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NASA Funded Commercial Space Projects Heating Up
coondoggie writes "NASA's role as commercial space entrepreneur is going well and the four companies it is funding to build future spacecraft that could take astronauts to and from the International Space Station and other destinations are moving forward. That was the chief observation in a status report the space agency issued this week entitled 'NASA's return on investment report.' You may recall that in April NASA split $270 million between Boeing ($92 million), Space Exploration Technologies (Space X--$75 million), Sierra Nevada ($80 million) and Blue Origin ($22 million) to continue development of commercial rockets and spacecraft capable of safely flying astronauts into orbit and to the International Space Station." Gubers33 pointed out another article about NASA's upcoming plans for Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon.
im pretty sure pretty much all rockets have failures early in their development careers. spacex mitigated that somewhat with having its failures on its smaller falcon 1 rocket, and once they ironed out the issues, built its larger more expensive falcon 9, which is 2 for 2 successes so far. so quit your anonymous coward bitching. spacex are putting more shit in space for less cost than the fucking chinese for fucks sake.
Consider a hypothetical moon colony -
Much as a I'd like space to be nice and peaceful, that doesn't seem to be in our natures right now - and just shifting the theater of conflict to space would put the well-funded military R&D pipelines on track to developing numerous technologies that we were going to need anyways - but they'd do it faster than if the goal was peaceful colonization, since it's now a matter of "national pride".
International joint ventures, particularly between governments, is a foolish and expensive thing unless the point is explicitly to improve diplomatic relations. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was precisely that, where the whole point of the mission was to increase the exchange of information between two nations that had spaceflight capabilities and learn how to help one another out if there was a reason for helping one another out.
Congressmen, the people who make the appropriations for NASA budgets, don't have many constituents in places like the UK, France, or Germany. Simply put, they don't care about international commitments as long as they can keep getting re-elected. A choice between killing their favorite pork project vs. some international space mission to Mars? The choice should be patently obvious.
BTW, Congress doesn't like to give up their political power all that much. Yes, they could make a long-term appropriation over multiple years, but they also like to micro-manage a whole lot, perhaps a bit too much. Why else is the SLS being called the "Senate Launch System" where not just the broad goals but the individual components and even the structural design are being designed by the wonderful aerospace engineers on Capitol Hill in the "upper chamber" of Congress? Even crazy details like the particular kinds of metal and the thickness of that metal in the engines to be used are even going to be prescribed by law. By the time funding is finalized, the contractors won't have to do anything but production work because the Senate will have designed the monster in such detail that they won't have to.