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Commercial Space: Spirit of Apollo Or Spirit of Solyndra?
MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Chaikin, the author of A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, believes that the spirit of Apollo no longer resides at NASA, but rather in the nascent commercial space companies such as SpaceX. This assessment is disputed by many, who see in the Obama administration program of government subsidies for commercial space the spirit of Solyndra."
The space shuttle cost between a billion, and half a billion dollars per launch.
Of that, well under a percent was the fuel.
A Falcon 9 launch retails at $50m, and of that perhaps .4% is fuel. (300 tons of propellant at $1/Kg, which is a high estimate)
There are plans to make portions of the falcon reusable.
There is _CONSIDERABLE_ room for launch cost reduction, if they suceed.
Considering that Deke Slayton was heavily involved with the construction of the Conestoga rocket system in the 1980's, I'd say he certainly has a foot in both the early days of Apollo (even being one of the original Mercury seven), and in some ways one of the very early pioneers of commercial rocketry. He embodies perhaps the whole of what was once upon a time NASA of a long ago era and what could have become of commercial spaceflight.... if America will only let it happen.
Yeah, the spirit of Deke Slayton would be of particular interest at the moment, and it would be good to invoke him in any such discussion of the intersections of NASA's past glories and what is happening now for spaceflight in America today.
It's not really about commercial vs private, they've framed it that way to simplify the debate for the public. This is about fixed firm contacts versus cost plus contracts. And if the early results are any indication, fixed firm is much better.
Killing Orion/Ares is something that should have happened for a whole bunch of reasons, and I'm glad that it was canned. It was a program grossly over budget and behind schedule and was something that should never have been proposed in the first place. It didn't even accomplish the primary goals of the endeavor, which was to keep as much of the Space Shuttle infrastructure (aka the assembly plants and spare parts delivery queues) going after the retirement of the Shuttle program.
For myself, I think the DIRECT approach is something that should have been done, and it might have even been able to use the Orion spacecraft. Indeed the Orion design was deliberately changed to make sure it couldn't fly on DIRECT or on existing EELVs like the Atlas V or Delta IV.
Really, the Ares program completely missed the objective of keeping Americans in space and only accomplished one real goal: keeping members of congress happy because money from that project flowed into their districts. Their main gripe is that the flow of money stopped, and unemployed constituents who were sucking off of the government teat are not happy voters when that flow of money ends. That doesn't justify why any other member of congress needs to support that program to continue other than to support their own crazy form of pork.
Certainly killing the Ares rockets has done nothing to American science, and indeed it might have even helped out.
It wasn't hard to recruit junior engineers with the following proposal: Do you want to spend the rest of your career building power point presentations and attending conferences, or do you want to work on a clean sheet engine design and actually fly stuff into space?
It doesn't take much brain power to figure out which career path will help you out both professionally and intellectually.
BTW, SpaceX didn't raid just JPL, but also Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and several other major aerospace companies. They also did a pretty good job of raiding the NASA astronaut corps (as have some other private commercial spaceflight companies) and have been picking up other people along the way that are also extremely talented, including some recent college graduates who also like working for companies that have an active production floor. The manufacturing plant at El Segundo is as busy as any factory was during the glory years of the Cold War when Atlas missiles (and others) were being built for ICBMs. SpaceX right now has more engines in its production queue than all other countries of the Earth combined, with an estimated completion of about one engine each week if the production line goes to full production as is anticipated.
Which place would you rather work for... a company where things are happening or a place where they are reliving the glory days and lamenting why it will never come back?