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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
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's a matter of flight rate. As more and more flights took place and it became a part of everyday life, people got a better understanding of how to make airplanes fly more cheaply and safely. The hope is that the same thing will happen with spaceflight.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.