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.

Comments

Go private enterprise!

[Animats]

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.

SpaceX Company Update is also online

[Narmacil]

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)

Re:The whole space program is private anyway

[stiggle]

NASA are the admin, everything else is sub-contracted out...

Engineers are sub-contactors from the likes of SAIC ( http://www.saic.com/ ) & Booz Allen Hamilton ( http://www.boozallen.com/ ) aswell as the manufacturers (Boeing, ATK, Lockheed Martin, etc).
Launches are handled by ULA ( United Launch Alliance - http://www.ulalaunch.com/ )
In-space operations are handled by USA (United Space Alliance - www.unitedspacealliance.com/ )

Both ULA & USA are joint operations of Boeing & Lockheed Martin.

So yes, Boeing, et al. did handle all that :-)

Private industry is not magic

[DragonHawk]

"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.