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NASA Seeks Help Carrying Cargo Into Space
Dotnaught writes "NASA wants to outsource space missions to the private sector. The government space agency on Tuesday announced the establishment of the Commercial Crew/Cargo Project Office at the Johnson Space Center as part of the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. The objective is to "create a market environment in which commercial space transportation services are available to Government and private sector customers." Proposals are due February 10, 2006."
NASA seeks help from private rocketeers
Entrepreneurs could take over job of sending cargo and crew into orbit
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - With the space shuttles due to retire, NASA is looking for private companies interested in taking over the potentially lucrative business of flying cargo and crew to the international space station.
The U.S. space agency issued a long-awaited announcement Tuesday for firms interested in handling delivery services now provided by the three shuttles, which are due to stop flying by 2010.
"Certainly this is an opportunity for the new space companies," said Jim Banke, head of Florida operations for The Space Foundation, an industry trade association. "They've been lobbying NASA hard for something like this for years."
NASA hopes to supplement, and eventually replace, crew and cargo flights to the space station that had been planned for the shuttle fleet. The agency also may have to pare down the number of shuttle flights to the station even before they retire to pay for development of a new spacecraft known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle.
In addition to flying to the station if no commercial providers are available, the Crew Exploration Vehicle is being designed to carry astronauts to the moon.
"We're excited about this opportunity," said Larry Williams, who handles international and government affairs for Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. The California-based is planning its debut rocket launch from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific this month.
SpaceX was founded and funded by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, who sold his online payment services firm PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion.
Musk is developing a series of launchers, called the Falcon, which, if successful, could significantly undercut the price routinely paid to aerospace giants Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., to send payloads into orbit.
Other start-up firms that have expressed interest in NASA's space station business include t/Space, SpaceDev, Constellation Services International, AirLaunch LLC, SpaceHab, Andrews Space, Rocketplane Ltd., Taco Bell, Universal Space Lines and Bigelow Aerospace, according to an Excel spreadsheet on NASA's procurement Web site.
Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which manufacture and sell the Delta and Atlas expendable launch vehicles, have kept any aspirations of becoming NASA's space station truckers under wraps.
"As long as it's a level playing field, we're open to compete with them any time and anywhere," said SpaceX's Williams.
Companies have until Feb. 10 to submit proposals to NASA for its transport services. The agency expects to award one or more contracts in May. NASA has allotted $500 million to pay for the initial phases of the program through 2010.
...here's the big question...
NASA has a way of bowing to pressure where they will say, "Oh, sure, we'll open it up to ____" and then making sure it won't happen behind the scenes.
For example, neither the Soyuz nor the Shuttle comply with the standards they've set for spacecraft-that-may-operate-near-the-ISS. They were grandfathered in.
Gentoo Sucks
http://procurement.jsc.nasa.gov/COTS/default.asp
Ideally, NASA will keep doing the big projects that are too expensive for individual universities (I doubt even Harvard has the money to build something like the Hubble on its own, and no grant is going to be big enough) and which don't have immediate profit potential for industry (in the very long run, there's a lot of money to be made by sending people Out There, but it will take decades, not quarters, to develop) while encouraging smaller, faster projects to be done by academia and industry. Basically NASA should be a trailblazer for missions no one else has the resources to do -- but which will hopefully, eventually, become routine.
That's the idea, anyway. I want to believe that it will work out that way. But considering the way things have gone since the glory days of Apollo, my optimism is damn near gone.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If you want to get this at the ol' .com.com (never understood why they did that) instead of MSNBC, here's C|Net's article on this:t s+for+shuttle+trips/2100-11397_3-5986093.html
http://news.com.com/NASA+seeks+private+replacemen
SpaceX is one of the private launch firms mentioned in the article and considered by many alt.spacers as the foremost contender for the ISS commercial crew & cargo contracts. Businessweek just published a pretty informative article on them, The Final Frontier At Costco Prices. Here's some relevant quotes from the article:
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If SpaceX succeeds in lofting its rocket and an Air Force Academy research satellite into orbit, Musk will vindicate his vision and his investment. Financed almost entirely out of his own pocket, the company is the South Africa native's attempt to carve out a lucrative niche in the wildly expensive launch business. Musk believes that he can blast military and commercial satellites into space at Costco prices -- $6.7 million for a small payload and $38 million to $78 million for a heavyweight launch. By comparison, the Air Force's total cost for a Boeing or Lockheed Martin launch of a big payload comes to about $230 million, up from an inflation-adjusted $95 million in 1998.
So far, satellite customers have rewarded Musk's optimism with $200 million in advance launch contracts. The company faces just two problems. While SpaceX, based in El Segundo, Calif., has fired off plenty of press releases, it has yet to get a rocket off the ground. Its first launch, already two years behind schedule, was scrubbed on Nov. 26 because of a balky computer and a liquid-oxygen leak from a valve inadvertently left open. The company expects to try again in mid-December.
Such rock-bottom fees -- and a belief in the reliability of SpaceX's gear -- have attracted a range of clients, from an unidentified U.S. intelligence agency to the Malaysian government to Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace. The startup is betting that companies will want to do research on the inflatable space stations it plans to put into orbit.
Musk says he has overcome many technical hurdles by simplifying launch hardware. For example, SpaceX uses the same engine on all its stages instead of different units. Its electronics are on chips instead of circuit boards, which reduces wiring glitches. To slice costs, most SpaceX rocket stages are reusable instead of expendable. And SpaceX intends to save money by recovering sections from the ocean instead of rebuilding an entire rocket. Musk also brought a Silicon Valley business model to Southern California, forming a small, innovative, 150-employee company, a sharp contrast to the bureaucratic legions who toil on launches for Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp. In an age of outsourcing, SpaceX makes its engines and boosters in-house to avoid high-priced suppliers such as Pratt & Whitney (UTX ), General Electric (GE ), and Rolls-Royce. If he used those manufacturers' components, Musk says, he would be trapped in "the high-cost culture of the space industry."
For Musk, beating the big guys out of a share of the launch market is just the start. His ultimate goal is to turn everyone into a highflier by making launches so cheap, easy, and common that humans will become, in his words, "a space-faring, multiplanet species." Musk wants to colonize Mars as a backup planet because Earth is vulnerable to manmade and natural disasters. Beachfront property on the Red Planet? Maybe someday. But first, Musk has to get off the beach at Kwajalein and show the doubters that his rockets can soar as high as his rhetoric.
How about the Antrix corporation ?
On a serious note, what are the prospects for international organizations bidding for the contracts? What are the implications?
"- What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"- You ask a glass of water."[from h2g2]
Very magnanimous (as well as wise) of NASA however that was law 15 years ago -- PL101-611 the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990. Dan Goldin must have been too busy "reforming" NASA to bother following the reform laws grassroots activists got passed the aerospace lobbies.
Seastead this.
What are you talking about, NASA has been outsourcing projects and components to private industry since its inception.
There's a significant between non-competitive cost-plus contracts and the new competitive commercial contracts which have just been proposed. With cost-plus contracts, it was actually in a company's interest to go over-budget, since it would result in greater budgets. Contract solicitations were also worded so that pretty much only a particular company could fit the requirements, so there wouldn't be any competition.
The plans is for these newer contracts to be fixed-cost, with payments contingent on meeting pre-established milestones. I'm curious to see whether or not this new system will survive, as its success would cut back drastically on congressional pork.
You can expect a lot more accidents in the private sector.
This, of course, is why we see so many accidents from commercial airlines and air cargo companies like FedEx. Their craft are so much more dangerous than government-operated vehicles.
Griffin also wants someone to develop a gas station in space so that his rockets can refuel from it instead of carrying extra fuel from earth.