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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.
"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)
Apparently the ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle and JAXA's H-II Transfer vehicle can also resupply the ISS, so the Russians do not have a lock on unmanned missions to it. I wonder when Dragon will be ready for human "payload"?
There was one accidential vacuum exposure during training and equipment testing. He survived. Turns out humans don't explode like in the movies.
According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_(spacecraft), in 4-6 years. Figure ten at the outside. I'd bet that could be accelerated to 2-3 years if NASA actually had the authority to tender a cash contract up front to get it flying next in two years with a moderate safety margin.
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.
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.
There was a suicide which took place in a ground-based vacuum chamber. It wasn't pretty and rarely gets talked about... in part because of the circumstances involved. Just like several astronauts who died for mundane causes like a plane crash or auto accident are not listed on the space memorial wall.... even if those deaths happened during "training". Perhaps that may change some day.
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.
That scene was written by Arthur C Clarke directly from NASA research, ACC had a lot of friends inside NASA, and wrote several stories based on stuff he got "from the horse's mouth". Not leaked - it was all public knowledge. But he got to talk to the researchers not just read the press releases and papers.
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.
"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.
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
Tell me when realistic human rating standards ever get established for spaceflight in America. At the moment, the only standard that I'm aware of is if the NASA administrator or one of his deputies simply declares that a spacecraft meets "man-rating" because that is what it was designed to do.
NASA Standard NPR 8705.2B “Human-Rating. Requirements for Space Systems.”
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!