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NASA Awards Space Cargo Grant

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the fedex-unavailable-for-comment dept.

pha7boy writes "NASA has made a recent award of 171 million dollars to Orbital Sciences Corp. of Virginia in order to aid the company in developing a feasible space cargo delivery service. 'The US space agency intends to hold an open competition in the years ahead for actual space station cargo-delivery contracts, but Orbital of Dulles, VA, is one of two companies receiving financial help from NASA to develop their proposed systems. The other is Space Exploration Technologies of El Segundo, CA.'"

5 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's wrong with ATV? by PeterBrett · · Score: 4, Informative

    I thought the whole idea of an *international* space station was that we didn't have to duplicate technology efforts between the partners? ESA developed the ATV for the express purpose of resupplying the ISS, so what's this duplicate piece of tech doing?

    It's not duplicate of the ATV: AFAIK, it's intended for very urgent deliveries of small amounts critical supplies to ISS, where the ATV is designed for long-term scheduled deliveries of large amounts of day-to-day supplies.

    The two problems are similar, but complementary.

    --
    Pirate Party UK
  2. Re:1960s called they want their space program back by Protonk · · Score: 2, Informative

    Soyuz is a great piece of engineering, and so are most of the other russian rocket systems, and the Airiane 5, and the Titan, etc. They aren't what this is for. OSC does novel, small payload, cheap LEO launch vehicles. This is something that NASA is looking for, a low overhead means to get supplies into LEO without sending an eleventy billion ton, 4 stage behemoth up there.

    Oh, and do I have to mention the CONSIDERABLE advantage that comes from not dealing with the russians?

  3. SpaceX by Eukariote · · Score: 2, Informative

    One would have expected NASA to opt for SpaceX http://www.spacex.com/ had they really been serious about engaging private space efforts. SpaceX has made lots of progress http://www.spacex.com/updates.php and has a range of boosters in the works including ones for heavy payloads http://www.spacex.com/falcon9_heavy.php.

    But then, making a suboptimal choice seems to be in-line with NASA history. It is almost as if NASA is trying is doing its best to go slow and waste as much money in the process as possible.

    1. Re:SpaceX by Eukariote · · Score: 3, Informative

      OSC has proven that it can put small payloads into LEO using solid fuel boosters. For cargo delivery to the ISS, you need a system that can match orbits rather well. That means advanced avionics and more flexibility in the upper stage. For that kind of capability, SpaceX seems to be rather better positioned as their liquid-fuel engines have restart capability.

      Yes, the last Falcon I launch did not deliver payload to orbit. But the failure mode was fairly innocuous: slosh in the upper-stage fuel tank together with some positive feedback. Throughout the oscillating burn the risky parts of the system (pumps, engines, guidance) performed well enough to indicate that had the engine not run dry a bit too soon because of the propellant being centrifuged to the tank sides, the burn would have been complete and on target.

      The slosh issue looks like an easy fix: baffles in the tank and some changes to the thrust-vectoring software.

    2. Re:SpaceX by Nyeerrmm · · Score: 3, Informative

      This is the second part of the COTS contract. The first already went to SpaceX, while originally Rocketplane/Kistler won the second part, but failed to meet agreed upon fundraising milestones and lost the contract. Now they are reawarding that second part to Orbital Sciences, while maintaining SpaceX as the first COTS partner.