Slashdot Mirror
NASA Charters Flights Aboard Virgin's SpaceShipTwo
Zothecula writes "Although Virgin Galactic is generally known as a space tourism company, it sees research experiments as a future mission segment and significant business opportunity. To this end, the company has signed a contract with NASA to provide up to three charter flights on its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane. The deal follows the curtain closing on the Space Shuttle program earlier this year and is part of NASA's Flight Opportunities Program, which is charged with providing reduced-gravity environments for research experiments while encouraging the emerging commercial space industry."
In related news, a 68,000-sq. ft. facility has opened in California that will assist in the assembly of SpaceShipTwo spaceplanes.
The military contracts jobs out all the time (think Halliburton). The results are mixed at best. This one feels more likely to be fair, cheaper, and successful, but I still have my doubts. As much heat as NASA catches for the flaws in its designs, space travel is VERY hard. I'm not sure Virgin can do it that much better.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
NASA chartered flights to low earth orbit. NASA built a spacecraft that's going to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Oh, and another one that's going closest to the sun. And robots to scoot around Mars for years at a time. And a telescope (Kepler) that's found hundreds of exoplanets already. Just for starters.
If you want a bigger better NASA then call your congresspeople and support their budget.
This will be the moment we remember. NASA having to charter flights to space, from a Private Company.
NASA routinely buys flights to space from private companies; who do you think launches all those Mars rovers? There's no good reason why they shouldn't do the same for manned flights.
In today's news, the nation which sent a man to the moon, but can no longer put a man into orbit, is buying tickets on stunt-planes to recreate the Mercury suborbital missions.
Apparently, we're back in 1961. 50 years of "progress".
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
that's not even pocket change for NASA... it's like the lint clinging to pocket change.
NASA employed an army of some 35,000 people to operate the space shuttle. Assuming each worker was paid $60,000 average, and another $40,000 in health benefits, pension, etc (i'm being WAAY conservative here), that amounts to...... well I donno maths but its in the umpteen billions. No wonder Burt Rutan called NASA "a job program, first and foremost".
Contrast that with SpaceX, which employs a few hundred people to run their Falcon program. Now you see why they can do things so much cheaper.
Sigh.
Okay, first of all, NASA has been using commercial companies to construct it's rockets for a long time now. The Space Shuttle? Yeah, that was made by Boeing and Lockheed Martin (among others), so it's not like corporations haven't been making basically everything we've put into space already. Same with the Saturn V and I presume most if not all other launch vehicles. They've just been costing us even more because of the combination of government and corporate incompetence (basically, anytime the government contracts out part of it's work to corporations like NASA did, you end up with overpriced and delayed projects. As proof: I offer the entire defense department and it's massive swollen budget. And NASA itself, in part.)
A private company that does everything on it's own is likely to be far (far far) more efficient. Virgin Galactic has already shown this. It's succeed or die for them, while for Boeing (for instance), failure just means more money and a delay. I haven't a clue how you arrived at the conclusion you did. If anything, this makes us less dependent on an individual company. If Virgin fails, we go somewhere else. Free market, bitch. It wasn't a free market before.
Oh, and BTW the other option on the table was to go to the Russians. I'll take an American company long before the Russian government. In a competition of greed and corruption, Russia won about 50 years ago.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
It is good news Private corporations are active in space.
First and foremost- this makes the government somewhat accountable. If the government(s) has(have) a monopoly on space they can get away with activities we may not want them to.
As the technology evolves we will require both public and private activity (new technologies often require the ingenuity of the private sector built on the foundations of the public sector). Ironically- the roles seem reversed here- but I suspect the same will hold true.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Did you warn them about WWII?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
NASA chartered flights to low earth orbit.
And in this case, they didn't even do that; they just chartered ballistic zero-G flights. These SS2 flights replace/supplement the vomit comet, not any of NASA's actual space flight. The fact that the Shuttle was recently retired has nothing to do with this deal at all, and was just a red-herring/troll that should have been cut from the summary.
Amen. NASA doesn't build its own trucks either. This just isn't a big deal.
While they may be doing things that normally would take place on the KC-135 (aka the "Vomit Comet") that NASA has operated in the past, it mainly is being used to replace the sounding rocket research.... which often went to the same altitudes which SS2 is expected to be reaching.
The use of SS2 offers a number of advantages, most significant is that it is simply cheaper than sounding rockets, and furthermore the principle investigator (or somebody working for the investigator) can even ride along with the experiments being used. The acceleration stress loads are also less with SS2, and in terms of continuous zero-g time the duration is considerably longer than it is on something like the KC-135 or the replacement plane which NASA is using.
I agree that the Shuttle was a red-herring, as NASA does and has done other kinds of research on other platforms even when the Space Shuttle was running.
The one area this might have a little bit of influence over is to give some of the newer members of the NASA astronaut corps their "astronaut wings" a bit earlier than they would otherwise get them (at least the gold vs. silver wings) and give something for astronauts to actually work for instead of sitting in an office in Houston. I can certainly envision how a couple hundred thousand dollars being dumped on an astronaut candidate doing research on something like SS2 first for NASA management to figure out if they have the "right stuff" before sending them on a critical assignment like going to a near-Earth asteroid. For the price of a typical Shuttle mission (depending on how you measure that price), you could send hundreds of astronauts into real space situations with real scientific experiments. That sounds like a good thing to me.
We are so sorry. Does Tentacle fight work better?
Seriously, we should have started doing this in the 1950's.
We have been. Thanks for noticing.
Support SETI@home