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Low-Cost Space Shuttle Replacement Proposed
FleaPlus writes "The Washington Times and Space.com has an article on a plan for a low-cost shuttle replacement by t/Space, an organization whose team includes AirLaunch LLC and Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites. Instead of a one-size-fits-all craft, t/Space's plan is to build an air-launched four-person capsule termed the Crew Transfer Vehicle (CXV), specialized for carrying people to and from low-Earth orbit. Once in orbit the CXV would dock with a separately-launched Crew Exploration Vehicle (likely built by Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman), which could be optimized for traveling between Earth orbit and the Moon. The CXV would also be able to dock with a space station or serve as a crew lifeboat. The group, which has already received some NASA funding, calculates that it can have the system ready by 2008 for $400 million, with a per-launch cost of $20 million (compared to ~$500 million per shuttle launch). Development would be done under a competitive fixed-price (instead of cost-plus) contract."
Why develop the same thing twice and compete, when you can cooperate?
Yeah, that international cooperation thing worked really well on the space station, didn't it?
Seriously, cooperation sounds really nice, but in reality all it means is that you have to deal with the red tape of two countries instead of one. Plus, the Kliper and CXV proposals are really quite different from each other; insights from both projects and which parts work best will make the following generation of spacecraft even better.