Orbital Becomes Second Private Firm To Send Cargo Craft To ISS 69
An anonymous reader writes "Orbital Sciences Corp.'s unmanned Cygnus spacecraft delivered 3,000 pounds of equipment, fresh fruit, and Christmas presents from the families of all six ISS spacemen today. 'From the men and women involved in the design, integration and test, to those who launched the Antares (rocket) and operated the Cygnus, our whole team has performed at a very high level for our NASA customer, and I am very proud of their extraordinary efforts,' said David W. Thompson, president and chief executive officer of Orbital, in a written statement from the company."
A field of Two (Score:2)
I think Orbital Sciences and SpaceX are at present the only real contenders for private commercial launch. Jeff Bezos' Blue Cactus or whatever is really just a "vanity project" for the bizillionaire.
I _sure_ hope there *WILL* be competition ! (Score:1)
It's not exactly a field where there is going to be a diversity of competition, not for the immediate future anyway
I sincerely hope that there will be * MORE * competitors.
Look at the cost ...
Orbital has a $1.9 billion contract with NASA to make eight flights to the space station under the space agency's commercial supply program
For each of the delivery NASA is shelling out more than $237.5 million.
Now, compare this with the cost for India to send a probe to Mars http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/12/01/040246/indian-mars-probe-successfully-enters-sun-centric-orbit [slashdot.org]
The Indian space project cost India a total of $81 million .
While there are some saying that the Indian space program to Mars only cost $74 million, even with the higher price tag of $81 mill
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I am not from India, so I have no way to know how much in term of safety the Indian space missions put in nor the accounting practice in India.
But I can tell you this ...
1. The group of Indian engineers and technicians must be WORLD CLASS to successfully send out a space probe on its way to Mars.
World class professionals don't come cheap, and world class professionals are not dumb either.
For sure, they must be paid handsomely even when they work INSIDE INDIA - You think they are that stupid that they are wi
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Sending a probe to Mars and sending 3,000 lbs to the ISS are two totally different things. First, if your programming is off just slightly, you miss Mars, or as we have seen previously, you crash into the planet and loose your probe. Hit the ISS with a capsule carrying that extra weight and you loose just more than the capsule.
But the real difference between the Orbital price and India is that India is reporting its actual cost. What Orbital charges NASA includes a hefty profit margin. The actual costs ar
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Sending a probe to Mars and sending 3,000 lbs to the ISS are two totally different things. First, if your programming is off just slightly, you miss Mars, or as we have seen previously, you crash into the planet and loose your probe. Hit the ISS with a capsule carrying that extra weight and you loose just more than the capsule.
But the real difference between the Orbital price and India is that India is reporting its actual cost. What Orbital charges NASA includes a hefty profit margin. The actual costs are significantly lower.
loose your probe
I am pretty sure you can be arrested for that.
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:)
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Hmm, lets see, and what was the payload weight of the Mars mission? Oh wait, that would be 33 pounds, not 3000. The Cygnus launch could have carried the entire fueled rocket for the Indian mars mission in to orbit. Sure, it takes more energy to escape Earth's gravity entirely, but you are still comparing apples to oranges when you look at the fact that the entire weight, let alone the fuel needs of the Indian mission were lower than the payload weight of the Cygnus mission. Taken in perspective, Orbital
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Err, strike that, I think I misread the stat sheet. Never mind.
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Not only that, SpaceX carries more while charging NASA for less, and Orbital still gets a contract. Why? Because they have always been a NASA contractor.
Pork barrels all the way down, all the way...
Re:A field of Two (Score:4, Interesting)
EADS-Astrium/AirBus (they are going through a reorganization at the moment) is arguably a major contender for private commercial spaceflight launch as well. RKK Energia (the company who makes the Soyuz rockets) is also a private company who is competitive with the launch costs of both SpaceX and Orbital. You can debate if they really are a private companies or not (they do have shareholders and private investors... but also governments as investors as well).
Richard Branson has said he has his sights upon orbital spaceflight with Virgin Galactic, and there is also Stratolaunch, but those are the only other companies I can see being real competition. I had high hopes for ARCA [arcaspace.com], the Romanian space group that is doing some interesting things, but their projects seem to take even longer to happen than I thought. I'm sort of pleasantly surprised they are still doing stuff. Another group to watch is Copenhagen Suborbitals [copenhagen...bitals.com], who is building flying hardware (they have sent aloft more than a couple missions) and have technology that could at least theoretically make the trip into orbit over time.
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Branson is more focused on creating a new space-related business than on creative new engineering to service existing business. I'm not sure whether such a market exists in the first place, but he's more about exploring new markets than new planets. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't think VGal will ever be about putting payloads in orbit.
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You had better tell that to Richard Branson that his dream is not going to be realized. For myself, I put Branson behind Jeff Bezos in terms of who is going to make the vehicles capable of going to orbit first, and I have my doubts about either one. Yes, I realize that orbital velocities are much less than suborbital hops, but I am not talking about suborbital spacecraft in this case.
I will also tip my hat to Virgin Galactic so far as trying to get airline-like operations out of sub-orbital spacecraft. If
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Once you get something to 60,000 ft you can design the nozzle to be 20% more efficient for that altitude and higher vs one that was efficient at lower altitudes. This gives you a pretty big advantage other then the height and that rocket can take you all the way to space. Now you are only throwing out one stage and have a rocket that can carry a higher mass vs it's size to orbit.
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This.
Also, by launching from an arial platform, you won't have to boost so much "down" to fight gravity drag, but can bost more "sideways" which is more efficient. If you could boost only tangentially to the earth, you'll avoid having to carry fuel for 1g of acceleration upwards.
Also, the air resistance is probably a bit lower at altitude as well.
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EADS/Arianespace is in a spot of trouble as their launch cost is much higher than that of SpaceX. The Ariane 6 is designed to close the gap a bit, but Arianespace has always struggled to be profitable even though they're bankrolled by ESA. Basically they're used to the old world where cost was no object and will have to adapt to the way SpaceX et al do things.
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Mars-One does not and never will build a launch vehicle capable of going into orbit. They may be entrepreneurs in space, but that is not what the GP was talking about. If you were suggesting Boeing or Lockheed-Martin was capable of competing.... that at least would be talking about companies who build rockets.
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If you were suggesting Boeing or Lockheed-Martin was capable of competing.... that at least would be talking about companies who build rockets.
I don't know how you people are so accurately able to read the minds of people like me, but I wish you'd quit because now everyone already knows the punchline to my jokes.
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self-woosh. whaa???
Re:A field of Two (Score:4, Informative)
This whole "look how gr8 commercial spaceflight can do so much better than government!" stuff is nonsense propaganda.
Again, SpaceX built a new rocket engine and two new rockets and launched them into space for less than NASA spent to put a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launch it into the Atlantic Ocean.
Aerospace, except in perhaps the first 5 years of flight, has always been about the government making the long-term investments and R&D, and private companies delivering final products.
So, you're claiming that government developed and funded the 747 and 787?
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So, you're claiming that government developed and funded the 747 and 787?
The government invested and invests very heavily in the technology, including R&D, both through the military and NASA (and maybe via other agencies I'm not thinking of). For example, here is NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate [nasa.gov].
Boeing is a leading beneficiary of these funds. Also, have Boeing and their competitors received tax breaks and other aid?
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perhaps he meant that much of today's aero technology and brainpower was developed through military and space programs. The 747 wasn't cut from whole cloth, rather the building block and people who designed it came from the military work. There's nothing wrong with this I think. It's also right to realize that a private company can design and build a new project like a rocket cheaper than a mil bureaucracy.
the best part about bureaucracy is if you drop that shit in WWF not only do you get mad points but use
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You're arguing that commercial spaceflight stands on the shoulders of necessarily-government-funded, unprofitable research; the parent post seems to be arguing that going forward, it is more efficient to let private enterprise do the work. You both seem to be correct from where I'm standing. If it's cheaper to let private businesses run the launches for publicly-funded space operations, then I'm all for it.
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Boeing directly receives as a benefactor a reduction in taxation by the state of Washington, and also the wings for its 787 are produced at well below cost due to funds its Japanese contractors received to design and build them.
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Again, SpaceX built a new rocket engine and two new rockets and launched them into space for less than NASA spent to put a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launch it into the Atlantic Ocean.
I think that it's not fair if you don't say that SpaceX did what they did by using NASA's research (which has huge costs that get written under NASA's budget but not SpaceX's) and with NASA's money (that is, it's the government and only the government that enabled them to reach their achievements).
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This whole "look how gr8 commercial spaceflight can do so much better than government!" stuff is nonsense propaganda.
Again, SpaceX built a new rocket engine and two new rockets and launched them into space for less than NASA spent to put a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launch it into the Atlantic Ocean.
Aerospace, except in perhaps the first 5 years of flight, has always been about the government making the long-term investments and R&D, and private companies delivering final products.
So, you're claiming that government developed and funded the 747 and 787?
To be fair, Ares I was intended to put 56,000 lb into LEO. While Falcon 9 only puts 23,000 to 29,000 lb into LEO. And Antares only puts 11,000 lb into LEO. And we all know that space does not scale linearly.
However, I applaud both their efforts. And I'm not sure you can ever consider government contracting in space as "private" in the sense that a private company might put out a RFP for silicon chip fab, and get back 10 aggressively competitive bids from other private companies. But, it's a step in the righ
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I don't think you understand the significance of private commercial space launches.
It has little to do with an invisible hand and more to do with less restrictions on who can get what up there. Right now, it is all corporatist communistic capitalistic space anyways. Yes, all three at once because those who actually make it into space are either government or doing so at the behest of the government using technology developed by the government but refined for their particular usages, with the intent of event
Re:A field of Two (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for the fact that Lockheed and Boeing have been NASA's contractors for decades.
The difference is how these contracts are funded. The COTS contracts for SpaceX and Orbital have two huge things going for them:
1) These are not "cost-plus" contracts, but rather fixed price contracts where any cost savings during operations is kept entirely by the launch provider. If either company can save even a few hundred dollars by doing something cheaper or avoiding a purchase of the proverbial $10k wrench & hammer, those companies see that savings directly. Neither Lockheed-Martin nor Boeing care about stuff like that as they simply pass those "costs" in the "cost-plus" contract on to taxpayers. There are no cost overruns in a fixed price contract too, so if either Orbital or SpaceX have some unexpected costs showing up.... they need to eat those costs.
2) Both SpaceX and Orbital are free to use these launch vehicles for any other purpose as everything they've made belongs to them and not NASA or the federal government.
I do think there is a time and place for cost-plus contracts where there is a genuine national priority that something absolutely must be made. None the less, this really is a different thing and in a great many ways these other companies have been extensions of the government in how they made their vehicles.
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The difference is that they wear the cost of fixing it. Possibly losing the contract entirely.
They don't get more money to fix it, and a continued guaranteed cost-plus supply contract for another 20-plus years.
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Like maybe deciding to go with the cheaper o-rings with the narrower operating temperatures; just how cold could a Florida launch be anyway?
Like maybe, simply using RP1 engines for the first stage instead of insanely dangerous solid fuel boosters strapped to ridiculously overcomplicated and underpowered LH mains.
Re:A field of Two (Score:4, Insightful)
Like maybe deciding to go with the cheaper o-rings with the narrower operating temperatures; just how cold could a Florida launch be anyway?
Engineers from Thiokol wanted to use the more expensive o-rings in that case.... and NASA overruled demanding the cheaper ones. Furthermore, Thiokol also wanted to scrub the launch on the day that Challenger flew.... and NASA administrators thought it was politically a bad idea and flew anyway.
This whole line of thought is bullshit as it presumes that a commercial company would risk lives to save $10, as if they want to pay higher per launch premiums to their insurance providers not to mention want the blood of people on their hands. Look at the problems RKK Energia is facing right now with their vehicles because there have been failures last year and tell me launching companies don't worry about that stuff.
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Except for the fact that Lockheed and Boeing have been NASA's contractors for decades.
The difference is how these contracts are funded. The COTS contracts for SpaceX and Orbital have two huge things going for them:
1) These are not "cost-plus" contracts, but rather fixed price contracts where any cost savings during operations is kept entirely by the launch provider. If either company can save even a few hundred dollars by doing something cheaper or avoiding a purchase of the proverbial $10k wrench & hammer, those companies see that savings directly. Neither Lockheed-Martin nor Boeing care about stuff like that as they simply pass those "costs" in the "cost-plus" contract on to taxpayers. There are no cost overruns in a fixed price contract too, so if either Orbital or SpaceX have some unexpected costs showing up.... they need to eat those costs.
2) Both SpaceX and Orbital are free to use these launch vehicles for any other purpose as everything they've made belongs to them and not NASA or the federal government.
I do think there is a time and place for cost-plus contracts where there is a genuine national priority that something absolutely must be made. None the less, this really is a different thing and in a great many ways these other companies have been extensions of the government in how they made their vehicles.
Not cost plus only works if the task is well known and well defined. Because a task with an unknown or wandering scope (i.e. a science experiment) will eventually just stop once the money runs out, if it is not cost plus. Because individual companies are not bottom-less supplies of money either. So they'll mess up once, eat the cost. Mess up again, eat the cost. Repeat until the bank account says $0, and the rocket is half-complete. Then the company will simply go bankrupt. You can't go after a company with
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I agree with you on this sentiment. The Manhattan Project and arguably the Apollo missions were situations where the contractors involved simply didn't even know what was needed in order to get those respective projects completed. But let's be serious on this point: Do we really not understand the scope and task involved needed to get a spacecraft launched into orbit? Why is a cost-plus contract still being used in rocket development for orbital spacecraft like the SLS? Is the scope of knowledge needed
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almost as good as UPS! (Score:1)
Only a few days later than UPS for Xmas presents ;-)
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That's cause they shopped online. They NEVER deliver by the Christmas deadline when you shop online.
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This is a good thing (Score:1)
It makes a lot more sense for public projects to handle launches out past geosynchronous orbit, where the technology isn't nearly as reliable and there's less opportunity for profit. Private companies are less likely to develop fo
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How long and how much money did it take SpaceX? Oh, that's right, a long time and a lot of money...
Less money than NASA spent to put a fake upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and fire it into the Atlantic Ocean.
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Re:This is a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words,
Thanks, Obama!
If we assume ISS shouldn't just be deorbited as a waste of money, space policy is one of the very few things Obama got right. Possibly because he doesn't really care about it.
Re:This is a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Had the shuttle been capable of taking us to the Moon or to at least Lunar orbit
The problem with the shuttle wasn't that it didn't go beyond LEO. It was a space shuttle, that's what they're for, surface to orbit. For longer trips you take the main ship.
The problem was that is was intended to be a low-cost all-purpose reusable truck that would free up funding for other projects. (For example, that "main ship" I mentioned.) But in reality it became the entirety of HSF, consuming vast amounts of funding. Too much to allow its own replacement to be developed, too much to allow iterative development of Shuttle MkII MkIII MkIV... Too much to commercialise. Too much to allow HSF to advance.
By now pushing LEO-work into the commercial sphere, there's a chance to finally turn to other things... ...Except SLS has been carefully designed to make exactly the same mistakes as the shuttle. The shuttle, okay, they were trying something new, they didn't know better. This time it's wilful and vindictive.
Becomes second private firm? (Score:2, Informative)
This is the second time they've done it, so the they became the second private firm last year.
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This is the first operational cargo flight for them, isn't it?
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Further Insight into the Cargo (Score:3)
Simpsons did it. Simpsons did it. (Score:2)
Cargo also included an ant-farm.
[And "video tapes". Because... the '80s?]
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Im willing to bet most of the standards data Orbital and SpaceX rely upon and likely refuse to disclose are in fact based upon the START repository.
I don't know about Orbital, but SpaceX routinely credits NASA research for the core of its work. The first Merlin engines, the material for the heat-shield for Dragon. They hired a lot of NASA and Primary-contractor guys, so brought across a lot of ideas. And a lot of their cost-saving manufacturing techniques were originally developed by NASA or through their research contracts. I'm also willing to bet the "pusher" launch-abort system was developed by researchers at, say, JPL, because Boeing & Bigelow
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And replace them with what, MREs? Because...?
You do realize that they have to eat either way, right, and that the only difference here is that they will prioritize the fresh food for consumption first. Obviously they need preserved food but there's no reason for them to eat it exclusively, since its only advantage is that it lasts longer. This is what the world's navies have known for only about three thousand years...
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Or set up a greenhouse and grow their own.
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That's some pretty fucking expensive bananas.
I think they avoid bananas because the smell tends to go through the whole station for days, and some crew find it off-putting.