NASA Reviews Private Space Station Proposals, Expects To Save Over $1 Billion Annually After ISS Retires (cnbc.com) 80
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to retire the International Space Station by the end of this decade, so the U.S. space agency is turning to private companies to build new space stations in orbit -- and expects to save more than $1 billion annually as a result. CNBC reports: NASA earlier this year unveiled the Commercial LEO Destinations project, with plans to award up to $400 million in total contracts to as many as four companies to begin development on private space stations. In response to NASA's request, director of commercial spaceflight Phil McAlister told CNBC that the agency "received roughly about a dozen proposals" from a variety of companies for contracts under the project. "We got an incredibly strong response from industry to our announcement for proposals for commercial, free fliers that go directly to orbit," McAlister said. "I can't remember the last time we got that many proposals [in response] to a [human spaceflight] contract announcement."
The ISS is more than 20 years old and costs NASA about $4 billion a year to operate. The space station is approved to operate through the end of 2024, with a likely lifespan extension to the end of 2028. But, moving forward, McAlister says that NASA wants "to be just one of many users instead of the primary sponsor and infrastructure supporter" for stations in low Earth orbit. "This strong industry response shows that our plan to retire the International Space Station in the latter part of this decade and transition to commercial space destinations is a viable, strong plan," McAlister said. "We are making tangible progress on developing commercial space destinations where people can work, play, and live," McAlister added. NASA is now evaluating the proposals, and McAlister said the agency hopes to announce the contract winners "before the end of the year," although he is "pushing for earlier." NASA "will not need anything near as big and as capable" as the ISS moving forward, said McAlister. He said the private space stations "could be very large, but NASA will only be paying for the part that we need."
The ISS is more than 20 years old and costs NASA about $4 billion a year to operate. The space station is approved to operate through the end of 2024, with a likely lifespan extension to the end of 2028. But, moving forward, McAlister says that NASA wants "to be just one of many users instead of the primary sponsor and infrastructure supporter" for stations in low Earth orbit. "This strong industry response shows that our plan to retire the International Space Station in the latter part of this decade and transition to commercial space destinations is a viable, strong plan," McAlister said. "We are making tangible progress on developing commercial space destinations where people can work, play, and live," McAlister added. NASA is now evaluating the proposals, and McAlister said the agency hopes to announce the contract winners "before the end of the year," although he is "pushing for earlier." NASA "will not need anything near as big and as capable" as the ISS moving forward, said McAlister. He said the private space stations "could be very large, but NASA will only be paying for the part that we need."
What would private enterprise even DO with one? (Score:1)
Unless that private enterprise has some ulterior motive for a space station (such as in-space assembly/construction of an interplanetary vehicle, pursuant to say, Musk's fantasies about Mars), what practical benefit does private enterprise, which principally does stuff on the ground, have with a space station?
Specifically, what could be done with one that could not be done more cheaply and with less oversight/concern, by a constellation of satellites?
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Unless that private enterprise has some ulterior motive for a space station ... what practical benefit does private enterprise, which principally does stuff on the ground, have with a space station?
I think their new space station will be named "Elysium", so ...
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I think "Freeside" [fandom.com] is more likely.
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I think Zion would be a better station to visit personally.
https://williamgibson.fandom.c... [fandom.com]
I could see Elon building a Zion instead of Bezos who I would see building a Freeside, especially since Freeside has more of an elongated shape...which he seems obsessed with.
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I was hoping for "Alpha [wikipedia.org]".
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Elon Musk is on a tight deadline to show other races we can be part of the galactic community.
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Well, I'm sorry, but Musk is *precisely* the type of person the galactic community will have avoided us for.
And if anything, that makes us the lucky ones. If we Musknnoy them enough, they might decide to move their asses, and annihilate us.
But frankly, I'm more looking forward to that than dreading it.
Re: What would private enterprise even DO with one (Score:2)
At one point, I wondered if silicon or gallium arsonide wafer production would move to space. Microgravity would allow purer crystals, so larger wafers of far higher quality than you could achieve on Earth.
Purification of isotopes by atomic mass spectrometry, touted as a very cheap method of producing isotopically ultra-pure silicon many years back, would also be realistic, as the time requirements would be insignificant compared to the other costs.
Or you could employ Stanford's GaAs technique ( https://phy [phys.org]
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And you would not need, or want, a space station for any of that.
Dirty, busy people are an astounding overhead in resources to support and would contaminate and shake the pure stable environment for manufacturing the product.
You would launch orbital robotic factories to do it.
But the Achilles heel of all space manufacturing fantasies which I have been reading for more than 50 years is that on Earth, at far lower cost, you can recreate the aspects of the space environment that actually help manufacturing pro
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Definitely. Chip foundries currently employ no people, so why would you want them in orbit?
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You also get more power in space from a given solar panel, while its structural mounts (not having to bear any loads or face any storms) become much lighter. Dramatically more if you're not confined to Earth orbit.
The barrier has always been launch costs. Not just for getting your hardware up there, but for the needs of the humans who inevitably have to build, operate, and maintain everything. It's one thing if your personnel costs for "space staff" are several times more than for "earth staff". It's some
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Presumably mainly access to microgravity and vacuum to a degree that's very difficult to achieve on earth, so research into metallurgy, pharmaceuticals, etc.
But I wouldn't discount tourism.
Bigelow built his fortune on budget hotels, and this is quite far from that, but he's already had a small inflatable test module attached to the ISS, and he's planning much bigger.
If (some, very rich) people are willing to pay Jeff and Richard a few million for a glorified rollercoaster ride, there might be enough of them
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"Quite a bit" is an understatement. Starship - if it goes as planned - should allow for tickets in the low-five figures. Possibly even the upper four figures.
Also, SpaceX's solution to the "chicken-and-egg" problem, where rockets can't be cheap if they don't fly often, but there's not much business for them to fly if they're not cheap - has been to make extra business for itself. E.g. they can fly Falcon 9 much more often because they're making business for themselves in the form of Starlink. I strongly
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I would imagine that space tourism would follow the BYOE model - Bring Your Own Everything.
I'm just over 100 kg in weight. Count on 1 kg/day for food, 1 kg/day for water (still a lot recycled), and 1 kg/day for oxygen (it's 0.84 according to NASA, but I'll add the rest up to 1kg as as "air tax" to build up and maintain a reserve for emergencies). So to go to space for a week you need to ship 151 kg - yourself, food, air, water, and 20 kg allowance for luggage (which sounds a little skimpy for a week I'll
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They will be having tourists up there, zero-g orgies down the hall from here NASA is trying to work.
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I would not be surprised to find some porn company buying a dragon flight just to film something. It seem porn is always on the leading edge of technology, so this would just seem to fit.
I however cannot see from a technical perspective the mechanics of it working out for numerous reasons.
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Specifically, what could be done with one that could not be done more cheaply and with less oversight/concern, by a constellation of satellites?
Probably not very much. Businesses need to make a profit, and so far, people in space aren't making any of that.
I expect at some point, commercial entities will figure out a way to make a buck in space, but for the foreseeable future, space will be a financial sink hole. That's why only governments are financing exploring it.
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Well, obviously SELL IT TO THE GOVERNMENT.
No, the government does not actually need to need it.
The military also did not need those 400 tanks back in 2007. The generals literally said "Please don't send us another 400 tanks. We have no use for them. We already got 400 ones rusting in the desert!". Yet they got them anyway. ... Oink.
All it needs, is your traitor aka lobbyist in government ordering it for you.
And YOU will be paying for it anyway. "Maximize profit! Whatever the market (you) can bear."
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It will be done at some point, but after the novelty wears off there will be few who'll spend tens of millions just for a trip-around-the-world in space.
What is the point of a manned space station anyway (Score:1)
If it was a departuref point for trips to the moon or mars then yes, it would have a purpose, but it seem to me all the ISS and spacelab and sputnik before it is just political posturing - we have a presence in space - justified by rather specious science claims. So far the ISS has cost approx $150 billion. Call me a luddite but I'm not *entirely* sure that seeing the results of lettuce (for example) grown in zero G is quite worth the expense. And we've known the effect of long term zero G on human physiolo
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All of the "possibly useful for something" applications I can think of all revolve around "Space exploitation, space opera style" pipedreams.
Be it "robot waystation for asteroid harvesting probes", "Assembly and staging area for interplanetary colony ship", or "service and repair center for re-usable interplanetary probe", they all come back to a "Maybe, kinda, sorta-- there could maybe be a ROI, someday" type thinking, or "this is my personal dream, and I am rich enough to make it happen, no matter how unp
Re:What is the point of a manned space station any (Score:4, Informative)
Here are a few of the benefits of ISS over the last 20 years.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p... [nasa.gov]
Admittedly the source is NASA but unless they are outright lying about these benefits they are still benefits.
I could see how some of these benefits could be financially viable for a privately owned space station (e.g. any of the medical benefits could be [were] commercialized).
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A platform was needed to develop long term space habitation technologies for the trip to Mars. We needed to figure out how to live in zero-g for 8+ months, with facilities such as showers and exercise equipment to prevent poor health. Exercise is a particularly tricky one because it needs to provide a work-out for muscles that don't get used much in zero-g, and the vibrations can cause problems for the spacecraft.
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And that was worth a 150 billion was it when there's no mars mission in sight even in the mid term future? Right.
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As opposed to at least $1.1 Trillion lifetime cost for the almost entirely useless F-35?
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Skylab's longest mission was 90 days for three people. It's impossible to get data on long term ZG effects from that. ISS has had multiple people say up there for a year or more. And then it took a lot of time to find out how to compensate for those effects.
Now what we need is data on the long term effects of partial gravity, which (aside from having an actual base on the Moon or Mars) is only possible with centrifugal space stations.
The primary purpose of ISS (and now SLS) is a pork pipeline between tax
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spend to save (Score:1)
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So this is what NASA has become. Look how much we can save. Like some factory second knock off. Do everything with robot helicopters. So imaginative.
While I agree with your general point, I do rather like the robot helicopter.
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Operating robot helicopters from 30 million miles away is a damn site more impressive than a load of people in low earth orbit doing pointless activities in order to justify a $150 billion white elephant.
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In short, yes, and it's a good thing because they can do more science with the same money.
NASA has always used contractors to build most spacecraft.
WTF! Keep the ISS! (Score:2)
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I kinda suspect that at some point Musk or one of thems gonna make them an offer for it. The ISS is old, but you can just keep on adding modules to that thing forever, and if Musk partners up with a Russian company, I suspect the whole thing can be made private and then rented back at, oh probably more than it would cost to keep it because government.
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The oldest modules are showing metal fatigue, which is not something that can be repaired or really even remediated. (This is incidentally an important scientific and engineering finding, because until it was launched and sat there in orbit for two decades in LEO no one had any clue how materials would age on orbit.) Having said that, I believe they use a common connector so damaged modules could be removed and the station reconfigured.
I was upset when Mir was deorbited, for a trivial amount more they cou
Re: Keep the ISS! (Score:2)
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And Amazon will be able to deliver to it soon once Bezos gets his dong into orbit
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...Because the oldest core parts are literally starting to fall apart..
Re:WTF! Keep the ISS! (Score:4, Informative)
Even though it looks like a solid object, ISS has lots of flexing. Just because it's in zero-gee doesn't mean it wobbles and wiggles constantly, especially at the joints. Eventually that aerospace-grade aluminum will start to develop stress fractures, and in the worst case a module's hull could unzip and pop.
It's also low enough that it has to be boosted regularly. You could try to raise the orbit by a lot, but that also puts stress on the hull, and you'd still need to get something up there with enough fuel to do that. The best outcome would be if Starship was able to capture a module at a time and bring it down, then let the frame reenter, but it might have trouble surviving the forces of that bonkers landing. Shuttle could maybe have done it, since it was able to come down with its Spacelab in the cargo bay, but that's long gone.
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Who is going to pay and maintain all that? You?
Expect deaths (Score:1)
Because the first thing that gets axed will be redundancies. And redundancies is what keeps you alive out there.
starship (Score:1)
Bigger, better and cheaper.
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"not retarded" is a weird definition of "picky".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I'm sorry, but you joined peak idiocy, and haven't even noticed. ;)
I suggest cleaning out that shrine.
Auction the ISS (Score:2)
They should auction the ISS to the highest bidder when they get ready to decommission it. I'm sure some rich idiot would want it.
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Will not fly (Score:3)
If NASA doesn't pay for the station and operation in full it's simply not going to happen.
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A commercial station using modern launch providers could be built for a tiny fraction of the cost of the ISS. It was mostly built by the space shuttle, which cost ten times as much to launch as Falcon Heavy, and that gap will widen far more with Starship. It's also now far cheaper to get to a space station (well, only moderately cheaper than Soyuz), meaning it's much cheaper to operate them too.
I do sort of have to agree with you about the economics, though. Even if you can build and operate something bigge
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Manufacturing semiconductor crystals in space too is a no-no since the price would see a hundred-fold increase compared to those manufactured on Earth. Scientific research too isn't profitable.
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That's the point, maintaining and supplying it becomes much cheaper if you can get people and supplies into orbit for a fraction of the current price. Starship is intended to be very cheap to launch due to both stages being reusable, and the payload lift capabilities are such that you need very few flights to resupply (and can probably use the same flights for people since there's so much capacity). But even with a dramatically reduced operating cost, there still isn't any way to get a return on the investm
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But they'll find there will be no takers, since no one can make a business case for it. Unless (as you claim) Starship decimates the cost of transport, which is something I don't see happening. But I hope I'm wrong.
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Even if there are no takers, no customers but NASA, if NASA can replace the ISS with something that offers equivalent capabilities but is cheaper to maintain and operate, isn't it still a win? Some of the costs of maintenance do already have many commercial customers to spread fixed costs, such as launch services. SpaceX has many launch customers other than NASA, even for crewed flights.
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Well, when Musk decided to build his rockets, people were not sure if they will work, and if they will be econimcal enough to compete with existing providers.
Now the demand for rocket launches are much higher, simply cos Musk has proven that you can launch cheaper then existing providers and a greater frequency.
And when Starship comes online, I expect alot more projects that are currently considered as not being cost effective/not feasable to become affordable.
Currently, the ISS and other space station (Ch
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It's not that the costs are too high, it's that the ROI is too long. In the modern executive game of Musical Chairs if a project doesn't pay for itself in five years or less it's exceedingly unlikely to be approved since it will just be a drag on the stock price and lower the value of executives' options when they rotate out to loot some other company. This is the same reason why solar power satellites have never been produced even though they could have been financially viable by the mid-'80s, since the
Just another betrayal by by rich beaurocrats (Score:2)
NASA has become a self-serving corrupt and ineffective beaurcracy. The best thing would be to disband it. The world needs a real rotating space station, not more upper class civil servants. What a crime.
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There's the science part and the tourism part. I agree that NASA shouldn't be in the space tourism business, but you haven't laid out an alternative for the science part. NASA already subcontracts most probes.
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There's the science part and the tourism part. I agree that NASA shouldn't be in the space tourism business, but you haven't laid out an alternative for the science part. NASA already subcontracts most probes.
No problem with either, just the way above average salaries, and all the vanity and junk science, not to mention all the nepotism, patronism and cronyism. Come on people, for the money we've spent we should have a real rotating space station and a functional space assembly platform and a moon base. We're getting ripped right off people and you folks think it's a-ok. Fools.
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you're hilarious with your definition of "real", especially as the freefall of ISS has made many significant experiments possible.
I hear NASA will have series of meetings next wee considering ignoring you.
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you're hilarious with your definition of "real", especially as the freefall of ISS has made many significant experiments possible.
I hear NASA will have series of meetings next wee considering ignoring you.
Wow, your trolling is abusive, nothing funny about it. Free fall experiments can be done in the non rortating hub of a real space station, but little minds like yours may not understand the reason we need a real rotating space station is so the personal can spend more time in orbit with less physical degradation. We have to keep putting people up to replace those coming down. With a real space station we could start to build a perment expereinced population. What's wrong with you peoiple? Can't see the obvi
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oh, so you're positing a rotating station with hub size on the order of the ISS.
You're the one trolling, your magical sci-fi ten trillion dollar space station can't be built.
the Sci-Fi channel isn't an engineering education channel, astro-boy.
What's wrong with you people? Can't see the obvious? You idiot.
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Wow, what a nice attitude, just an absoute and no reasoning, but plenty of denial and anger, wll, good luck with that
how about one reason it can't be done or is that asking too much?
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The shear amount of material for a 100 meter ring to avoid disorienting centripetal force differences between head and foot while having enough tensile strength to not fly apart are enough to keep such a thing a fairy tale for the century. In fact the only construction scenario NASA considered was smelting on the moon with solar collectors and railgunning to earth orbit... yeah not any infrastructure possible for this century. Won't happen.
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The shear amount of material for a 100 meter ring to avoid disorienting centripetal force differences between head and foot while having enough tensile strength to not fly apart are enough to keep such a thing a fairy tale for the century. In fact the only construction scenario NASA considered was smelting on the moon with solar collectors and railgunning to earth orbit... yeah not any infrastructure possible for this century. Won't happen.
Sigh. Typical denial and short sightedness, you don't need to with a big ring, or a whole ring. it could start small with two rotating structures tethered together. Or with structural arms to build out from a triangle, add a section, you get a square, add another, you get a polygon and so on. Besides, this has been discussed and engineered already:
https://www.universetoday.com/... [universetoday.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.space.com/orbital-... [space.com]
Obviously NASA should have been doing this already. All I see i
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You want a 1-G rotating O'Neil habitat right? That's not going to be launched from Earth, it will require construction of a lunar base because of the massive amount of material necessary. NASA has known this since the 1970s but Congress is much more interested in funding massacres of brown people than actually looking to the future so nothing but engineering studies have been funded so far.
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You want a 1-G rotating O'Neil habitat right? That's not going to be launched from Earth, it will require construction of a lunar base because of the massive amount of material necessary. NASA has known this since the 1970s but Congress is much more interested in funding massacres of brown people than actually looking to the future so nothing but engineering studies have been funded so far.
Said nothing about the O'Neil points. We can't build habitats there until we have an orbital space station, obviously. What is wrong, have none of you people taken the time to think this through? Really?
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So what would be the point of a rotating space station, except to make plumbing and ventilation work better? We don't need a way station to assemble rockets in orbit just to reach the moon, there are a number of different ways to get stuff and people to the moon that don't require an expensive habitat in the middle. Robotic docking of spacecraft is not cutting edge any longer, it works really well and can assemble whatever craft is envisioned to carry colonists to the Moon. While a habitat nearby will be
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So what would be the point of a rotating space station, except to make plumbing and ventilation work better? We don't need a way station to assemble rockets in orbit just to reach the moon, there are a number of different ways to get stuff and people to the moon that don't require an expensive habitat in the middle. Robotic docking of spacecraft is not cutting edge any longer, it works really well and can assemble whatever craft is envisioned to carry colonists to the Moon. While a habitat nearby will be necessary for the assembly and maintenance of any large construction on orbit you need to get the materials there first, and the materials are going to have to come from the Moon.
The point is to provided simulated gravity for the health of the workers and some processes require 'weight' to function. A rotating station provides this functionality. We need to have more people in orbit and for longer periods if we ever hope to build a moonbase. More importantly, funds need to build infrastructure in space, not provide above average incomes for a earth bound beaurocracy. There's no point in going to Mars until after we have a space station and a moonbase. One step at a time. Just saying
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Rotating sufficiently quickly to provide even fractional gravity will require a couple of orders of magnitude stronger structure, which means several orders of magnitude more mass. Even if you don't go with a full O'Neil ring and just settle for spinning dumbbell shape you're still talking about enough raw materials to need to launch it from the moon. I suppose the other alternative is hollowing out and then spinning up an asteroid that you've put into orbit, but there are so many currently-impossibilitie
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Rotating sufficiently quickly to provide even fractional gravity will require a couple of orders of magnitude stronger structure, which means several orders of magnitude more mass. Even if you don't go with a full O'Neil ring and just settle for spinning dumbbell shape you're still talking about enough raw materials to need to launch it from the moon. I suppose the other alternative is hollowing out and then spinning up an asteroid that you've put into orbit, but there are so many currently-impossibilities in that proposal as to make it a non-starter for the next couple of decades.
Sigh. I guess you're unaware of the long history of this concept and all the work that's gone into it already. A rotating space habitat is not that difficult, considering NASA's current budget, hence my claims of mismanagement. We don't need most of crap NASA does, at this time. At this time, we need to develop orbital facilities, obviously. If NASA was as effective in space as they are in taking care of themselves, this would be done already.
In the 2010s, NASA explored plans for a Nautilus X centrifuge dem
/. brainstorm time - reuse of Falcon 9 2nd stages (Score:2)
SpaceX is launching a sh*tload of Falcon9 rockets with Starlink sattelites.
The 2nd stage & the Starlink "shelf" is being discarded/burned up every time.
If the 2nd stage had extra fuel so it can move to a higher parking orbit after the all the Starlink satellites are deployed (which made up most of the mass at that moment) can those parts (from dozens... hundreds of launches) be reused to build the frame of a space station ? (considering that all the new Falcon9 2nd stages will have some built-in extra m
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More useful than the shell is the fuel tanks inside it. High strength, insulated, air tight, one of them from each launch will still have leftover oxygen.
Bigelow Aerospace (Score:2)
For-profit + saving money = DOES NOT COMPUTE (Score:1)
The only reason a private enterprise can ever be cheap, is when they want to trap you into their lock-in and/or haven't established such a monopoly yet.
The whole and entire and *only* point of a private enterprise, is to take as much money from you as physically possible, while giving you as little work as physically possible. Everything else is merely a hindrance to remove.
Of course if your government is formed from such private enterprises, as is the case in the US, then that is also their "ideal" state a