Astronauts Won't Be Flying To Space In Boeing's Starliner Until 2018 (theverge.com) 89
An anonymous reader writes: The Boeing Starliner, one of two new spacecraft meant to break the Russian stranglehold on sending people to orbit, has hit a snag. Originally scheduled to start flying next year, the Starliner won't carry a crewed mission to the International Space Station until 2018 at the earliest. Six years is long enough. Ever since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle NASA has been pushing for privately built craft capable of ferrying astronauts to orbit, which would let the agency buy American-made ships and end its dependency on renting seats aboard Russian spacecraft. The Starliner and SpaceX's Dragon were chosen, and 2017 was to be the year. But while SpaceX has sent its ship to the ISS on multiple uncrewed cargo resupply missions, the Starliner won't make such trips until 2017 and won't carry people until 2018 at the earliest. SpaceX maintains that it will be able to send crews to orbit in 2017.GeekWire explains: "For Boeing to shift its crewed test flight from 2017 to 2018 isn't as much of a slip as it might sound: The company's earlier schedule had called for the visit to the space station to take place in mid-December."
"American-made ships" (Score:5, Informative)
It's not really american when the Atlas V, the rocket which this capsule ist built for, still uses russian RD-180 rocket motors. A rocket is a fuel tank and a rocket motor mostly. It's not the fuel tank that's hard to build....
Re:"American-made ships" (Score:5, Interesting)
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But if it's the same Boeing I used to work at, they'll have to subcontract out all the engineering. There's nothing left at that company other than a bunch of managers.
Re:"American-made ships" (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's not really american when the Atlas V, the rocket which this capsule ist built for, still uses russian RD-180 rocket motors.
The Boeing Starliner "is to be compatible with multiple launch vehicles, including the Atlas V, Delta IV, and Falcon 9, as well as the planned Vulcan.[9] "
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I work for ULA and I can assure you that a rocket is a lot more than an engine and fuel tank. You are forgetting a sophisticated suite of Avionics, reaction control systems, pneumatics, and pyros for staging, payload separation and flight termination, just to name a few items. If you think the engine is the only difficult part to get right then you should tell that to SpaceX. Most of their problems including their recent launch failure have been caused by components other than the engine. The Atlas V also
Race for the flag (Score:2)
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Falcon Heavy was deliberately pushed back because upgrades to the Falcon 9 increased its payload to the lower end of Heavy's original design, resulting in a lower cost launch in those paylaod ranges. Basically there was no point to rushing the Heavy because there wouldn't have been an immediate market for it. Sure, there was some slippage just because reasons, but much of the delay was of the "oh wait, we don't need that right now after all" type.
Re:Race for the flag (Score:4, Interesting)
I would expect that the speed at which they get to Falcon 9 reuse would have an impact on the Falcon Heavy schedule (that speed, in turn, being relative to the rate that they keep landing them - the more they have on hand, the more risky they can afford to be in their return-to-flight testing program for them). Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy cores are extremely similar and made on the same lines, and the engines are identical. So the more line capacity they free up, the more they can dedicate toward the Heavy.
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Out of curiosity, what are your back-of-the-envelope calculations? Rocket costs don't generally lend themselves very readily to such things, so I'm curious ;)
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There are several data points available with which one can make at least approximate calculation:
- The price of a Falcon 9 launch is $62mil (was expendable up to now)
- Gwynne Shotwell said that if first stage can be restored for $2mil, then the reflight would cost $40mil
- The cost of the first stage is known to be around 70% of that of the rocket
- The cost of the rocket is only a part of the F9 launch cost. Let's say that this fraction is R.
- Given that a reflight uses again everything else other than the f
Re:Race for the flag (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what differentiates a quality organization from those stock market driven pointy haired managed fiascoes all to common in business today.
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I'm OK with aggressive deadlines that get pushed out. Aggressive time lines presses a team to be as productive as possible.
Until it becomes a de facto expectation that you won't meet the deadlines and they'll be pushed out anyway because they were some PMs wet dream. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that if you want it in three weeks you set the deadline to three days, because nothing will really happen until you start raising a stink about how late it is while the project that actually schedules three weeks waits three months instead. And as a consequence of the schedules being unrealistic, there's no real retrospect
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My Friend Neil taught me an important principle about the ABCD of decisions:
A - Achievable
B - Believable
C - Concrete
D - Desirable
A great leader never sets goals that are not ABCD. So far, Elon Musk has set ABCD goals. Having the courage to take the time to get it right makes it special. Maybe his team will start hitting the deadlines - but until then I hope his organization continues to get it right even if its not on time.
Man-rated Dragon hasn't flown (Score:4, Informative)
FTFS:
SpaceX has sent its ship to the ISS on multiple uncrewed cargo resupply missions
To be fair, the Dragon that SpaceX has flown is a very different vehicle than the Dragon V2, which is the capsule rated to carry astronauts. So while they do have a leg up on Boeing in some respects (and will likely beat them on schedule) neither capsule is really flight-proven at this point.
Re:Man-rated Dragon hasn't flown (Score:4, Insightful)
1), the in-flight abort test.
2) sending the dragon to space on its own.
IOW, not much is left for the first manned spaceX flight.
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IOW, not much is left for the first manned spaceX flight.
My point isn't that I think Dragon V2 has issues - it's just incorrect to claim (as the summary did) that it has flight heritage, because it really is a different vehicle than the cargo-only Dragon. I agree that SpaceX is on track and only a short way from that first flight, though.
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SpaceX generally builds one thing and then keeps improving on it. I suspect when they built the flight computers and avionics the intention is for them to be common across both platforms. Likewise I would argue that from an engineering point of view they've tried to keep Dragon and Dragon V2 as common as possible.
Hence, lots of lessons learned from Dragon can be applied directly to Dragon V2.
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In terms of overall architecture and lessons learned, absolutely there's a lot of commonality for SpaceX to leverage. That said, Dragon V2 has a totally different solar array and trunk, it's a different size, it uses new propulsive landing and brand new SuperDraco engines to support it, it docks instead of berthing via Canadarm2, it has to support manual control by the astronauts and provide full ECLSS... for all practical purposes it's a brand new vehicle.
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In other words - the grandparent is correct. No matter how hard the SpaceX fanboys try to spin it, Dragon V2 isn't currently man rated. Nor is it known when it will be certified for manned flight. (Currently the final certification flight isn't scheduled until 2017.)
I look forward to their first test flight in 2023 (Score:3)
Assuming it doesn't get pushed back again.
Doing this stuff is hard (Score:3)
Although we proved it in the 60's, this stuff is hard. You've now got private companies competing, not cooperating via NASA to deliver this stuff.
The problem here is our federal government hot cancel contracts and retire heavy lifting vehicles. Frankly, the shuttles were not in immediate need of retirement. Endeavour, the newest, was built in '92 and could have been kept in rotation until there was a viable American-controlled alternative.
In the Reagan administration, the USS Iowa and Missouri were pulled out of mothballs to patrol the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, the USS Missouri served longer in this second period than it did in its maiden one.
Re:Doing this stuff is hard (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, to keep even a single shuttle flying, you have to maintain most of the infrastructure that was required to keep an entire fleet running. Low flight rate was one of the reasons that the shuttle never met cost projections in the first place, because you're paying for these huge facilities and workforces that are perpetually running at 25% capacity because of low launch rates. So keeping a single shuttle in play would have exacerbated this problem and ended up making our per-flight cost go through the roof, and so it probably came down to an "all-or-nothing" sort of calculation. And nobody wanted to risk killing another crew because of trying to stretch an orbiter beyond its useful life.
Note: many of these same problems are set up to plague SLS, the follow-on program to the space shuttle, which is hugely expensive, over budget, and behind schedule. If you're a fan of low-cost American space access, you should root for more funding of Commercial Crew and the other COTS efforts, and cancellation of this giant congressional effort to repeat shuttle's mistakes.
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Wholeheartedly agree.
NASA needs a huge haircut on personnel and facilities related to "launching giant rockets which they can't afford", and a corresponding expansion round in robotic exploration, advanced concepts (aka cost reduction) engineering/testing, and long-term off-planet habitation engineering.
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Absolutely. BTW, I'm a longtime unregistered lurker at the NSF forums, and I think I've seen you (or someone with your username) posting over there about Venusian habitats among other things - really interesting stuff!
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Yes, that would be me ;) I haven't posted an update recently, but I've definitely been working on it further. It's a really addictive project, because with each aspect you start researching / doing calculations on, you find subtopics that need the same thing... and subtopics on subtopics, and so on down the line ;)
I've found a group of other people who are doing the same and there's been some talk of establishing a Venus Society (equivalent to the Mars Society) later this year. Honestly, there's a lot of
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Do you think humans will never settle off-world? Or just "not now"? Because habitation engineering does not mean "now" it means laying the groundwork for the future.
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When launch costs are $25k/kg, you get one probe ever 3 years. When launch costs are $25/kg, you get hundreds or thousands of probes per year. If you had a 100% reusable, no maintenance vehicle, energy costs are $3/kg. It's like the difference between mainframes and PC. At $25/kg I would mount my own probe expedition to
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Figuring out a chemical process to do X does not go obsolete. Figuring out where a resource Y is located on another world and characterizing it does not go obsolete. Finding out what materials can withstand offworld environments does not go obsolete. On and on and on.
You're confusing basic engineering with "locking down hardware systems to specific lists of specific manufactured components". There's vast amounts of the former that need to be done before we can even think about the latter.
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I would even add to what you typed above, actual engineering can be used in Earth orbit or in Earth-Moon Lagrange points. We should be working towards building better space stations, and orbiting habitats, and that will give us some of the engineering needed to do longer missions and eventually allow us to build colonies on other planets.
Unfortunately, the engineering I have seen you talk about for Venus, some of it would be utterly useless in space, so would be less useful to your idea of a Venus mission.
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Most of the cost of developing for Venus is directly applicable to elsewhere. The interplanetary transfer stage, for example - one of if not the most expensive component to develop - would be pretty much identical to that used for Mars. The basic starting resource extraction trees are quite different for both bodies (generally easier on Venus), but after that, they merge together - same process for the Sabatier reaction, for UHMWPE synthesis, for Haber, for Ostwald, etc. Everything related to "long-term
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I'd also like to see "remote robotic mining and production", which we might get use of long before "off-planet habitation" (though maybe it's part of the same bucket). I think we've reached the point where asteroid mining is mostly a robotics challenge, and a fuel station in orbit changes everything.
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So keeping a single shuttle in play would have exacerbated this problem and ended up making our per-flight cost go through the roof, and so it probably came down to an "all-or-nothing" sort of calculation. And nobody wanted to risk killing another crew because of trying to stretch an orbiter beyond its useful life.
The space shuttles were supposedly designed for 100 missions each. Discovery flew the most at 39. Atlantis launched 33 times and Endeavour just 25. They could have easily taken all three of them to 50 missions each and made Endeavour the workhorse of the three. It was as much political BS as anything that was behind the decision to not extend their mission.
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The thing is, to the extent that a lack of shuttle capability has opened up more funding and pressure to get a commercial option off the ground, it has been a good move. I agree that it would have been better if there was some overlap, and Commercial Crew came fully online before the shuttles were retired, but at the same time Commercial Crew has struggled to get full funding and support from congress even when it has been competing against the unbuilt, hugely expensive, and technically unoriginal SLS. The
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Also: we had multiple shuttle failures before orbiters had reached EOL, and there's a good argument that the system was nowhere near the reliability that it was claimed to have when it was designed. So an original "design life" is fairly meaningless compared to your actual track record and a real assessment of the condition of the vehicles.
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Also: we had multiple shuttle failures before orbiters had reached EOL, and there's a good argument that the system was nowhere near the reliability that it was claimed to have when it was designed. So an original "design life" is fairly meaningless compared to your actual track record and a real assessment of the condition of the vehicles.
The failures didn't really have much to do with the air frame though. The Columbia was caused by crap falling off of the booster tank during launch and damaging the heat shield. Challenger was due to an o-ring not sealing correctly in cold weather.
Still, the entire shuttle program was an enormous boondoggle. I just wish they would have been smarter and had a replacement before retiring the fleet. It's just embarrassing that we can't put our own astronauts on the space station.
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The failures didn't really have much to do with the air frame though.
But the deaths had everything to do with selecting an inherently unsafe design to begin with. Every other launch system since Mercury has had an abort system and much simpler, safer method of re-entry.
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I wholeheartedly disagree. The Space Shuttle program was an enormous financial boondoggle that had an average cost per flight of close to $2 BILLION each. The money and mind share consumed by the shuttle program were the greatest roadblock to private space industry and I thank God it is gone.
With the government no longer sucking all the air out of the room and competing with them, private industry is finally moving ahead. Now we need to cancel the next NASA financial boondoggle: SLS.
- Necron69
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Did you mean you agree? Because every other part of what you wrote seems to mirror my own statements.
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The problem here is our federal government hot cancel contracts and retire heavy lifting vehicles. Frankly, the shuttles were not in immediate need of retirement. Endeavour, the newest, was built in '92 and could have been kept in rotation until there was a viable American-controlled alternative.
The problem with the Space Shuttle program was the cost. It was stupidly expensive. The tiles had to be replaced after every mission, and every tile was unique with its own part number/serial number. The main engines needed to be nearly rebuilt after every mission, due in large part to hydrogen embrittlement of the steel. The cost per launch was somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion dollars per launch. SpaceX launches for $60 million for satellite launches and about $133 million for space statio [wikipedia.org]
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Endeavour, the newest, was built in '92 and could have been kept in rotation until there was a viable American-controlled alternative.
If you are going to have people riding controlled explosions into space (at great expense, no less), make sure there is an escape plan if things start exploding in the wrong places.
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...what could we accomplish if we spent that on making better robots?
And use them to replace politicians? AI FOR PRESIDENT!!! Seriously, I'm all for it....
And When It's Done, It Won't Be That Great Anyway (Score:2)
CST is not reusable, can't do a powered landing on solid ground, and although it's supposed to be launch-vehicle-agnostic, it is currently planned to use Atlas 5 and we don't have a US engine for that yet.
Contrast the Dragon, which is in the heritage of a flying spacecraft, is designed for powered landing on solid ground so that it can bring experiments back even more quickly than a space-plane - and SpaceX has proven its ability in powered landings now, and is intended to be reusable.
Obviously everyone who
Boeing is concentrating more on human-rated flight (Score:2)
Boeing is concentrating more on human-rated flight from the start. This kind of delay is not unexpected.
It all depends on the contract (Score:2)
If the contract is fixed price, as with the original cargo contracts awarded SpaceX and Orbital ATK, Boeing will have no incentive to delay, as they won’t be paid anything until they achieve specific milestones and will get no additional monies to cover the added costs of the delay. If the contract is cost-plus, how
Stranglehold?? (Score:4, Interesting)
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"shameful" ? It's shameful that the US doesn't spend more?
The US, like every country has a budget. We allow so much for NASA, so much for military, a bit for health care and a lot for corporate welfare... These choices are made by the people we elected to office and no doubt are the result of honest caring for the welfare of our citizens. If our government has chosen to fund warfare and not space tourism we can trust that their reasoning is sound.
Now for today's quiz: Of all the weapons on all sides of all
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The US, like every country has a budget. We allow so much for NASA, so much for military, a bit for health care and a lot for corporate welfare...
Um. You may want to check your percentages and adjust your adjective choices accordingly.
We spend diddly-squat on NASA, a fair bit on the military, an awful lot on health care, and some unknown amount on tax incentives for corporations.
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No, he's correct. We don't spend much on health care. Medicare and VA don't add up to much of the federal budget. Medicaid is state-level. Everything else is private, so it's out of government hands (except for the laws like ACA which govern it; we're talking about funding here though).
Out of the federal budget not funded directly by FICA taxes (which are specifically for SSI/Medicare), NASA is barely noticeable, the military is huge, and corporate welfare is also huge.
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and corporate welfare is also huge.
Please point to the budget line item you are using to make that assessment.
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https://www.rt.com/usa/199480-... [rt.com]
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I came here to post this, and you did long ago. "Stranglehold" is a ludicrous word to use- it implies fighting to maintain a grapple. That's a really slanted word to describe "didn't throw their launch program away like we did". It's not like Russians were behind the scenes cancelling the shuttle on us or something. We did this to us. Maybe save the anti-Russia ire for when they do something bad, not when they do something good?
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The Dragon V2 is actually a very next-gen spacecraft, not least because it can do a propulsive landing. This means it can not only land gently and precisely in any random field that it needs to (and also safely abort and save the crew in the case of launch vehicle failure) but that it can potentially land on other planets, asteroids, whatever. That's a totally new capability that no other manned spacecraft has possessed before now.
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Shoot a Dragon around the Moon (Score:2)
The Falcon Heavy is scheduled to do a demo launch in November. I would not be surprised if they put a Dragon 2 capsule on it to do the unmanned flight test at the same time. If they do, it would be cool if they launched the Dragon around the moon. SpaceX has a history of doing experimental landings during real launches. Launching a Dragon atop of FH would be more efficient than just having a dummy payload and going around the Moon would certainly make the launch worthwhile.
George W Bush's 2nd biggest mistake ending the shu (Score:2)
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That is quite a lot of assertions, do you have citations to back any of that up?
I am not saying what was typed is untrue, but I don't recall ever hearing about an effort to possibly bring back the shuttle under Obama, and the main reason I recall hearing for the shuttle shutdown was conversion of facilities and funding which could not be done with the shuttle running.