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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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
Once an operation becomes routine, I think it should be privatized. In this case, NASA does a better job at developing the new (and highly risky) missions (like the one to Mars), and less well at doing routine things like lifting payloads into orbit. I'd put this akin to commercial freight hauling and less in the vein of the Apollo missions. Given this, getting someone in the commericial market to do the hauling should be cheaper, quicker, and probably safer than having the government do it. Sort of like the difference between the USPS and UPS... perhaps 100 years ago when delivering packages was a very risky endevor with zero profit margins having the government deliver them was logical, but it's hard to see the reason now. Perhaps we're turning that corner in the orbital lift business this decade.
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
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
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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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.