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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."
...the Venusian drivers with beaded seat cushions.
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I'm curious as to just how low the launch cost will be, compared to other options. From the article, it seems that SpaceX is targetting 6M$ per launch, but that is surely not for the same weight a shuttle can lift.
but the Falcon 9 series gives me a hard-on. Theoretically the Falcon 9-S5 will be able to launch almost 25 tons for $78 million. That is about half the cost of a Delta IV Heavy or the Ariane 5 ES ATV (not including the ATV of course). The Falcon 9 series is exactly what the space transportation business has needed for a long time: competition! Cheap heavy lift vehicles are going to make realistic space transportation possible in the future.
There is a lot to be said for a smaller, focused, agile group of people with a unified dream. They can often do amazing things that (as evidenced by TFA) larger, more cumbersome groups who are weighed down by the inherent bureaucracy of a large group of people (and large amounts of government/corporate money) simply can not.
This sort of thing should be applauded and promoted. The American space industry has become one of "throw money at the issue until it's fixed" while the Russians, with much less money, were having pretty comparable successes for quite some time by just being more efficient and clever about their problems. We need to get back to a "less is more" approach whereby the simplest, easiest, cheapest solutions are the ones that we use, both because they work and because they allow for much greater flexibility and rapid growth for a program that is ailing, to say the least.
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.
Bill Gates is giving away Billions for medices but how much could he realy do for the hunan race if he put that money into spce explolration
Or better yet, remedial spelling lessons. Though I did have a nice dinner tonight, as made by the "hunan" race. Duck, it was. It was that or the peeking chicken.
What is it with people that think it's one or the other? Space exploration/commercialization and things like vaccines and education for kids around the globe are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I'd venture to say that a whole lot of other resources, as needed currently for defense, etc., would no longer need to be spent if some of the crustier parts of the world could be talked into providing a decent, non-Apocolyptic education for their kids. To that end, be sure to thank Bill Gates heartily for what he and his wife are doing, and just have a little patience. And, it's not like Jeff Bezos is a pauper, either.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The short answer is, SpaceX for example is building from scratch, using a small number of (we presume) highly talented individuals. Until the product is built and accepted by NASA, a high proportion of their resources are directly productive, and they can change directions very quickly in the event that a particular design won't work.
Big established companies, especially government contractors, must devote a huge proportion of their resources to satisfying internal and government regulatory/ oversight demands - this can be viewed as frictional losses and the energy required to maintain system integrity (I forget the name in biology - auto-something) - big systems have a big basal metabolism.
No doubt if Boeing were to start a new spacecraft program, the project would require more people just doing paperwork than all the employees of SpaceX's entire company - and that would be before NASA got involved! SpaceX can just work away on their prototype with minimal paperwork and justification, and can exchange future potential benefits for present pay and security with their employees. As it happens, the most capable and creative people often tend to be the biggest risk takers - bonus for SpaceX!
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Invest in the the people who already exist on the planet, you will get a much better return!
While this is true, I question how much good external investment can really do.
I think there's something very wrong when the number one way to improve a significant fraction of the world's population (my take, one third to half of the global population) is to get them an airline ticket and a work visa somewhere in the developed world. At one time, the developed world started with pretty much the same primitive culture that everyone had. But they turned that into the advanced societies that are leading the way in human endeavors like space development.
The Gates Foundation targets low lying fruit like treatable but widespread diseases and parasites because in part you don't need a functioning society to fix the problem. Education and some basic infrastructure (like water wells) can be accomplished in such an environment. But ultimately, you need a system of reasonable laws, fairly applied and a democratic process for selecting the local governments, the lawmakers, and the heads of state. I think that more than anything else is what seperates the developed world from everyone else.
Once you have this basic structure, the society can heal itself and invest in its citizens and infrastructure. But without it, you are limited to how you can invest in citizens of this society.
Here's where I'm going with this. Chosing between space development/exploitation and human investment is a false dilemma. Any society where you can measurably improve someone's life and value has social and legal infrastructure that will naturally encourage investment in those people. The places that still hurt are places external sources have limited effect on.
Space development is important for several reasons. First, it allows access to a vast amount of resources. There is far more mass, energy, and space in the Solar System than there is on Earth. Much of the technology developed in space will have tremendous value on Earth. For example, I think the science of arcologies will be greatly advanced by space settlements. Space settlements will have to recycle resources at a level of efficiency unimaginable on Earth.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
The summary is misleading. These companies won a "competition" but it was not to provide low-cost commercial transport to ISS. The competion was for NASA funding to develop a demonstration of this capability. Once a particpant actually demonstrates this capability, the project will move into the services phase where they will have the opportunity to bid on a service contract for cargo transportation services.
Both companies represent a departure from business as usual at NASA.
I don't think it is the companies themselves that represent the departure from business as usual as much as it is the whole concept behind COTS: NASA seed money (in the form of firm, fixed-price milestone awards) for commercial partners to develop a new technology. NASA isn't buying/developing anything. They are germinating a seed and nurturing it.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
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.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gave a rather fascinating talk at this year's Mars Society Conference, where he talked about his plans for the Dragon capsule, his long-term vision for private spaceflight, and his hopes of eventually helping to enable Mars colonization. An article at the Space Review, Dragon Uncloaked, gave a nice summary of the talk. Here's some interesting quotes from the article:
..
The large number of engines needed for the Falcon 9 will provide SpaceX with notable economies of scale, Musk believes. "Next year SpaceX will manufacture more rocket booster engines than the entire rest of the US industry combined," he claimed. He estimated they will manufacture 25-30 engines in 2007, when Falcon 9 tests are scheduled to begin, growing to 40-50 engines in 2008.
At the same time, Musk is dismissive of some of the proposed applications that could take advantage of such a powerful rocket. "I don't believe in the mining of stuff in space. The transportation costs are so horrendously high that I don't think there's anything... if there were packages of purified crack cocaine in orbit right now, I'm not sure it would be financially viable to go and retrieve them," he said, to gales of laughter from the audience.
He was similarly dismissive of another popular proposed application, space solar power. "I know a lot about solar power," he said, "and trust me, space solar power is not a good option."
So what might be the "killer app" for space? Musk has an unconventional answer. "I think there's some number of people in the US and other countries that would pay to move to Mars," he claimed. "They would sell everything that they've got, and they would move to Mars." If the cost of a one-way journey to Mars could be lowered to the "single-digit millions" of dollars, he said, "I think enough people would pay that to actually make the business plan quite viable. I think thousands of people a year would pay that." Needless to say, that got a loud round of applause from the Mars Society conference attendees.
That concept might seem way of out left field for an industry that is only now accepting space tourism as a realistic market, but it also fits into Musk's personal philosophy. Early in his presentation he spoke of the importance of becoming a multiplanet species, calling it "one of the most important things we could possibly aspire to". "I think it's really incumbent upon us to extend life beyond Earth," he said. "Basically, to help make that happen is why I started SpaceX."
and I didn't see a big screen tv or an xbox 360! No wonder it's so cheap!
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
Think of what $500 million US could do for the shrinking portion devote to the NASA science budget; which, by the way, has helped to fund the current and next generations of astronomy and astrophysics researchers in the US.
You should really think in longer terms. Investing that money now in lowering transportation costs will allow us to perform much more space science with the same money in the future.
Second, a glance at the official purpose of NASA (as described in the amended act that established NASA) reveals that NASA oversees nonmilitary US activity in space, that it should "seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space", and then as the first of the activities that NASA should engage (which follow these previous declarations) "The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space."
In other words, science isn't the main priority at NASA nor IMHO should it be. So claiming that NASA is "stealing from science" and is a "feeder for the aerospace business' policy" ignores that encouraging "commercial use" of space is a higher priority and that the recent moves can be rationalized as doing just that. I'm not saying they actually are fulfilling their purpose, just that it's not enough to criticize a NASA move by saying that it takes away from space science.
IMHO, the current manned missions do little to support NASA primary purposes. It's just salt in the wounds that they are funded with money taken from the space science budget. Nor is NASA addressing significant problems with the proposed missions. For example, we have no idea what the health consequences are to extended living in Martian and Lunar gravity (0.4 and 0.16 gees respectively). Assuming the Ares launch vehicles remain unchanged, we don't have backup vehicles in case these fail. If the Ares V vehicle is grounded for a couple of years of NASA soul-searching (ie, NASA conducts an accident investigation), then all programs that depend on this launcher are halted for a similar length of time. This will generate huge expenses each time it happens. We aren't studying the Moon very well given the ambition to colonize the Moon.
Finally, given the importance of space science missions to future US commercial activity in space, it's not clear to me why these missions have been scaled back or delayed. It will ultimately just add to the cost of the missions and thwart one of the prime objectives of NASA.
Further, it's not clear why the Bush administration expects that future presidencies will respect these programs. I expect that the next president will complete change course on NASA.