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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."
Dupe. See NASA Seeks Help Carrying Cargo Into Space
I still think it's a good thing that might end up saving money if it's done right.
I don't read AC A human right
http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html
2 005/09/28/GOOGLE.TMP
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
really 867993
Karma schkarma
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.
How about we fire the retro rockets and bring it down? Do we really want to put more money into the ISS when there are so many more interesting projects to pursue (Moon, Mars, deep space exploration)? Apart from creating jobs, just what have we gotten for the billions that we've spent on the ISS?
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
I believe the money to pay for the payloads to the ISS will still come out of the NASA budget (for instance, the article mentions a $500 million price tag just to fund this privatization effort). NASA just hopes that the price tag will be less once competition takes over. And, I suspect they're correct, given the remarkably low cost of the recent X-prize contestants.
Perhaps they should change their name to "Not Attending Space Anymore"
Read "NASA decides to scrap ISS, blame private industry for not picking up the ball."
Really, how much cheaper can we expect a private company to do this? After all, NASa just needs to do it, while a private company needs to do it and turn a profit. And, seeing as how all "NASA" hardware is built by private contactors, how much of a difference are we really going to see?
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?
Today, a nation needs them to function on the seas and in space.
I suggest you read Slashdot
with base camps...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
despite the obvious troll:
if they'd spent the trillion on space instead of iraq, people would complain it was better spent on education- which it would be. It would be better spent on a lot of things.
But the truth is, we ultimately need to go to space, we ultimately need education, we ultimately need a lot of things which is why we have budgets and its not an all or nothing deal for one particular endeavor.
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.
But why would NASA outsource the very skills they'll eventually need for future Moon, Mars, and beyond missions? They'd win the immediate budget battle but loose the war.
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.
I didn't realise that the Halliburton Space Agency (HSA) was that far along in development.
kgf
...and offered to fly their new taikonauts to the ISS?
I bet NASA woould suddenly receive all the funding it needed, ASAP, and no questions asked!
Despite what people claim "privatizing" something does not necessarily entail a cost-savings. I'm not saying that it won't here but people (on /. and elsewhere) have a tendency to assume that private companies are necessarily cheaper/faster/better than a public function. This is the mantra of both Republicans and Libertarians (as well as many Democrats).
Consider the costs of privatized schools, privatized prisons, privatized utility companies (California anyone?) etc. In many cases of privatization the promised cost savings never appear but people still press ahead as if it will necessarily come.
NASA already contracts out much of their work. In a sense contracting for the whole shuttle rather than each part is not an illogical step. I just hope (for the sake of NASA and my tax dollars) that they privatize the flights if and only if real savings emerge not the expectation of savings.
Are you trying to say that flying is dangerous, or that commercial airlines are reckless? Depending on how you read the statistics, flying has roughly the same rate of passenger death as riding on a train. If we could get people and cargo into space with the same fatility rate as riding on a train, I think most people would be thrilled.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Wouldn't a company have even more to gain than just money from NASA by using similar technology to win America's Space Prize? Maybe someone can correct me here, but it seems like it would be feasible to complete the two missions with similar enough technology that the two applications might offset the cost.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't regist
But if you were to plot journey cost vs safety, you'd find strong correlation, that is, flights are getting both cheaper AND safer. Of course, corrleation does not imply causation.
(Here's a copy of a comment I made the last time this story was posted.)
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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:
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.
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.
Dunno, why are europe being slackers - sending a robot to do a Man's job???
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/rlv-02g.html
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Yeah, anyone daring to be so un-American and unpatriotic as to critize the Iraq war and the huge sums spendt on it must be a troll.
if they no longer have to dish out the tremendous amount of money that getting astronauts and cargo to the ISS requires.
They will still pay the tremendous amount of money that getting astronauts and cargo to the ISS requires. The only difference is that the money will be going to a private company instead of doing it in-house. What did the OP expect - that the private sector will do something like this for free?
Of course, it is possible that a private company can do it cheaper. However, since there are currently no private companies that can do this, it is equally possible that it will cause no end of scandals, court battles, disasters and bankruptcies that may force NASA to pick up unexpected bills. The good thing about doing things in-house is that a large number of variables can be trusted to be under control without the overhead of armies of lawyers, miles of contracts, thousands of accountants and unbelivably expensive insurance.
I would like to see the insurance company that would insure a small space company against the possibility of astronatus being stranded in space, or a failure to deliver setting a space program like the ISS back so long that it would have to be scrapped. Who can even provide an objective cost of such losses?
This may not be all bad but I don't advise any holding of breath. We have some insightful comments, yet judging by the scores, the moderators know nothing about economics or monetary policy. This is hardly surprising in view of the fact that it is not generally taught. The accepted belief system for most citizens is that money came from God or the Big Bang and as populations grow and society becomes more complex, we have to do more and more with a fixed amount of money, necessitating a sort of social, economic and environmental triage. What makes this silly model even sadder is the implicit assumption in all discussions of cost, that money once spent is simply gone. This is clearly contrary to everyday experience, yet we as a species simply don't often make these connections without serious study once a belief system is established and widely held. Sorry guys, but it is a fact that when the human resources, raw materials and infrasructure are available, then claims of a government being unable to afford something it purports to want or that the citizens want, is nothing more than Orwellian doublespeak meaning "We don't want to do that." The struggle to get by in a world of limited money helps keep people off the backs of the unelected real government that detests and fears democracy. Who has not noticed how infrequently the elected government does what was promised in the election campaign? Look into this or struggle, fight or pray for more money. When can we move on? The choice is up to us.
We all know and love that space corporation:-D
Maybe some of the Metamodders could look at the parent post and decide for themselves.
Since I have never previously posted a troll post...
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.
All this is, is a chance to get NASA back up and functional. You see, Katrina hit Nasa while it was down, destroying the infrastructre to support the Space Center/Fuel Tank/Repair Facility in NOLA. Just as they were working on fixing the Shuttle Foam problem. So, what can Nasa do: Support the Shuttle, flogging the dead horse mercilessly, to support the ISS at great cost? Or offload the mission to Private Industry, and give NASA a chance to invest in the Crew Exploration Vechile? I think the choice is easy, but the problem is I'm not sure that the CEV design is the way to go.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
You don't deserve to be upmodded for this post. You should be flogged.
We've gained a lot of knowledge, albeit, not quite the knowledge intended to gain, gained nonetheless.
We have learned to construct a sizeable structure in space using equipment that will not exist in 5 years. ISS is the most criminal waste of money in the name of science of all time.
The iss is a platform for developing and testing long duration mission technology. The goal is to reach the point where the technology for a mars mission exists (it doesn't today), and has been tested in the harsh environment of space
The occupants aboard ISS aren't testing anything. They are marooned campers trying desperately to keep alive between resupply flights. The Russians shouldn't be involved at all considering their negative progress in democracy, human rights, and nuclear proliferation.
The iss itself is not an initial experiment in low orbit long duration, Mir already showed us that can be done, it carried on in that role for 15 years. ISS is a platform for hosting more advanced experiments and development.
Mir was a veritable carnival of danger - spacecraft collisions, explosive decompression, deadly fires. It taught the US never participate again in Russian lead ventures.
The ISS is proably going to die uncompleted. The biggest lesson learned for most of the partners, dont depend on the usa when large expenditure projects are involved, projects that extend beyond the 4 year election cycle hence they become suceptible to the short term political cycles of the usa.
Blame it on the USA. Perhaps it is going to die because our partners (besides the Russians) don't have manned space programs at all. The program has survived 25 years, 4 presidents, and $100G in funding. Seems to me that is consistent enough. The US deorbit its modules and walk for the program. That would leave a Russian module and the Canada arm remaining.
But, the bottom line, if the program is not capable of managing completion of the ISS, then there's no way it's going to produce a manned mission to mars that operates without resupply for the timeframes involved.
The assembly of ISS was very well managed by NASA. It is gone perfectly. The problem is they must use the most dangerous manned space vehicle ever launched.
an ill wind that blows no good
Love those mods!
I'll have whatever they're smoking.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
well, let's see here now... NASA learns everything it knows by putting up space flights. now they want to outsource it but keep paying for it. so NASA gets dumber and dumber and loses its ability to do anything except write checks.
sounds like a job for Halliburton!
prove me wrong.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The system is so broken that I've started meta-modding all moderations unfair, as they can only be that in this unfair system. You can do it too!
but the USA is, primarily, descended from Europeans. When talking about the USA, as a country, you can pretty much assume that people aren't talking about the natives that lived here before the 16th century.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I'm amazed that no one has bothered to note the inherent biased assumption that privatization will save money.
There are tons of examples that suggest that privatization, far from being the be-all/end-all cure to gov't bureaucracy, results in even shoddier service and actually costs more in the end.
One can pick out tons of examples: States that have privatized the investigation of welfare fraud find that it costs more. Privatized prisons not only cost dearly, but result in barbaric treatment for the inmates (not that state-run prisons are any prize!).
The US military has privatized many combat tasks to private mercenary corporations -- but does anyone think that privately hiring now-ex Green Berets and Rangers and paying them hundreds of dollars per day as mercenaries is really cheaper and more effective than paying them $30K/year as members of the US Army?! The Army is having to pay out huge bonuses to elite troops just to keep them from leaving the service to go work for the private mercenary corporations -- taxpayers pay to train them, then we pay through the nose because of privatization. Halliburton and mercenary corporation stockholders may benefit by military privatization, but the taxpayers certainly do not!
We can also have ample evidence that privatization doesn't work in health care. The US has the world's most expensive health care, yet Canadians live 4+ years longer and the cheaper Canadian system outperforms the US privatized health care system in almost every measure. (Standard disclaimers: The US system performs great -- expensive, but great -- if you're rich and/or have good insurance, and the Canadian system is far from perfect; but on a national scale there is no comparison -- Canada's public system is cheaper and far more effective than the US private system.)
I think there are very, very few people that will claim that Bush's privatization of FEMA resulted in an effective Hurricane Katrina response.
Privatization may be effective in some rare instances, but it is far, far from the cost-saving, effectiveness-creating cure-all that the article's lead-in portrays it to be.
I seriously doubt that Scaled Composites or other 'up and commers' will have any serious shot at any dollars from this. I think we'll see more of the typical Big Business orientation that the US gov't tends to align itself with.
not that- but anyone who brings up iraq in every possible subject is often a troll.
i've never consciously posted one, but one or two of mine have been interpreted that way by mistake. It happens, especially with topics people use as flaimbait/trolls a lot. The war on iraq is a polarizing topic and quickly leads to offtopic discussion.
;o)
Good metamods will view context, decent ones sometimes don't.
One 'troll' on your karma won't kill you
If NASA can't afford it, they can pay someone else without a lot of experience in this field to do it cheaper? Of course...
Is the world gone crazy?
Privatization is always a scam. ALWAYS. It is always backed by well-placed insiders who want to line their pockets by providing the same-or-lesser service at greater cost. If you expect any such scheme to work out well for taxpayers while the current GOP is in power, you're a rube.
In the same way that robots have taken over roles on earth in various industries this is a sensible and more effective method of transporting materials to the ISS. The additional costs of life supporting systems and of course the payload space for humans are surely not warranted for this sort of mission. The ATV is one of a number of projects coming out of Europe although there is admittedly a smaller budget over here for space projects than NASA have!
I think you missed I was _trying_ for humour!
Damn good thing using robots for routine stuff like this! Shame the shuttle can't do such, then it'd be less of a worry if it goes wrong...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
I seriously doubt that Scaled Composites or other 'up and commers' will have any serious shot at any dollars from this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T/Space
Let's be serious, when it comes to performing certain tasks, the government does it best. Two of the most notable examples that come to mind are military operations and space operations. It's a well publicized fact that contracting out military support and logistics is a terrible and wasteful idea. Private companies charge obscenely high amounts for their services, they rip the government off. There are private contractors that are being employed in Iraq, where upwards of 95 percent of their profits come from the U.S. government. How does this save the governmnet money when they end up supplying the contractor with the vast majority of its revenues? Now we want to privatize trasnsport to the ISS? These companies' revenues will come solely from NASA! Not only is NASA paying for the costs involved, they'll also end up paying bloated profit margins that would be unnecessary if they were handled by NASA itself! It'll end up being a greater waste of money. I sense meddling by the Bush administration.
The point is that NOBODY ELSE HAS DONE IT YET. Good to see up and commers trying to get it done, but when there is a couple of hundred million on the line, NASA and the US Govt will pay the $$$'s to their old buddies.
Just one more item that the Gov't thinks they can actually make money on by outsourcing. Think about it: Going into Space in a Low Bid spacecraft? Just get the Russians to do it. NoMorePoints.com
States that have privatized the investigation of welfare fraud find that it costs more
Did they sell it as a contract, paying a set amount, or as a bounty system? I'd set it up as a bounty system where the company is awarded for each case of fraud caught & stopped.
As for the health care system, I feel that it's suffering from the same symptoms as Lockheed and Boeing. Consumers are too insulated from costs on the whole. I've read studies that say that half the cost of a procedure is paperwork.
I don't read AC A human right
So you will kindly point out the private firm capable of doing this!!!
Those things that the private sector can do, they SHOULD do. That is, things that NATURALLY happen in the private sector without needing public sector help (financing) should be left to the private sector.
The problem with what is happening now is that they are trying to artificially create private sector companies do fill the role of public sector agencies. Think Halliburton and military services. The ONLY thing they are doing is creating a profit where there was no profit before. And along with it, a fair amount of kickbacks to political backers.
This is ALL about graft.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
http://www.unitedspacealliance.com/
USA [as in the company, not the country] has been running NASA ops for about 10 years now per a large contract and having won the bid.
There are currently relatively few 'non-contractor' people working at NASA; the sheer majority are contractors.
Granted, the current NASA/USA arrangement is a shell game of sorts; the government still pays out the USD $12B+ budget and the same people still do it (albeit with checks signed by someone else).
The new proposal, in theory, might see the government moving to reduce payout and let private industry assume the risk and expense?
Look, if Boing and Lockheed Martin could run these operations privately, wouldn't they have already done it by now???
NASA source's it's equipment to Aerospace. However, they keep overall mission management in house.
If Aerospace wants to cut out the government and service the private sector directly, I say all for it. Don't forget that these guys have to pay rental fees for NASA's launch and mission control facilities (unless they want to build and maintain their own).
BTW, the purpose of the space shuttle was to make NASA appear as if it had a full fledged re-usable vehicle more alike to something people had seen in science fiction movies. In reality, it was a space station that could be launched and recovered.
I support ISS. I don't support the Shuttle's role in either launching components or servicing ISS. But that's what we had to go with. Hopefully we can get back to launching "flying washing machines" soon that are disposable and ultimately a lot cheaper than the shuttle.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!