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NASA to Privatize ISS Missions?
Brian Young writes "Nasa is looking for private companies to take over the business of transporting astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. "'Certainly this is an opportunity for the new space companies,' said Jim Banke, head of Florida operations for The Space Foundation 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." One has to wonder how much money can be saved by NASA that can be put to use elsewhere, such as trying to figure out how to put together a manned mission to Mars, if they no longer have to dish out the tremendous amount of money that getting astronauts and cargo to the ISS requires."
Hmmm... Which is better at providing safe and cost-effective missions: the government or a private company?
On the one hand, being in a bidding situation forces companies to have a lid on their costs, while on the other it encourages said companies to cut corners whenever they can. If NASA were competently managed, then it would be obvious that outsourcing the missions would be silly. However NASA's management has some issues, so maybe this is the right move.
I remember hearing something about Russia not being able to afford to help out the ISS project anymore, but what about China, India, France? These are hardly backwater nations... why aren't they helping more? Is it a contractual thing?
http://www.angelfire.com/pa/sergeman/issues/techno logy/space.html
Manned space flight has all but died, perhaps this will spark a new era - The one we geeks have been waiting for...
I'm not fat, just big boned...
This is just another step in NASA's eventual demise that I spoke about earlier.
With NASA not even putting people in space, instead paying others to, it will be yet another step in furthering NASA away from... well anything involving space. After all, once a company does this, eventually people will begin to ask "what is NASA needed for? Can't we just have this company do it? We'll be able to save money if we cut out the NASA overhead and replace it with a smaller group."
Thank god this will be help in furthering private space-flight. If NASA has to be destroyed, at least they're doing it in a way that will give a boost to the private space industry.
I can understand this working if the task was already being done somewhere else by someone else.
.. oh - that's not good :-(
But NASA have the track record, and any privateer will have a really steep (and costly) learning curve to master. Of course they could take existing management skills from NASA and
I guess that leaves the Russians and the French.
Sure, but do you need a multi-billion dollar "tent" set up years in advance to put everything into? After all, during the debate on which mode to use to get to the Moon, an orbital station was never considered. The closest mode would probably have been EOR, which allowed for on-orbit assembly of components before departure for Earth's orbit. I'm not sure that I see how having a manned orbital outpost would make things any easier. To use your own analogy, base camps are set up while on-route to the top of the mountain. You don't set them up years in advance. You set them up as you go. (In partial defense of your argument, polar explorations often set up depots in advance of travel. This is necessary, however, because of the short windows of opportunity for travel.)
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
This sort of incentives-based policy is in the tradition of American values. It should be no surprise that such values are being eroded as the 'nation of immigrants' changes from pioneering independence to bureaucratic dependence. The use of a socialist bureaucracy to explore space is a fundamentally different experiment that other proven American approaches to expanding the resource base available to humanity.
In 1989 I was working on grassroots legislation to reform NASA's launch services policies. This led to the passage of P. L. 101-611, The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 which required NASA to procure launch services from private vendors whenever possible. This is common sense if proper boundaries between public and private functions are to be maintained. As radical as this may sound to many who see NASA as a space transportation company, it was, in fact, Presidential policy at the time and the legislation was therefore, in fact, redundant, but bureaucratic inertia demanded separate acts by the Legislative branch to reinforce the Executive's own command structure. This legislative effort started out as an attempt to passsomething along the lines of the Kelly Act of 1925 (which formed the basis for Jerry Pournelle's recommendations first put forth by his Citizen's Advisory Council for Space Policyin 1980), but compromised when it became clear that resistance from NASA, and its contractors, to citizen involvement in space policy was so intense that serious reform would be impractical. My testimony before Congress legislative follow-up to P.L. 101-611 made recommendations for a focus onincentives for commercial investment, rather than plans or "programs". An example of incentives-based legislation, applied to fusion energy policy, was recommended for passage by Bussard, R. W., one of the founders of the US fusion program in a letter confessing some of the subterfuge to which technical leaders resorted. It is still quite relevant today given the reliance on Middle Eastern oil and problems with fission energy. The point here is that incentives are more effective in general than governmental programs.
The first settlers in America experienced enormous causalities their first years they were in America. Entire colonies were lost. The original colonies included a substantial variety of fundamentally differing approaches to settling North America. America's frontier wasn't built by a centrally controlled bureaucracy -- and there is no reason to expect such a bureaucracy will take Americans to their next frontier.
Space policy is a touchstone of American values since Americans are spiritually a pioneering culture. Let's not forget who settled the frontier, how those "immigrants" differed from later immigrants, and what sort of "program" they had to settle the new frontier.
If Michael Griffin is for real about this he may just reawaken the very pioneering character of Americans. We must hope he is not just sincere but will be successful doing so.
Seastead this.
the recent X-prize contestants weren't exactly low cost,
For what it did, I think it was very low cost. Could you imagine NASA developing anything with the same capabilities as Space Ship One for 20 million dollars? The closest thing I can think of recently was the DC-X project back in the 90's, and that cost 58 million dollars.
They got nowhere close to what it takes to send crew / cargo to the ISS.
True, but the X-prize's goal wasn't orbit, just up to space and back down. It was eminently do-able, but nobody was doing it.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
You do if you plan on making the trip routinely. If a person goes up the moutain once a decade, put up a tent. However, if 25 ascend per week, maybe something a bit more permanent is in order...
2. NASA should sell it's stake in the ISS. It's a toy and a money sinkhole.
3. NASA needs to focus on space based research and exploration. Leave terrestrial flight research to the Air Force, DARPA and the private industry.
4. NASA needs to focus on robotic planetary research, astronomy related projects and deep space vehicle research.
BTW, a manned mission to the moon or Mars is the ISS on steroids sinkhole wise.
It's a very clever move on NASA's part. For the cost of the reward, $20 million, they managed to get all the contestants to invest their money to do the research. Even if each contestant invested less than the $20 million, the sum of their research investment will add up to be more than $20 million, even if you discount for some redundancy in their research efforts. I think it's a very good example of using public money to promote private investment in something that will eventually benefit the public.
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For several reasons, it will not die. Since it is already jointly owned, it can not be re-tasked. That is, we can not take it apart and use the parts for another station (Bigelow's).
More important, Europe, Japan, and Canada all own parts of it. Assume that USA and/or Russia make it to the Moon. It will be years before we set up a perm staffed base. Until then, we will need a base to keep testing equipment. But assume that we establish a base in 2010 or we decide to go to Bigelow's. So we abandon the ISS. The other countries will continue on with it. Why? For the simple reason that they need to test their equipment. Nobody wants to go to the moon and part way there, find out that they are losing O2.
I suspect that in about 3 years, China will send up a mission that will dock with the ISS. They will then join the team as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.