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NASA to Announce New Commercial Space Partner
NewScientist is reporting that NASA has kicked their previous space partner, Rocketplane Kistler, to the curb and is in search of a new commercial space partner. The new partnership will try to develop a new shuttle to service the International Space Station. "The GAO's decision clears the way for NASA to select a new COTS partner in addition to SpaceX, whose partnership with NASA continues. Only $32 million was paid to Rocketplane Kistler, leaving $175 million for new partnerships."
They just kicked them to the curb? In my day they would have kicked them to the moon. Yes, Alice, to the moooooon.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And yes, statistically speaking, I probably am older than you.
So what is it that the company who got kicked out did? The link didnt work for me:( It seems though that if they just burned through $30M, maybe they should be held accountable for paying some of it back... I'm not 100% sure how things work in the states (I'm Canadian Eh), but shouldnt there be some form of performance rendered from this "partner", or is it just NASA sending money in this company's direction hoping from some sort of result? Maybe there should be more nerds doing open-source aerospace....or it could be a new field for google to go into ;)
Statements like "kicked to the curb" are not factual and just inflamatory. The editors should prevent slashdot from becoming a tabloid and adding the writers comments to the news. This doesnt say what Kistler did wrong, if anything, and why. It just presents kistler in a bad light.... we dont know why the person who submitted the article doesnt like Kistler?
I clicked and got a message that it would not forward me to an advertisement from pheedo.com. This news article seems to be an advertisement, perhaps PPC.
What a coincidence, I'm in search of a new "Space partner" as well. 399/Protoss Templar/Aiur here. I know it's cheesy but I can't wait for starcraft 2
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What did Rocketplane Kistler come up with before this breakup?
where's the link and the FA?
Why in the world does NASA contract out the construction of its vehicles to begin with??!
When there is a world where there is a fluid market of space agencies and vehicle makers, then yeah, let the free market decide. Until then though, let's let the governments "waste" their money by developing them themselves, ok?
I'm trying to decide which is worse. The "article" is a page complaining "We were unable to forward you to the advertisement you clicked on.", or the fact that most of the people posting comments seem blissfully unaware of that fact.
Maybe not
Article link not working at the moment
Does the story link to an add click link? using FF with noscript add on, I get this:
We were unable to forward you to the advertisement you clicked on.
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Just want to put that out there.
RocketPlane : http://www.rocketplane.com/
/. worthy : http://www.rocketplane.com/20070108_01.htm
News Worthy : http://www.rocketplane.com/press/070329%20-%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20-%20RpK%20&%20MSFC%20Sign%20SAA%20070329.pdf
http://www.rocketplane.com/press/070213%20-%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20-%20RpK%20Meets%20NASA%20Milestone%20Ahead%20of%20Schedule%200207.pdf
And
I'm thoroughly offended... Such abuse of language in such an upstanding and influential forum. What is Slashdot coming to?
The "etc." these days is pretty small. There's Boeing, Lockheed, and then a handful of more specialized companies. And they don't operate on a very free-market basis with government contracts either: Generally the government provides up-front money to pay for development and so on, rather than just buying a product. The reason is that it costs too much to develop a product that the government might or might not buy, so nobody would do it. So you don't have privately-developed products, and therefore don't have a market.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I have NewScientist in my slashboxes and went to the original. I imagine that others have done the same - at least those who RTFA.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Only $32 million was paid for nothing...
This seems to me to be a failure of NASA as much as Rocketplane Kistler. The objectives appear to be entirely unrealistic. NASA wants two separate companies to develop two separate vehicles capable of unmanned resupply of the ISS in a very short time frame. Now, this is an agency that has access to literally DOZENS of off the shelf rockets. None of them will do. This is an agency with experience spanning decades, working with several companies to design DOZENS of rockets. None of them cost any less than "many billions of dollars". I'm not saying that it won't be possible to develop a new rocket on the very limited budget and very limited timetable, but NASA would never be willing to do it on these terms. Private investors looked at that and saw what we are starting now to see: a project which is conceptually flawed, and which will almost certainly unravel before a rocket flies, and which will almost certainly not result in a profit on the investment.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Barring further information, I'll put my money on the latter. What a bunch of nobs.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
NASA wants two separate companies to develop two separate vehicles capable of unmanned resupply of the ISS in a very short time frame. Now, this is an agency that has access to literally DOZENS of off the shelf rockets. None of them will do.
Actually, two of the four finalists are proposing to use those already-existing off-the-shelf rockets you mention. If I understand correctly, both Spacehab and PlanetSpace have partnered with Lockheed Martin in order to use their currently-existing rockets.
For future reference, since it wasn't mentioned in the original submission, here are the four finalists (info from rlvnews.com:
- Spacehab
- Andrews Space
- Orbital Sciences
- PlanetSpace
Just about all "commercial" launchers either had their development directly funded by the government, or are relatively minor updates of an earlier rocket in the same family that was funded by the government. A combination of missile repurposing and direct funding from NASA, the US Air Force, and the Department of Defense accounts for the Atlas, Delta, Titan, and Centaur rocket families. In many cases even the minor updates are directly funded by the government, such as through the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program.
There are a handful of completely private launch systems, like the Falcon being developed by SpaceX, but they seem to still be in the test stage.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That's a public-private partnership at best. If the U.S. government is paying $2 billion to subsidize something, there's no way you can call it "free-market".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Read too quickly and thought it said NASA was announcing a new space panther.
That would be sweet. I would totally read about that.
Rumors are the top contender is now Walmart.
"Why in the world does NASA contract out the construction of its vehicles to begin with??!"
Your question is akin to asking "Why does Fedex buy (contract out) it's airplanes from someone else, instead of building their own.
Because FedEx isn' tin that business.
Thus NASA, which isn't chartered (in the business) to make rockets purchases (contracts out) to people who do it for a living.
It's less expensive. If FedEx had to have the necessary talent and infrastructure to build their own planes it would fail to break even let alone make a profit. Why? Because when you design and make planes for yourself only your per-unit cost is far higher than when you sell them to companies who are smart enough to know better.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.