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NASA Picks 5 Firms To Work On LEO Tech
Gary W. Longsine writes "Five contracts have been awarded by NASA today, to firms exploring different aspects of the effort to develop a private launch industry for people to low earth orbit. Today's winners include: Sierra Nevada Corp (aka 'SpaceDev') for the Dream Chaser; Boeing in cooperation with Bigelow on a capsule design; United Launch Alliance (Boeing and Lockheed Martin) to explore safety issues related to upgrading Atlas and Delta rockets to human flight safety standards; Blue Origin to build a launch escape system; and Paragon Space Development Corp for 'air vitalization' (aka life support).
Will the forecast $6 Billion allocation over five years be enough to inspire private industry to develop not one, but two human rated launch systems (a capsule, and the lifting body Dream Chaser)? NASA clearly wants competition in the private market, so they seek more than one vendor."
Billion dollar companies will buy up these small entities and we'll be back to $2billion launches in no time...
Dear editors, LEO is usually associated with Law Enforcement Organization
I first read the Headline, my brain told me "LEGO TECH", and I was momentarily excited.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You mean Falcon 1. Right now Space X is working on the Falcon 9 for launch this year. They are working with much smaller $ amounts than these 5 companies, but they're not working on human launches either.
I agree that it would be need to see a man-rated version of the F9, but I think NASA wants to focus on rockets that are available now rather than rockets that aren't yet available.
There are parts of this plan that really sound fishy to me. But of course, we do not have yet the full information about it.
Charles Boden says they are taking the "flexible path" drafted in the Augustine Report and not by any stretch bailing out of human spaceflight. Yet, they are cancelling the whole Constellation Project, consisting in the launchers (Ares I and V) and the capsule (Orion), while the Augustine panel had specifically kept the Orion capsule in all the flexible path options. Actually, they thought any redesign of the capsule would cause an unwanted setback of more than a year.
So now, we are redesigning again a capsule from scratch. I do not see how this implementation of the "flexible path" approach is going to give us any time (or money) benefits regarding the capsule. Are we supposed to put the astronauts directly on the top of the rockets ?
Study this, investigate that, make sure there is a contractor in every important Congressional district. Sick.
They ought to just pay for performance: We need X tons put into orbit no later than date Y, and we'll pay you this much to do it. Pick a payment that is half of what they are going to spend the "big government" way, and the contractors will still make a whopping profit.
Of course, that wouldn't put pork in the right pockets...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
They were already given a contract to develop the Falcon and Dragon for use with delivering cargo to the ISS. See this (now out of date) wikipedia entry on NASA's COTS program for more information.
Right now the Delta and Atlas rocket are the closest thing we have to a man-rated rocket after the shuttle retires, so it only makes sense that NASA would look into this route. NASA is very excited about what SpaceX is doing and once the Falcon 9 proves itself with unmanned cargo, I have no doubt that they will look into getting it man-rated.
Nasty.
Serious. Just because you have an industry doesn't mean you'll have competition. Especially because it's going to be a small one with few players. You say to all these companies that you have to make all the items conform to what NASA considers a standard spec. Then NASA can interchange parts (and thus the suppliers) as budget calls for. Then you will have a competition, then you can build and industry.
As it stands now, you give one a guy a carte blache cheque, then your stuck with them for life because you are stuck with their shit.
Look at China and how they are doing their high speed rails, they had all competitors build prototypes and made sure that all of their stuff was integrated. In the future, they can just kick out the current provider and get someone cheaper.
For some reason I misread "private" as "pirate". Which got me thinking.. How long do we have until there are Space Pirates?
It may sound far-fetched, but once the value of payload(s) exceeds the cost of launch by some degree, I believe it's inevitable that we'll see criminal involvement. Treaties against the weaponization of space, slow response times, and the ability to drop off both crew and payloads virtually anywhere in the world all make space piracy a potentially lucrative enterprise. It's debatable whether any existing laws would even provide for the prosecution of such activity. Maybe John Carmack is really the next Blackbeard!
Whoever the first organization is, and I'm not condoning or trivializing the potential for wanton death and destruction caused by Space Piracy, but I sincerely hope they talk like pirates.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
We'll need LEOs to police LEO!
- Peter Pan. I'm captain of the Dream Catcher. Grumpy Bear here tells me you're lookin' for passage to the Aslan system?
- Yes indeed, if it's a fast ship.
- Fast ship? You've never heard of the Dream Catcher?
- Should I have?
- It's the ship that made the Emerald City Run in less than twelve cowznofskis. I've outrun Middle Kingdom dragons. Not the local luckdragons mind you, I'm talking about the big Morgoth-bred firedrakes now. She's fast enough for you old wizard.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The main difference from last year is that NASA is no longer planning to compete against those efforts, with it's own craft. That's a huge improvement from the perspective of a company considering this market, but it may not be sufficient, when it's clear that:
You can't just go to the marketplace and say, "I want to buy rides in nuclear powered DeLoreon, and I'm willing to pay standard cab fare rates in the D.C. Metro Area, oh, and by the way, half of them should be rides in nuclear powered Porche, which I'll buy from your competition, instead of from you, oh, and I only want three rides per year," and expect that to actually happen.
However, everybody involved might be banking on the notion that NASA has now backed themselves into a corner. They won't have an option other than to buy from the commercial market, once Ares I and Orion are shut down. NASA will be forced to pay "market rates" for these launch services. If NASA doesn't fund the launcher development, and only buys 1 or 2 flights per year from each vendor, the per-flight market rate is going to be about a billion bucks. Don't like the price? We'll give you a discount, if you buy 30 flights per year so we can achieve economies of scale.
The other potential up-side is that private launch firms probably have some market opportunity to sell to other countries which would like to have improved access to the ISS, or other crewed access to space, but which have a reluctance to fund their own system development. Japan (HOPE-X, and ESA (Hermes) are obvious candidates, having previously tried to build a crewed spacecraft, but potentially other nations such as India, which might elect to direct their R&D budgets toward in-space activities, rather than reproducing the ability to get there).
It also appears that NASA may be transferring the technology from Orion to a private company. This idea was apparently floated under the name Orion Lite, with the idea being a quicker access to the ISS by reducing the capsule's life support requirements to a few days (down from a few weeks).
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It looks like all of those competing for this are "perch it on top of a rocket" systems, and the "Dream Chaser" team have already switched rockets at least once in their design history. It's likely that if Falcon lives up to its potential for improved reliability, it could enter this market later, as the lifter for one of the other systems.
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My question is, since the Dream Chaser seems to be designed for that same niche, are they supporting both so they can have their pick of crew vehicles in case one doesn't pan out, or is there another reason?
These contracts were awarded as part of NASA's CCDev program. The purpose is to stimulate the market, and can be thought of more as research grant than being paid to deliver a product. The amounts awarded will give the companies enough money to fully flush out their design and begin prototyping. The idea is that as they get closer to completion NASA will pick the best one to fully fund for actual production and use.
Toward the end of Administrator Bolden's presentation at the National Press Club (0:48:40) he mentioned that "game changing technology enables us to go to Mars in days, not months". Is this grounded in any reasonable expectation of propulsion development over even the next several decades?
Blue Origin: A normally secretive team established by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos...
How much does NASA have to send into orbit before they get free shipping?
It's worth noting that NASA is only able to award $50 million this year due to interference by Congress. They had initially wanted $150M in commercial seed funding, but most of this was diverted by Congress -- in particularly Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Al) -- towards the soon-to-be-cancelled Constellation project.
The cost of the payloads already exceed the launch cost, by rather a lot. That's why people are willing to pay $10,000 to get a pound of stuff into orbit. The real trick is getting the cost of a pound to orbit down, and down substantially. That way Space Pirates can afford to get there, too.
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Some thoughts after watching the press conference which announced the winners and reading up about the companies:
Sierra Nevada ($20 million): Their in-progress Dream Chaser reusable lifting-body spacecraft is really interesting, derived from NASA's HL-20 personnel launch system tested in the early 90s. It's a pretty well-understood design, with nice features like reusability, being able to land, low operations costs, and the capability to launch on a medium-lift rocket.
Boeing ($18 million): For developing a capsule with Bigelow Aerospace to launch on a variety of existing rockets. During the press conference they mentioned that they're not only interested in delivering crew to both the ISS, but also the forthcoming market of Bigelow Aerospace's private space stations. The design will probably benefit from some of the work Boeing did 5 years ago for their Constellation/Orion proposal.
United Launch Alliance ($6.7 million): for an emergency detection system (needed for human-rating their existing rockets). Many of the proposals are planning on using the ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, so this is an important step towards man-rating them. The Atlas V is already designed with these sorts of emergency detection systems in mind, although it might be trickier for the Delta IV.
Blue Origin ($3.7 million): for developing a novel 'pusher' launch escape system and testing a crew module made of composite materials. The launch escape system is particularly interesting, as that's the main component which still needs to be developed for most of the other proposals. If Blue Origin makes a pusher-style system which can be sold to the manufacturers of other capsules, that could help bring those spacecraft online faster, and also give Blue Origin experience for making their own designs better. A SpaceX Dragon with a launch escape system built by Blue Origin would be pretty awesome.
Paragon Space Systems ($1.4 million): to build and demonstrate a turn-key air vitalization system. By turn-key, they mean a life support air vitalization system which could work on just about any spacecraft, an obvious boon.
Also, SpaceX and Orbital are still being funded for the (currently larger) contracts to deliver cargo to the ISS, which may be expanded to include crew transportation. They also stated during the press conference that other companies than these seven will likely be recipients in the future. Future contracts will be competitively awarded based on how well the companies perform (rather than which congressional district they're in, which is the status quo) and NASA's goal of achieving safe, reliable, and cost-effective access to orbit.
For the curious, I wrote up a summary of the press conference here.
Well, it might be the case that some of the funding will come from private companies. I think that's the intent, anyway. NASA seems to have $6 Billion over five years allocated to development of commercial crew transport system(s?). That's half of what has already been spent on Constellation (in four years, plus termination penalties). Presumably they expect private companies to contribute the remaining development investment, in exchange for NASA getting out of the market (and thus becoming a guaranteed buyer, of a sort.)
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What's this 'competition' you speak of?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The fact that these new contracts have been awarded so quickly shows that these decisions were made before the Augustine report was finalized. The new plan bears no relationship to any of the 'options' presented by Augustine, regardless of how Bolden chooses to label it. The only contribution of the Augustine Report was to codify the mantra that the 'program of record' would cost more than some arbitrarily selected historical estimate. The new plan was invented within the administration to distribute the new contracts to the new political favorites of the new administration.
For cryin out loud, how did they not get in the game? They seems to be in every other corner of the government market! Don't take this as a whine as to why NG isn't in the game, I for one am glad that they aren't. I would much rather see more smaller companies in there working for "the greater good" as it were, than the big boys. But, the big boys have some good technology that they bring to the table, but they also bring a hefty price tag and probably some nasty rules too.
When the US government becomes reliant on these (or other) companies for access to space will they become "to big to fail"? If they go broke can I expect another bailout?
It said that the CONSTELLATION PROJECT is dead. That is all. It said that NASA was not going to fund building of the orion DIRECTLY. And as to either Ares, NONE OF THE COMPANIES INVOLVED WOULD WANT TO DO THOSE. Heck, even ATK COULD fund it themselves and build it, and capture human contracts RIGHT AWAY. Yet, they will not. The reason? Because it is cheaper to fly spaceX, even Russian, then Ares.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.