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SpaceX, Rocketplane Kistler Win NASA Competition
An anonymous reader writes "Two emerging space companies have won a NASA competition to provide low cost commercial transport to the International Space Station. SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, is developing its two-stage reusable Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft, but it is making changes after the loss of Falcon 1 during its maiden launch. Rocketplane Kistler's K-1 is a two-stage reusable launch vehicle that has been in development for over a decade. Both companies represent a departure from business as usual at NASA. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are the largest companies in the aerospace industry and win most NASA contracts."
Nope, not even close. But if you have a small payload it mus be nice to have a low cost option instead of the shuttle.
It is also nice to see American business picking up the slack instead of using Russian refitted SLBM/ICBM's. Hurray for the little guys.
The cost per kg has little meaning for the Space Shuttle since the marginal cost per launch is only $250 million per launch (which IIRC puts it around $5,000 per kg for ~50,000 kg to orbit). But the Shuttle also has a $5 billion per year fixed cost whether it launches or not. FWIW, if NASA uses commercial launchers by the launch then they don't have to pay the fixed costs. I seem to recall that SpaceX's Falcon I goal was $5,000 per kg and the Falcon V goal was $1,500 per kg (ie, the customer pays that much, and SpaceX in theory makes a profit). But I have no idea how close SpaceX will come to meeting those goals particularly since they have yet to successfully launch the Falcon I. The Russians' Protons have a cost per kg around $3,000 to $4,000 per kg, IIRC.
Someone who actually has a handle on the prices, please correct me.The SpaceX "Dragon" capsule will launch on the Falcon 9 launcher, not the Falcon 1 which costs $6 million and change.
The Falcon 9 list price (see http://www.spacex.com/falcon_overview.php ) is $27 million for the basic 3.6 meter diameter fairing. For that price, you get around 9 tons (9,300 kg) lifted to low earth orbit, based on the announced specifications.
I am glad to see that they got one of the contracts. This is good for the industry. So is the Rocketplane Kistler thing, sort of, but there's already been $500 million spent on the Kistler vehicle and it's only half-built, so I have my worries about that one...
Your mileage may vary, they haven't built a Falcon 9 yet or successfully launched a Falcon 1 yet, etc.
Disclaimer: my company was a COTS phase 1 competitor, proposing to launch on a Falcon 9, which SpaceX was cheerfully interested in selling me despite their own Dragon project.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
Actually, Bill Gates' money is probably being spent very efficiently. There are a number of diseases that are prevelant, cause a lot of long term harm, and relatively low cost to treat. For example, malaria not only kills more than a million people a year, but it infects up to half a billion people a year. Some malaria infections are chronic and may linger for years or even decades. Tuberculosis is another disease that can debilitate rather than kill cleanly. And it is still pretty curable despite the advent of drug resistant strains.
The Russians haven't been doing much of anything in their space program lately. While they are smart by still using the workhorse of the Soyuz spacecraft and the Soyuz launch vehicle, they haven't done anything phenomenal in a long time. But I can't really blame them since the Russian space program has a budget of about $1 billion per year.
I disagree. The real action in space development is Earth to orbit. The Russian space program has the most active launch systems (Proton and Soyuz) in the world. They have the most reliable manned vehicles (no deaths in a Soyuz vehicle since the 70's). Their program may actually generate a profit for them. That is phenomenal given the resources they currently have.The Google founders are pouring money into Nanosolar, which is one of the companies developing a new form of solar cell that might actually be economical for widespread use - thereby giving your hypothetical African village power to pump + purify water, and irrigate their own farmlands.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
Right now the Falcon 9 is slated to cost between $27 and $35 million per launch. However, Musk has stated that the Falcon 9 is to be reusable, so I suspect that figure assumes that plan works out.
Actually, Musk has stated the opposite -- the current price assumes that they would be unable to successfully reuse any of the components, and that the price would come down more if it turned out they were able to reuse components effectively.
From here:
Falcon 5 and Falcon 9 will be the world's first launch vehicles where all stages are designed for reuse. The Falcon 1 has a reusable first stage, but an expendable upper stage. Reuse is not factored into launch prices. When the economics of stage recovery and checkout are fully understood, SpaceX will make further reductions in launch prices.
From the submission: Both companies represent a departure from business as usual at NASA. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are the largest companies in the aerospace industry and win most NASA contracts.
This is true, but it isn't the reason that this is so different from the way NASA (and government agencies in general) typically do business. In fact, Lockheed Martin is one of the members of the Rocketplane-Kistler team. RLV News (a very good source of private spaceflight news, btw) describes nicely what makes this such a departure from typical government contracting:
NASA will select the COTS winners based on the viability of their proposals but the agency will not dictate the design of the hardware. Another unusual feature of the COTS approach as compared to the standard way NASA does business is that the COTS winners will not receive money in annual lump sums. Instead the companies will be paid incrementally as they meet milestones laid out in their contracts. If a company doesn't meet a milestone, it won't get paid.
Usually these contracts are cost-plus, meaning that the contractor is paid for whatever the project ends up costing, plus a reward. Cost-plus contracting is a sure-fire way to end up with a project that is over-schedule and over-cost, as the contractor has little incentive to do things quickly, and decreasing costs actually means they make less money.
With the COTS contracts, companies will only get a fixed amount of money for meeting pre-set development milestones. If they go overbudget, they'll have to eat the costs themselves, or they'll get nothing at all. This gives them a strong incentive to do things cost-effectively. Plus, both companies will also be responsible for supplying their own funding, and I suspect that with at least one of the companies the private funding will be more than what they'll be getting from NASA for meeting milestones.
Not necessarily here. The key word is if Boeing were to start a new government contract to build a new rocket system, it would require massives amounts of paperwork, just like any government welfare program. Or about one sheet of paper for every $100 that you recieve. Think about it. Think college Pell grants and anything else you have recieved from the government, including tax refund checks.
$1,000,000 of government money usually translates into a nice stack of about 10,000 sheets of paper by the time it is all said and done. $1 B is usually a semi-trailer worth of paper. I am not kidding. Electronic documents merely add to the mess, not reduce it. The Shuttle booster engines have a paperwork trail on each mission that is heavier than the actual boosters themselves, and that isn't even the original engineering paperwork that happened before they were designed in the first place.
If Boeing decided to go the route of SpaceX and decide "if we build it, customers will come", the paperwork would be decidedly less, as they would only have to report directly to the board of directors of the company. The problem there is that the culture of Boeing may not be used to designing and building in an extreme design fashion and not be able to untrain its engineers to not need so much paperwork or bureaucracy.
Of course, that allows windows of opportunity for companies like SpaceX to come in that somehow solve the problem. BTW, Mr. Musk did hire some former Boeing engineers who signed on specifically because they didn't have to answer to so much red tape and that decisions about how and when to proceed could happen on the factory floor by the company owner, not in some congressional hearing that takes a week to decide what flavor of pizza they should be ordering for their staff members while the hearings take place.
That is precisely why SpaceX can do it so much cheaper.
Well, the Apollo CM held only three people and they also had the benefit of stretching out in the LEM for much of the trip, which had room to stand fully upright.
The Apollo CM had a diameter at the base of 3.9 meters and according to wikipedia an interior volume of either 5.9 or 6.2 m^3. I couldn't find any interior volume estimates for the Dragon, but presumably it will have the same 3.6 m fairing diameter as the Falcon 9, but of course is taller than the CM.