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."

Comments

How much cheaper?

[forkazoo]

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?

Re:How much cheaper?

[FleaPlus]

Really, how much cheaper can we expect a private company to do this?

Much, much more cheaply. The private space startup SpaceX is targeting the ISS contracts with their Falcon 9, which has a price of $35-$78 million. In contrast, a launch on an equivalent Boeing or Lockheed rocket costs up to $230 million, and a space shuttle launch costs somewhere between $500 million and a billion.

The key thing to remember is that a truly private company has a direct incentive to make things cost-effectively. For a government agency the incentive is quite indirect, and in the case of a typical cost-plus contractor (i.e. Boeing or Lockheed), they actually make more money if a project costs more.

And, seeing as how all "NASA" hardware is built by private contactors, how much of a difference are we really going to see?

Again, the big difference here is that they'll be using fixed-price contracts for deliveries, rather than using cost-plus contracts.

Re:How much cheaper?

[maraist]

The key thing to remember is that a truly private company has a direct incentive to make things cost-effectively.

You miss the whole point.. In a truely private "industry".. There is competition for consumers.. Each corporation MUST minimize costs, as that's the only way to maximize profit (technology, timing, etc help but are less reliabile). But the eact opposite is true of ANY government contract job. That "industry" works by a completely differnet set of rules. Yes there is competition, but only for the initial bid.. After that, there is a trick called "cost ovrerruns". The government will pay ALL over-runs, because they're in it too deep.. They can't afford to back out and switch to a competator.

Imagine being a software programing and KNOWING that your boss can't fire you, but pays you by the hour.. How long is that bug going to take to fix?

The incentives are completely out of wack. The gov-contract-industry is supposed to correctly estimate how cheaply they can do something.. Then their goal is to ahead-of-time estimate every innacurancy in the government-contract plan.. Each gov-err in their specification will require a renegotiation of the price, and almost always at a hansome profit for the contractor.. So the contractor that can find the most flaws in the specification knows they can reduce their estimatd bid the most, and ultimately turn the highest profit.

Then, when the contract is being fullfilled, the company has trade-offs.. Money-based trade-offs.. At any given point, they can choose to do something money-efficiently or not.. The determining factor is whether the gov will pick up the tab for the extra cost or not. And if the contractor can get the service done for cheaper than they know the government can track, all the better.

The end result is that the project will DEFINITELY cost more than anoter space shuttle mission the 1'st couple times; look at all the libability coverage; they can't just go out there with untested stuff. (NASA could, but a private firm couldn't).

In the long run, space industry has to be purely based on a high-volume consumer demanded, competatively offered industry.. Otherwise, somebody is getting the shaft.

Unfounded Rumor Mill

[kgfowler]

I didn't realise that the Halliburton Space Agency (HSA) was that far along in development.

kgf

Re:Money still comes from NASA...

[Rhinobird]

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.

Re:Money still comes from NASA...

[Comatose51]

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.

Re:Scuttle the ISS

[grozzie2]

Apart from creating jobs, just what have we gotten for the billions that we've spent on the ISS?

We've gained a lot of knowledge, albeit, not quite the knowledge intended to gain, gained nonetheless.

Science is a wondeful thing. You start with a set of assumptions, add either hypothesis or theory, then design experiments to validate the whole works, or, sometimes try invalidate it. In the end, knowledge is gained. sometimes, the experiments accidently invalidate the assumptions, so, altho they appear on the surface as a failure, valuable insight is still gained for future use, even tho the failure of assumptions means the hypothesis or theory never did get tested.

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. Low orbit is a good starting point, because it's a place we can go to 'routinely' to do this kind of testing. The iss was designed to take the best parts of the russian space program, combined with the best parts of the american space program, and get an international program in motion that could leverage it all. 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.

The problem with the iss program is, access to low orbit as routine turned out to be an invalid assumption, and, pretty much everybody had to step back and re-evaluate the fundamentals on which the program were built. In order to fulfill it's mission, the iss needs to be completed, but, it's slowly becoming apparent that the american space program is not up to the task of delivering into orbit the modules required. This was the 'strength' of the program that the entire iss concept was built on. As sometimes happens in science, the setup for the experiment invalidates the assumptions, now you have to step back and re-evaluate the basics before you can finish the experiment. The whole program was launched on the premise that us space shuttles would be available to lift specific modules for station assembly, and a lot of other countries bet significantly on that assumption. It's turned out to be flat wrong.

The re-evaluation process is now ongoing. The usa took a couple years, spent a few billion, and 'fixed' the shuttle problem, then launched another shuttle. Up to that point, it was just a delay. The 'fixed' shuttle turned out to be not quite so fixed, the same old problem still exists. This really does now put the entire iss program in doubt, for a lot of reasons, some political, some technical. From a political view, other partner countries are asking a simple question. What happened during the 'fix the shuttle process'? A lot of time/effort/money was expended on the problem. Is this a core competency problem within the american space program ? Can other countries afford to continue investing billions into this program if the station is not going to be completed ?

ISS partners have gained a LOT of knowledge from the program. It's just to bad most of that knowledge is in the area of politics, and engineering required to get to low orbit. Those were actually 'assumptions' at the onset of the program. The soviets were able to service Mir for many years, the ability of an american/russian partnership to service ISS was never questioned. It's turned out to be the achilles heel of the program overall. Shuttles are not flying, Russia cant afford to fly all the missions themselves, and silly laws in the us prevent american money from extending funding to soyuz launches.

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