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SpaceX Given Approval For ISS Mission
An anonymous reader sends this snippet from an AFP report:
"California-based rocket maker SpaceX said that it will make a test flight in late November to the International Space Station, now that NASA has retired its space shuttle program. 'SpaceX has been hard at work preparing for our next flight — a mission designed to demonstrate that a privately-developed space transportation system can deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station (ISS),' the company, also called Space Exploration Technologies, said in a statement. The mission is the second to be carried out by SpaceX, one of a handful of firms competing to make a spaceship to replace the now-defunct US shuttle, which had been used to carry supplies and equipment to the orbiting outpost. 'NASA has given us a November 30, 2011 launch date, which should be followed nine days later by Dragon berthing at the ISS,' the company said."
SpaceX has an information sheet for the Dragon capsule, as well as an interesting post about the costs involved in their launches.
As far as I know, NASA doesn't have a factory. Everything they used was made by the likes of Boeing, Lockheed and others. All NASA added was 50 layers of management, to ensure that everything was behind schedule and over budget.
Space-X may be the future of space travel. They designed that thing. It's not a NASA design, and it didn't go through NASA's process of spreading everything out among contractors spread across the US.
I remember they pushed them up when the Shuttle retirement was announced.
"It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract." - Alan Shepard (supposedly, it's often quoted but I haven't seen a definitive source)
SpaceX Update
This goes more into what's been going on running up to the launch, and has some great pictures of the rocket/capsule/facility in hawthorne (I took one of them :P)
But how much extra will you spend for say a 2% points reduction in risk? Let us assume a crew of 5 astronauts. Will you spend 50 million USD extra per launch for that? This means that you are spending 10 million USD to remove a 2% of an astronaut dying. Or on average 500 million USD to save an astronaut.
Of course my numbers are pulled out of my a** and there are also other costs of mission failure. And we don't even know if NASA can provide better safety. But the point is that NASA is spending a disproportionate amount of money on safety. Money that could have saved a very large number of people if invested in improving safety/health in other areas.
I guaran-god-damned-tee that 2% risk reduction would be easy if we were not shoving 60+ % into contractors pockets to reelect senator dickfuck, not like we have a choice about it, our system is setup to only provide the opinion to our representatives, who do whatever the hell they feel like and say we voted for it.
Thats how a country votes in one guy, but the dumb fuck outdated points system votes in whoever the state wants in, weather it be a unqualified two faced, snaked tongued community member, or a fucking retard drunk coke head.
Sending NASA back to the drawing boards to develop breakthrough technologies for deep space exploration is what it should do, let private enterprise do what has already been proven. Breaking the power of the aero-industrial complex with their legions of lobbyists and congressmen in their pockets took guts to do. This is a giant leap in the right direction.
Ironic that people (used to?) claim that Obama was a socialist. Sure he spent taxpayer money to save the auto industry. Now it is being paid back although admittedly projections are that the government will lose 1.5 Billion upfront. Still, considering how many Millions of jobs were directly and indirectly (suppliers, communities) saved, that $1.5 Billion was well spent. And that's not even considering the taxes these now highly profitable enterprises (record sales and growth) are returning to the treasury and will be doing so (hopefully) for many years to come.
It's an old old joke that a lot of the astronauts always told, and probably still do.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Since the cost of almost any NASA project can't be nailed down to within an order of magnitude anyway, pulling numbers out of your a** may be about as accurate as anything else you might find in any formal report that even comes from the GPO. I've seen the cost of a shuttle mission anywhere from about $50 million to about $5 billion (usually somewhere in between those numbers) depending on how you make the calculations... just to give an example. The costs for the ISS are in a similar range and even more extreme.
Since it is all other people's money, the amount NASA spends on extra safety is irrelevant. Keep in mind that during the Apollo era, the mantra was "waste anything but time" in order to get people put on the Moon. And they succeeded as well for both cost and getting people there.
The difference with SpaceX is that they are indeed footing the bill and are accountable to investors on Wall Street (or rather investment groups in Silicon Valley... Wall Street is just around the corner though with an IPO) and so far all SpaceX has done are fixed cost contracts where the costs for safety must be accounted for to the penny. That kind of focuses the engineers a bit more as well as makes them very much paranoid about a NASA engineer saying they need to add an extra billion dollars worth of safety features.... when the whole project (engines, spacecraft, launch vehicle, launch pad, testing facilities and more) has been done for less than a billion dollars. NASA can't even do a power point presentation for less than $100 million.
The difference here is that SpaceX is planning on selling flights to people other than the U.S. government, and thus is interested in a reasonable price that can induce those other customers to be using their services. They are hitting up other governments (South Korea, Brazil, and a few others) who are already going to be using Bigelow Aerospace modules for their astronaut programs, so the issue here is really the bottom line: How much does the spacecraft actually cost?
Most other space contractors use a cost-plus contracting model where the "cost" is assured to be completely paid by the government where the "plus" is the guaranteed profit from the contract. That works fine for things like building an atomic bomb when nobody has ever built one before, but it stinks for things like a rocket going to space that has been done dozens of times before and the engineers do have a pretty good idea on how to build the thing.
The launches that follow are not expected to be significantly higher in price.... and SpaceX wants to keep them low out of self interest because other rocketry companies are close on their heels within a decade or so which can compete with the flights to low Earth orbit. As it is the Atlas V is being reworked to launch the CST-100 (made by Boeing) and Oribtal's Taurus II launcher is going to be flying the Cygnus spacecraft.... either of which can also compete against the Dragon/Falcon 9 spacecraft combo. That says nothing of the dozen or so smaller companies like Xcor, Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites, Blue Origin, and more that are moving onto larger spacecraft who all have eventual orbital vehicles in their long-term business plans.
These companies know full well that the number of flights for government employees and government sponsored flights is few and far between, but the U.S. government does have the money right now and the need while private groups are still trying to get themselves organized to take advantage of much lower launch costs.
and other companies trying to compete in this area.
Government contractors usually get to hide behind the same government. So when they screw up they get paid more to do it right the next time. Private contractors cannot afford the screw ups. Oh I am sure they will screw up but when your trying to make a buck in a high risk area you do your damned best to eliminate all those risks, especially ones that will end your business like losing a life.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The name "Dragon" sounds a bit ... Chinese. Our biggest rival. I don't think they'd call their spaceship "Eagle".
Except that, should they do this, they will then cost as much as or more than the Chinese they are boasting about undercutting. They are saying that they are in an open market for non-man-rated launches to orbit: they are competing with the Russian and Chinese national launch systems. If they start with "teaser" rates and then raise them, a canny buyer will take the teaser and then go elsewhere once it expires. It has already been shown that you can switch a payload from one launch system to another for not many millions, especially if the possibility was considered at design time.
A case of the free market possibly working.
I am surprised that you cannot accept that the price of something cannot fall over fifty years of development without impacting safety, The price of most tech gadgets falls over over time, while the performance rises. Plane tickets cost a fraction of what they did during the Apollo program, and are far safer. Why should not freight-to-orbit have followed a similar, albeit slower, curve?
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
And, in terms of the prosperity of the country, has this been a bad thing? Countries that have not had government-funded development have remained technically backward. Countries that have hugged their government-funded development to their government heart have had inefficient, unreliable tech industries. Th US has got the leading position it has by the very process you describe of government developing a technology to prove it was viable, then leaving it to private enterprise to make something marketable out of it, and market it.
No, it is not state-sponsored socialism: if it were, the government would hang on to their inefficient dinosaur technology companies as happened in many European countries.
Go on, kill the golden goose: destroy the US tech lead by stopping DARPA, NASA etc from doing blue sky research,
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Corporations are a creation of the state -- they're an entitlement for the corporation's owners to limited liability for their actions. There's nothing at all libertarian about them.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
which should be followed nine days later by Dragon berthing at the ISS
Dragons roost- they do not 'berth'.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
They are hitting up other governments (South Korea, Brazil, and a few others) who are already going to be using Bigelow Aerospace modules for their astronaut programs
Where do you get that information for Bigelow and the manned Brazilian space program? I used to work on the unmanned program and never heard something like that but I've been out for two or three years now. As far as I know, there's no man-rated space vehicle planned and VLS-2 was being redeveloped with Ukrainian cooperation after a VLS-1 launch pad explosion that killed a good number of engineers. There was some talk of direct cooperation with Russians but I don't know how that went. The program is probably on freeze after this year budget cuts, though.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
"Although NASA subcontracts for 'parts' and equipment, they are pretty much a top down organization, much like Apple in that respect. It doesn't mean they aren't in full control of their projects. Without NASA, we wouldn't have been the first on the Moon."
The contractors in the Apollo program did a lot of their own engineering. I remember watching a documentary about the LEM, and how Grumman had to solve a lot of challenges, flowing change requests up to NASA. Sure NASA was heavily involved, but it wasn't like all ideas originated from the top.
I don't intend this post as a knock against NASA, just your perception of them.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"Private contractors cannot afford the screw ups."
You ever work for a private contractor? I assure you, they screw up all the time. Sometimes it costs them, sometimes they dodge it. Sometimes they learn, sometimes they don't. Cronyism, nepotism, favoritism, bureaucracy, inertia, etc., all exist in the corporate world, too.
SpaceX succeeds because they're new and small and nimble and aren't tied to existing dead weight. And more power to them for it.
The main advantage of private industry is that (ideally) there are opportunities for competitors to replace the defective ones. (It doesn't always work that way in practice, due to startup costs, network effects, etc., of course.)
Aerospace has high startup costs, so it's been a tough one. Fortunately, with SpaceX, some investors with very deep pockets have decided to have a go. They've also gotten funding from the government, but so far have largely avoided getting tied into any existing pork, which is great.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Where do you get that information for Bigelow and the manned Brazilian space program?
I don't know what capsule that the Brazilian Space Agency is going to be using, but Brazil is one of the countries who have signed an agreement to lease and/or purchase one of the Bigelow modules. I presume that would involve either purchasing spaceflight from one of the existing companies or perhaps creating their own space capsule to get up to that space station on their own.
Bigelow doesn't have the list of countries on their website but there are some other stories that have come up fairly recently. This story might interest you on this issue:
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2011/07/18/aeb-president-wants-to-triple-brazilian-0space-budget/
The Brazilian space program has been in the news in a few other cases, including some work in the CTA and the AEB starting to get serious about Brazilian access to space.
First off, it IS state-sponsored socialism. We have been socialists since before Ben Franklin created the fire dept. And yes, it is socalists for us to do this R&D and then pass it off to our industries. Personally, I do not have an issue with that.
The problem is that many of these companies now send the items to china to be produced.
And as to having DAPRA, NASA, etc stopped, well, China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Al Qaeda, etc would be ecstatic about that idea.
Windbourne - moderating.
You're silly. The "safety regulations" are not hiking up the prices. Everyone wants a successful mission. Cutting corners usually means losing the mission. There's nothing particular that SpaceX is doing differently in the safety department that the big boys (Lockheed and Boeing) do differently. SpaceX just happens to waste an order of magnitude less money doing so. I guess you're nowhere near the current government contracting: they waste so much money it's crazy. Your mistaken belief is that somehow SpaceX is a "budget knockoff" type of a deal. I'm worried you're a shill for United Launch Alliance -- because they'll be getting their ass handed to them. If everything goes allright for SpaceX, in about 10 years there will be nobody else left selling launch services in the U.S. -- the customers aren't silly. At prices charged by SpaceX, for reasonably priced cargo you can get one launch failure and one successful launch for the price of one successful launch with closest competitor.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The cited article has no links to Bigelow. It's difficult to imagine it would happen in the actual political context. One of the main aims of the Brazilian space program is to develop the local industry. Buying from SpaceX or Bigelow with a technology transfer program is difficult to imagine (there are legal American restrictions too). Buying without a technology transfer program should be a no-no and will probably be seen as a useless marketing gimmick, much like the when the first Brazilian astronaut flew in a Soyuz capsule just like a space tourist.
The article cites the "Cruzeiro do Sul" proposed rocket family. "Cruzeiro do Sul" depends of the Russian cooperation. Russia (MAI) has been providing training to engineers. How well the training is going and how much time it will take until those newly trained engineers to be able to engage in a useful project remains to be seen. I do have a lot of admiration for the IAE guys but I don't have much faith in the Russian cooperation program. And now Jobim resigned from the Defense Ministery - Jobim was a major backer of the Russian cooperation agreement - my hopes aren't high.
A new Brazilian capsule is probably out of question since SARA - a proposed unnamed reentry capsule for microgravity experiments - didn't even fly yet. And I'm not sure it will, considering the current deep budget cuts.
Don't take AEB press releases seriously. AEB is the problem, not the solution. The Brazilian space program is run by two entities: INPE (satellites, space physics research) and IAE/CTA (launchers). AEB is just a useless bureaucratic overhead, created because politicians and international observers didn't like the space program being run by the Air Force (maybe out of the fear of a imaginary secret ballistic missile program).
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
So "these prices are not arbitrary, premised on capturing a dominant share of the market, or âoeteaserâ rates meant to lure in an eager market only to be increased later"; perhaps not, but you already announce that SpaceX will cover any cost overruns and will pay for them "themselves", i.e. the customer after you will pay for them.
Or by taking less profits (or more loss), like most companies do when their cost to provide a service is not aligned with what they are able to sell the service for.
This notion that if a company's costs increase for any reason, that cost will necessarily be passed on to the customer makes the illogical un-capitalistic assumption that the company is not already charging as much as they can without reducing sales such that they make less money.
In other words, it assumes that the company has not already tried to optimize their price structure in order to maximize revenue.
If costs increase such that that optimized revenue is less than the costs, then the company just takes a loss. Jacking up prices to try to cover the cost will just mean they end up taking in less revenue, for a greater loss.
So the only way it makes sense to charge one price now but increase it later if there are cost overruns is if the current price is a "teaser", and they planned to increase costs to what the market will actually bear later. If you believe them when they say that's not the case, if you believe that they think the price they are planning to charge is the price they believe will get them the most revenue (i.e. you believe their accountants and business planners know what they are doing), then no, you should not expect them to jack up prices just because they take a loss on some missions.
The enemies of Democracy are
The article I cited was just one of several that I've seen recently about the Brazilian space program. Stuff is definitely happening which is why I cited that article, but the link between Bigelow and Brazil is something I can't find straight off at the moment, but I know it exists as I've seen numerous reliable (to me) references to it over the past couple of months about it.
Bigelow signed an agreement with nearly a dozen countries to fly astronauts of those countries into space for various projects, although not all of those countries have been formally disclosed. My point in bringing this up in the first places is that Bigelow has many customers needing manned spaceflight vehicles, and SpaceX is one of those companies Bigelow is strongly looking at having as a partner to get astronauts into space. Brazil is just one of those countries that has been disclosed along the way more as an example of who is interested, as has South Korea. I also know that neither China nor India are among that list of countries as well.
Unlike NASA, however, Robert Bigelow doesn't want to be stuck with just one potential source of space travel and has openly signed agreements with Boeing as well for flight services (using their CST-100). Assuming Brazil could build something competitive to SpaceX, I don't see why they wouldn't be considered, but I also have no inside knowledge as to what Brazil may or may not be doing in space. On the other hand, I did live in São José dos Campos for about a year and am quite familiar with the CTA, although that has been quite some time ago too. When I see it in the news, it does draw my interest because I still know people who live in that city. I just don't keep bookmarks for every article that comes along about it, however.
Assuming Brazil could build something competitive to SpaceX, I don't see why they wouldn't be considered, but I also have no inside knowledge as to what Brazil may or may not be doing in space.
I don't think that Bigelow would be a serious option is that it adds no knowledge to the space program. It's a box, a fancy box, a gadget. The fundamental point of the space program is to make the country know how to build stuff. Buying previously made stuff from other countries makes no sense under this light. It could still be done, if the country is unable to launch something on it's own. The first Brazilian sat in GEO was bought from Boeing, being subcontracted from Hughes Eletronics. Hughes, as part of it's contract, subcontracted Promon, a local company, for part of the work. Testing was done by INPE itself. While the satellite itself was useful, the main objective was to produce local knowledge.
The first Brazilian made sat was also launched by an American company (Orbital) but just because a Brazilian rocket was not ready for launch and wouldn't be for years. If Bigelow offer a contract with this terms - subtracting some work for a local company - it could be a viable option. But from what I've seen in the last few years technology export licenses from the US were difficult to get (at least in the satellite area).
The Brazilian launcher is also another problem. VLS-1 is/was a solid propellent rocket. After the VLS-1 launch pad explosion (which killed a sizable chunk of the engineering team) the choice was to build a liquid propellent rocket. After this the Russians and Ukrainians were approached for technological cooperation. The cooperation program is still going but, as I said before, I don't believe it's going far. I hope I'm proved wrong on this.
The Ukrainian approach was to locally produce the Tsyklon-4 rocket (and to launch it from CLA). The Russians provided an alternative agreement for launching an Angara derived rocket. I'm not sure any of the approaches is going to produce viable results.
I did not live in SJK but I used to work for a INPE contractor (besides doing a significant amount of my academic training inside INPE itself). I have no links to the CTA besides knowing a few people.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
When you libertarians destroy the government, the anarchy you create is immediately filled by the expanding corporate power we use government to protect us from. Corporations are very libertarian, the way that chickens are very egg.
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make install -not war
No, I made that up all by myself. Your Ron Paul screeching, though, was manufactured by a Republican marketing corp. You libertarians are so scared of your own shadow that you're nothing but a cartoon of yourselves.
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make install -not war
Your assumption seems to be that the vast majority of corporations' power doesn't derive from their close cooperation with the state, and that's an assumption we don't share.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
No, it is perfectly clear that we agree that's where corporate power comes from. What you don't seem to realize is that without the government, corporations will not be limited to the power they derive from the state, but rather will consume all powers the state now keeps for itself, and the even greater remaining powers that we still manage to limit the US government to. That's corporate anarchy. That's what drowning the government in a bathtub will give us: warlords bathing in blood, calling themselves CEOs.
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make install -not war
It's not that I "don't seem to realize" it. It's that I don't agree that would be the outcome.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org