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."

Comments

Same wolf different clothing

[assemblerex]

Billion dollar companies will buy up these small entities and we'll be back to $2billion launches in no time...

Re:Same wolf different clothing

[khallow]

Billion dollar companies will buy up these small entities and we'll be back to $2billion launches in no time...

And the people that created a new launch business are amply rewarded. Existence of an exit strategy, even if it's just getting bought out by a big player trying to maintain an oligopoly, is a necessary precondition for venture capital funding.

Re:Same wolf different clothing

[Alinabi]

Only in this case the funding does not come from venture capitalists, but rather from taxpayers who will see no benefit once we are back to $2 billion launches, so your point is moot.

Re:Same wolf different clothing

[CrimsonAvenger]

Just so.

Competition would have been offering two (or three or four or more) companies contracts for each general category of hardware (launcher, capsule, etc).

Picking one company for each piece of hardware is just handing money to someone and saying "Please don't just piss this money away on hookers and coke!".

Alternatively, of course, they could have done it the way the military does it - release the specs, allow anyone to enter a design, and hold trials. The design that wins, gets the contract.

Or the way that the military handles big-ticket items - same as above, but pay for development of the two or three most promising designs, then hold the trials.

Re:LEO

[Chris Burke]

Unless you're talking about space, where it is usually associated with Low Earth Orbit.

If there were only some contextual clue as to which acronym expansion was appropriate. If only...

Re:LEO

[ElectricTurtle]

But what about times where one is talking about police operations in space? How will we get our LEOs into LEO?

That was the Falcon 1

[mosb1000]

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.

Re:That was the Falcon 1

[camperdave]

Um... The Falcon 9 is being assembled at Cape Canaveral right now, in preparation for it's first launch in early March. It was designed as a crew lift vehicle from the outset, so it is "man-rated".

Re:That was the Falcon 1

[mosb1000]

Man-rated means that NASA has certified it's use it to launch people into space. Space X is developing the dragon module to launch crews and cargoes into space with the F9, but that doesn't make the rocket Man-rated. I think it's understandable that NASA has chosen the Atlas V over the Falcon 9, given that the Atlas V has been launched 19 times with a near-perfect success rate.

Re:That was the Falcon 1

[CrimsonAvenger]

I think it's understandable that NASA has chosen the Atlas V over the Falcon 9, given that the Atlas V has been launched 19 times with a near-perfect success rate.

It should be noted, for reference, that Shuttle had flown 24 times with a perfect record before Challenger failed.

It should also be noted that Shuttle carried crews on each of those launches, unlike Atlas V.

Re:That was the Falcon 1

[Anonymous Coward]

It should also be noted that if you sum together the shuttle and all winged-body vehicles used since the 60s, the numbers shows that its more dangerous to fly these things, than to do a 3 year combat sortie in Europe during world war 2 (KIA ratio 1.4 % , vs. Shuttle etc 1.56 %)

But I rather sit on top of a rocket with a capsule than some freakish winged thingy. Will be interesting to see how Virgin Galactic will cope with the first fatal failure (and the business as a whole)

Re:That was the Falcon 1

[QuantumG]

NASA has made no such choice, and Falcon 9/Dragon have been built to all published NASA man-rating standards. The problem is, NASA is perfectly willing to publish more standards later if they see fit. Ya know how developing software with incomplete specifications is hard? Try rockets.

A new capsule...

[Cochonou]

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 ?

Re:A new capsule...

[natehoy]

The Orion was being developed by Lockheed-Martin, but Boeing already has an Orion-like capsule design. So this may be more of a lateral move from one company to another than a setback.

I'm sure there's some good reason for moving from L-M to Boeing for that work. Not sure exactly what it would be, but I'm certain there's a valid reason. If only we could guess...

On a completely unrelated historical side note, did you know that Boeing moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago in 2001? In an amazing coincidence, I think some major figure in the US political system lives in Chicago, doesn't he? Isn't that terribly interesting, if completely coincidental and off-topic?

Re:A new capsule...

[rijrunner]

    Umm. The Augustine Commission report clearly states that Orion is overdesigned and should be scaled back and that EELV-derivatives would significantly reduce the costs of development, they just felt it may have been too late for that. That part was a judgement call on whether you wanted to keep funding or bite the bullet. The Boeing capsule listed is the Orion scaled properly to existing vehicles. It isn't like we have a bunch of Orion capsules sitting around and going to get thrown away. They are years away from bending hardware. There is also the matter that Constellation and how Griffin handled it was the real fly in the ointment. The capsule/EELV was the design that was originally approved for the ELV program under O'Keefe and that was trashed by Griffin and they had to restart from scratch. They have several years worth of design already done for the exact configuration awarded this contract.

    Even if the capsule set the design back a year, so what? The full scale Orion on Ares would not be flying until 2016, or so. By designing to existing launchers, we can eliminate the delays caused by concurrently designing a launch vehicle and capsule. If it takes 4 years to design a capsule, it'll still fly long before NASA managed to launch Ares and Orion.

    When you consider the differences in scale, you are not talking a significant change. The aerodynamic modeling is easily scaled, the command, navigation, and control aspects are also pretty much the same. The materials are pretty much the same. When you get right down to it, the setback in time is pretty minimal as they had not even finalized the launch weight on Orion yet as it had to keep adjusting for design changes in Ares. By having a sitting target to shoot at (the existing payload capabilities/requirements on EELV-derivatives are fixed), they will likely actually finish the design faster than waiting to see what those parameters on Ares would really turn out to be.

Re:A new capsule...

[camperdave]

Look at it this way: The army doesn't design tanks. They just outline what they want, and then some company says "We can make that tank. It will cost $X". Similarly, NASA should no longer be designing rockets, capsules, etc. They should just be outlining what they want and having companies bidding on it. NASA was getting too deep into the design process, and it was bogging them down.

Re:LEO

[An ominous Cow art]

Talking about space could also mean Astrology. As a Gemini, I find that this Leo favoritism to be very distasteful. :-)

Stupid approach, typical of bloated government

[bradley13]

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...

Re:Stupid approach, typical of bloated government

[goodmanj]

Don't forget to add "if you break our cargo, you pay for it."

If you want space transport to work like a trucking business, you should pay for it the way you pay a trucking business.

If you want space transport to work like a bottomless money black hole, you should fund it like a bottomless money black hole.

You get what you pay for, and what you get depends on *how* you pay.

Re:LEO

[An ominous Cow art]

As a Gemini, I find that this Leo favoritism to be very distasteful.

Yeah, me talks da gud english...

SpaceX already has NASA contracts

[pavon]

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.

Yarrrr

[StikyPad]

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.

Peter Pan. I'm captain of the Dream Catcher.

[RevWaldo]

- 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.

Re:Peter Pan. I'm captain of the Dream Catcher.

[Chris Burke]

Lol, that was perfect. Except google tells me that a cowznofski is actually a unit of time! Maybe that should have been in twelve potrzebies.

Blue Origin?

[tomhath]

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?