NASA Awards Space Cargo Grant

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.'"

Comments

Superguns

[edwardpickman]

Superguns were the coolest idea I ever heard of for low cost launching systems. The cargo would need to be able to survive a 100G excelloration but that's not a problem with raw materials and even electronics can be hardened for that force. The cost would be a fraction of current rocket technologies and they could launch far more often. It's a brilliant system so I can't believe no one has pushed it since the inventor died.

http://www.astronautix.com/lvfam/gunnched.htm

1960s called they want their space program back

[clarkkent09]

$171 million to build and demonstrate a launch system capable of delivering cargo to the international space station.

You mean they are getting paid to demonstrate something like the 42 year old Soyuz? And once we have a way of delivering something to the earth's orbit, we can get ready for the big push to fly to the moon over the next 20 years or whatever. If someone in the 1960 predicted this would be the state of the US space program 50 years later, people would laugh at how ridiculously pessimistic that prediction was.

Re:1960s called they want their space program back

[moderatorrater]

Oh, and do I have to mention the CONSIDERABLE advantage that comes from not relying on the russians? There's a (corrected) statement that I can agree with. Cooperating in our respective space programs is one of the most visible signs that the cold war is behind us (at least for now). While it may be a pain to work with them sometimes, I for one am very glad that our countries have reached the point where we do.

Re:1960s called they want their space program back

[aix tom]

Ah, but the 60s were about faster!, higher!, stronger!

Today it's about cheaper!, cheaper!, cheaper! (no matter what the cost)

Re:What's wrong with ATV?

[PeterBrett]

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.

Re:Can my dreams of being an astronaut come true?

[CRCulver]

I wasn't thinking of UPS, I was thinking of FedEx. In Michael Flynn's future history beginning with the novel Firestar , FedEx becomes a major investor in the private space industry because of the possibility of delivering something anywhere on Earth in just a couple of hours. Interesting how in real life this company hasn't yet decided to expand up into space.

This is one of many

[wasted]

NASA has several grants for COTS technologies planned in this area. The one discussed in the article is the least specific, or the "General Grant". There is another payload specific version ("Carry Grant"), the supporting technologies version ("Foster Grant"), a southwestern cuisine delivery version ("Flay Grant"), a version to improve color definition in delivery vehicle cameras ("Hue Grant"), and probably many others.

Okay, I'll stop for now.