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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
It was great we had NASA to jumpstart the space exploration field, and make the the USA the space superpower it is today, but now it's time that we turn it over the private sector. Private for-profit businesses can break the space doldrums we're in now.
Right now, NASA has become too distracted with political and budget battles to really take space technology to the next level. We need to see what the USA's brilliant minds in the private industries can do to keep the USA the best space power there is.
Step 1.Paint large "42" on side of shuttle step 2.Release the mice
Purple, because ice cream has no bones.
If this happens, what purpose would Nasa serve?
The funding Nasa gets for scientific works could be diverted to researching at universities directly who could then use the funding pay private space companies to run the experiments.
Well, they can easily outsource--I mean it isn't rocket science. Oh, wait.
NASA has outlived its usefulness as an astronaut ferry operator. It's shown in the past few years that it is unable to reliably send astronauts into orbit or to even provide aid to the international space station.
This is good.
There are several large problems with having NASA in charge of space flight, and one of those is that it's the government tightly controlling who flies and who doesn't. If you aren't selected as an astronaut, you aren't going. Period. That means that it's just not feasible for the private sector to come up with NEO vehicles because NASA just won't allow it. No NEOVs, no rapid intercontinental travel, no business case.
So government here ought to do what only it can do, finance good ideas. Get out of the business of trying to do this space travel stuff on their own and turn over that money to the private sector who will find ways of doing the same more cheaply and more economically and more safely than any government boondoggle could hope to imagine.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
http://procurement.jsc.nasa.gov/COTS/default.asp
Level playing field. Any bets on that?
That's right, it's hard to keep anything level in zero-G.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I think this is good... as long as...
1/ I think that the core NASA missions should be kept at NASA for the sake of maintaining scientific integrity and also because it allows for riskier and more substantial undertakings. The grunt work of hauling cargo (which is what this is all about) is a good candidate for outsourcing, though. So as long as this doesn't turn into a slippery slope of a total NASA privatization...
2/ I am reserved about how effective this can be. Can the private sector really do it for a lower cost? Will they be able to do a good job? NASA is not very efficient, so hopefully this won't be that hard to achieve, but until they can show that private companies really can be as effective, I'll take this as wait-and-see.
And to comment on the article's constant mention of space start-ups: perhaps I shouldn't judge so much on just one incident, but the whole X-Prize thing did not serve as a good first impression for me personally for the private-sector start-up space industry. The kind of hoopula that went into what was essentially a glorified rocket plane that momentarily touched space and won by a design that was geared specifically towards meeting the winning requirements was really discouraging (like studying for a test by studying the test instead of the real material), and I fear that, at the moment, much of the talk about space start-ups in the US is just hype.
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
I think if everyone works together, launching payload into space will be easy. If you got everyone in a medium-sized town (54,000 people) to cooperate and have each person lift just 6 feet, you could get the payload into space without expensive rockets. I am stepping up to the plate and personally offering to lift the payload from 5400 feet to 5406 feet. Any takers for "5394 to 5400" or "5406 to 5412"?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
This will help provide some much needed incentive for companies to invest in space beyond satellites and the dreams of a few nutty billionairs. We need more SpaceShip1 s and genuenly American pioneers like this guy...http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviationspace/e 08989c49db84010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
Demented But Determined.
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.
On the flip side, neither businesses nor investors nor insurrers like to lose billion dollar investments.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Freaking Space Elevators!!!
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.
Look, after Apollo 1, we were flying again within 9 months. After challenger, it took less than a year. Now, we are up to several years and will retire the equipment shortly thereafter. In addition, Nixon worked to kill NASA, Reagan scattered it in a million directions (without funding). Carter, Poppa Bush and clinton just went with the flow. The current bush now tasks them with going to the moon, but it appears that he will fund it less than what he did "no child left behind". About the only real leaders that we have had for the last 50 years, has been Eisenhower (road systems) and Kennedy (NASA amongst others). Plain and Simple, America's space systems can not be left to idiots.
Yes, private companies will crash and burn; literally. And people will die. Make no mistake about it. Private companies will lose ships and ppl. But these ppl will have died doing something that they believed in and was useful to not only America but the world as whole. Well worth the price.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
Private airlines aren't safe because they're private. They're safe because of a slew of regulations.
Right. It's only because of the regulations. Consumers aren't smart enough to not buy tickets on an airline which crashes regularly.
That said, what gives you the impression that the FAA isn't going to have any regulations on private spaceflight?
Customers didn't have a choice. The zero crashes a year thing only started happening since after 2001. Until then, while flying was safer than driving, you had no idea which plane was poorly maintained.
Such safe quality of service is expensive, and this is one of the reasons airlines are going out of business now.
Go do a google on GM - their CEOs actually found it was cheaper to eat a bunch of lawsuits over defective and dangerous cars than to recall them, or make them safer. You can betcha the same rule will apply to private space transport.
And big business would love to get rid of the FAA. Failing that they'll look for ways around it. Like flying cargo out of another country...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Though we in the USA like to think that we control space and call all of the "shots", the reality is that China is well on it's way to puting us in second place in the next 10 years. Let's see, Russia and the European Space Agency routinely put rockets into space as does China. Japan, India, and even North Korea have rockets. Point is that if you want to hitch a ride into space, NASA is not the only show in town. NASA does not decide all who fly.
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
Just down the hall from Research-Research / Development-Development
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Are they going to put "CCCP" on the sides of the vehicles?