NASA, Congress Reach Accord On Commercial Crew Program

MarkWhittington writes "NASA and Congress have reached a deal on how to proceed with the commercial crew program that provides government subsidies to pay for the development of private spacecraft. NASA will select two competitors from the current four — SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada. A third competitor will be picked for partial funding as a fallback in case both of the main competing companies run into difficulties developing a spacecraft on time and on budget."

Comments

Sierra Nevada?

[nitehawk214]

How is an IPA going to get people into orbit?

Re:Sierra Nevada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of thrust?

Re:Sierra Nevada?

[Anonymous Coward]

With a hop rocket Hop Rocket.

lobby

[Anonymous Coward]

those that payout first win...

3 out of 4

[Taco Cowboy]

I have a hunch that "Sierra Nevada" gonna be the candidate that will get axed

Re:3 out of 4

[Teancum]

The sad thing is that Sierra Nevada is in some ways doing more to help drop the cost of going into orbit than almost anybody else around. The Dream Chaser spacecraft is really an amazing vehicle that is just beginning to reach a point of getting a payoff, which the early flight trials going on.

If they get cut, I hope that the investors in Sierra Nevada (and apparently Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic fame is one of them) continue to press forward without NASA funding.

They really don't deserve to be cut, at least so far as the investment being made by NASA into this company will likely produce some impressive long-term results. It is mainly sad that a jerk of a congressman who doesn't like these programs (COTS and CCDev) instead wants to dump 10x the amount of money on a fiscal black hole that will never fly (namely the SLS... aka the "Senate Launch System").

This move to reduce the options for CCDev is not going to save much money, and in fact it will set back commercial spaceflight by several years if not a full decade.

Re:3 out of 4

[mark99]

What is your logic here? You think it costs signifcantly less to turn Dream Chaser around than a Dragon Capsule? It looks an awful lot like a Space Shuttle to me for that.
The two who seem to be doing a lot for bringing the price down would be Blue Origin (who are banking on a seemingly unlikely SSTO), and SpaceX with their Resuable Powered Decent stages (which also seem pretty far away at this point). It takes a 130 million Atlas V to put a Dream Chaser into orbit last time I looked, where as the Dragon only needs a 60 million dollar Falcon 9. Although Dream Chaser *could* probably fit on a Falcon 9 and in either case you are looking at additional costs on top of the basic launcher.

Re:3 out of 4

[Anonymous Coward]

If they get cut, I hope that the investors in Sierra Nevada (and apparently Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic fame is one of them) continue to press forward without NASA funding.

Sierra Nevada Corp is a privately owned company. It is wholly owned by the married couple Faith and Eren Ozmen who are originally from Turkey. http://www.ehow.com/about_5059106_sierra-nevada-corporation-history.html

In 1994, senior management, and husband and wife, Faith and Eren Ozmen purchased Sierra Nevada Corporation. The team developed the company from a small mid-level military contractor into a major air force supplier.

No one has any ownership of the company except the Ozman's. There is no employee stock ownership program.

Re:3 out of 4

[Rei]

IMHO, "looks like the space shuttle" is a pretty flimsy excuse. The Space Shuttle was a victim of two things: massive budget cuts in the development program, and being a first-generation reusable -- aka, it should have been seen as a testbed for learning rather than a workhorse. This craft seems to have the major lessons learned from the shuttle program down - top mount (lower vibrational load, no debris impacts, etc), single-piece TPS to save on maintenance, much smaller vehicle (the smaller the craft, the higher your surface area to mass ratio, greatly simplifying reentry), lifting body to reduce wing mass, less of the boost phase coming from the orbiter (again, keeping the orbiter smaller and lighter, simplifying reentry), and so forth. Doesn't look half bad to me.

Re:3 out of 4

[strack]

it doesnt exist yet. it hasnt flown, and its still more expensive per pound than the dragon, which has flown twice and is cheaper per pound. so if you could illuminate how the dreamchaser is doing more than spacex in dropping the cost of going to orbit for all of us, were all ears.

Re:3 out of 4

[khallow]

The Space Shuttle was a victim of two things: massive budget cuts in the development program, and being a first-generation reusable

In other words, NASA badly overspent on a first generation reusable. If the Space Shuttle had been able to carry a couple of people and a little payload, it'd have fit quite nicely into NASA's existing ( and for the foreseeable future) budget. Instead, they built the successor to the Saturn V. It sucked the oxygen out of the room for any other large space projects that didn't involve the Shuttle and contributed to its survival in some way.

Re:3 out of 4

[Rei]

It was too ambitious. It wasn't overbudgeted for what they were trying to accomplish (and after the budget cuts, it was way underbudget for what they were trying to accomplish). They were, however, trying to accomplish too much, and especially for a first-gen.

Re:3 out of 4

[mark99]

I think the Space Shuttle was just a big flop that only escaped being cancelled because the US Government has such deep pockets. In the end, in fact way before the end, it was a jobs program more than anything else. It set the space program back something like 20-30 years.
I don't understand why people can't just admit it was a horrible mistake. Actually, of course I do understand, so many valuable lifetimes of work were sunk into it.We have to pretend.... But we should have just been building cheaper rockets (which the two other programs on the table proposed) - or funding a Ramjet, or Roton, or almost anything else. The only really useful thing the Shuttle did was repair Hubble.

Imagine where we would be now if NASA had done something like COTS 20 years ago after Challenger blew up instead of building another Shuttle.

Re:3 out of 4

[JWW]

I think theres a very good chance that the one of the four that gets completely cut could easily end up getting bought out by one of the others in order to get access to some of the developed technology.

Specifically, I'd look for Boeing to buy the odd company out in this situation. Yes, that means I think there's no chance Boeing would be the odd company out.

Re:3 out of 4

[Teancum]

The current four companies are:

• * Boeing
• * Blue Origin
• * SpaceX
• * Sierra Nevada

Of these four companies, the only one I could possibly see being "bought out" is Sierra Nevada. They have other projects going right now and while the Commercial Crew is a wonderful bonus and useful for the development of their company, they aren't necessarily dependent upon just this one contract in order to continue to exist as a company.

There is no bloody way upon this green Earth that either Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is going to sell out to Boeing, although I could see those two possibly proposing a merger or joint venture to buy out Boeing. Of course that would be like a guppy eating a whale in terms of the relative size of those companies.

The only real down select that is going to halt further development of space vehicles would be if Boeing is cut out, as they are oriented towards meeting government contracts. Even that seems dubious in terms of commercial ventures with the CST-100.

Of course I think this whole down select is pointless as well. None of the CCDev contracts are really anything more than some minor seed money to help encourage what these companies are already doing and hoping it will translate into proven vehicles that will go to the International Space Station once they are built. ATK with their Liberty rocket is technically in the program as well, even though they aren't receiving any money (but ATK is getting technical assistance from NASA under this program). Down selecting as worded with this particular congressional amendment would cut out even this "technical consulting" similar to what ATK is getting at the moment.

Re:3 out of 4

[JWW]

In retrospect, my post could have been simpler had I just said:

I think Sierra Nevada will be left out and Boeing will probably buy them.

Your analysis is spot on.

Re:3 out of 4

[Teancum]

Richard Branson's involvement is to use the Dream Chaser as the orbital spaceflight vehicle for Virgin Galactic. He is investing "seed money" and essentially offering a hard purchasing contract for the vehicles once they are built. That may not translate into actual stock ownership of the company, but it does make him an investor after a fashion and somebody important to consider in terms of company finances.

There are other people involved, and what is now known as the Dream Chaser has a fairly interesting development history that is worth looking at as well.

Re:3 out of 4

[Rei]

I don't think it's that clear cut. As I mentioned before, the problems were overambition and budget cuts during the development process that made everything worse.

The overambition is actually quite understandable. Think of what we had gone from, at the start of the 1960s to the Apollo moon landings. This incredible pace of accomplishment was driving people's sci-fi dreams of the future wild, even people in high places. The notion was that, clearly, we're about to become a spacefaring race in a major way, we need a vehicle to haul people and tons of cargo with a rapid launch rate turnaround; that's where the inception of the concept came from. Of course, that was not to happen, and not only due to the fault of the shuttle program.

If the overambition itself wouldn't have doomed the goal of affordable reusable spaceflight, the budget cuts in development (brought about in no small part due to the Vietnam War) certainly did. The sacrifices made in development to accommodate them pretty much ensured that it would not be a reliable, affordable system. Turning to the air force for funding meant adding crossrange capability and even greater cargo capability. Disastrous. The lower level of funding meant less system reuse and higher maintenance on the systems that were to be reused. For example, the early shuttle designs called for a titanium frame which could run hot, instead of the current (cheaper) aluminum frame which can't. Letting the frame get hotter means you can use a simpler, and thus easier to maintain, TPS. Not to mention safer; the Columbia disaster couldn't have happened and there wouldn't be nearly as much metal fatigue concerns.

Again, hindsight is always 20-20, but it's easy to see how the problems came about from overambition and then huge budget cuts in development. And I don't think calling it a jobs program, at least initially, is totally fair. Unlike Ares, which is "let's use as much shuttle hardware as we can to keep the plants open and keep developing it even when there's no longer a niche for it", the Shuttle wasn't heavily based on Saturn hardware. Now, what I think clearly became a jobs program and takes no hindsight to see is that when the Shuttle program went down the tubes, and it clearly had failed at its nominal goal of affordable reusable spaceflight, of not only keeping it running but keeping it as the workhorse of the US spaceflight fleet.

Re:3 out of 4

[khallow]

I don't think it's that clear cut. As I mentioned before, the problems were overambition and budget cuts during the development process that made everything worse.

The problem with your interpretation is that: a) The budget cuts were well known from about 1968. The design should have been scaled down from the start. It's worth remembering that NASA had a large budget for only a few years. I think it was very foolish to assume that NASA would get 2% or more of the federal government for the indefinite future.

b) NASA even after budget cutbacks still outspent every other space program on the planet and has done so for about four decades.

And while I'm thinking of it, there's c) if NASA had a larger budget, then it's ambitions would probably have scaled to consume that budget as well. Perhaps not with the Shuttle itself, but they'd have found a way.

So simply put, NASA and its Space Shuttle were too ambitious. One should not blame the budget which was a known quantity and something which couldn't be sustained at the brief peak it has been at.

Re:3 out of 4

[Anonymous Coward]

One of them will get partial funding. My guess is that it will be SNC. If SpaceX gets full funding, they will be ready by 2014.

Now, with that said, what I think is REALLY important, is to get Bigelow going. They need to have a station in orbit around 2014-2015. By doing that, it gives MULTIPLE destinations for the multiple companies. Competition is what will make this happen. It will force launch prices down quickly (fixed costs are the real costs), and will allow us to support multiple launch companies. Once we have that, then we are guaranteed that we can truly support not only LEO operations, but lunar and mars as well.
The issue is that the neo-cons such as wolfe, shelby, hatch, hutchinson, etc. have gutted NASA's attempts to go BEO multiple times. Even now, they are desperate to block private space from making things work. The regs that NASA has, are already stiff. Adding more will not help.

Re:3 out of 4

[Teancum]

Robert Bigelow seems to have the money and the will to go into space on his own dime, and apparently even has the customers needed to make his space enterprises profitable. Enough that he even went through a significant planet expansion, even if he had to lay off a bunch of his employees temporarily.

The main problem that Robert Bigelow has been facing is trying to get people into space, and he has been insisting that he must have at least two different launch providers using completely different sets of engineering history in order to be able to get started and launching his stations on a regular basis. If he could get more launch providers, he would be happier. The idea here is that once he starts to launch his stations, he doesn't want to shut down operations because of a launch failure or some other serious problem which shows up forcing that particular vehicle to cease operations.

NASA has been operating with a single vehicle with a single engineering history, which is why they had to crash Skylab without follow up visits, and why the space program had to halt after the Challenger and Columbia disasters. If Bigelow Aerospace had to shut down for a couple of years after ramping up to full production, testing, and hiring... they would simply go bankrupt. NASA didn't go bankrupt only because Congress kept funding them... but NASA still had to end up paying the army of workers at KSC and all of their sub-contractors or they wouldn't have been able to fly the Shuttles afterward. Robert Bigelow simply doesn't have that kind of luxury.

I'd like to add that Bigelow Aerospace is hardly the only company needing this redundant service into space from multiple companies, which is precisely why this down select is foolish and clueless on the part of Representative Frank Wolf. Rep. Wolf thinks that somehow he is going to save some tax dollars, and over the short term he might be correct. But the future of American spaceflight is on the line here, which needs competition and some seed money to get it going.

The seed money is mainly needed to accelerate the commercial crew development so NASA doesn't need to depend upon the Russian Soyuz spacecraft for transportation to and from the modules on the ISS that were put up there by American taxpayers.... but which NASA can't reach now on their own because of ineptitude and mismanagement. There should be other alternatives, but the old way of doing things just isn't working any more nor really worked very well in the first place even when it was sort of working.

Re:3 out of 4

[cheesybagel]

The problem with SNC is: can they do the vehicle or not? It is difficult to design any RLV let alone one of that configuration. They can do hybrid rocket engines (they did the SpaceShipOne engine after all). That's like half of the problem. As for Blue Origin... well I haven't seen anything other than demonstrators of things which will not be used in any meaningful suborbital or orbital vehicle. It seems, to me at least, they keep spending a lot of money on one off things without having a long term technological path or vision. But hey it's Bezos's money not mine...

Re:3 out of 4

[Anonymous Coward]

I am hoping that SpaceX and Boeing (who you know has already won one of them) get the full funding, while SNC gets partial. To be honest, I would rather see Boeing and SNC get about the same amount, with another group of money going to ULA, while SpaceX get the full funding (they are developing capsule and rocket).

My fear is that Liberty gets full funding. They are the WORSE choice for an America project. Even Atlas should be disqualified, but this is already decided.

Finally, we need Bigelow in there. Without it, then all is dependent on NASA, which means that the idiots in congress, such as wolfe, shelby, hatch, hutchinson, coffman, etc call the shots. And they will work hard to end private space.

Re:3 out of 4

[Anonymous Coward]

> much smaller vehicle (the smaller the craft, the higher your surface area to mass ratio, greatly simplifying reentry),

For a given weight a smaller craft will have a lower surface area to mass ratio.

We have already failed

[subreality]

pay for the development

It works the same in NASA as it does in software dev: you get what you pay for. If you want results, pay for results. If you pay for development, all you get is lots of development.

Re:We have already failed

[Anonymous Coward]

Our government is remarkably bad at buying software. At least when we buy things, we usually get *something*. Unfortunately, the next generation of spaceship is likely to be almost exclusively software.

Re:We have already failed

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's a success. You misunderstood the objective.

Re:We have already failed

[khallow]

He didn't say it was a failure, just that you get what you pay for. Which I suspect you solidly agree with.

Re:We have already failed

[SomePgmr]

At least when we buy things, we usually get *something*.

You're in the business of buying military aircraft, aren't ya. ;)

We've got a good long list of bullshit warplanes that just don't work right, to the tune of billions of dollars. But hey, at least we've got handfuls of those futuristic-looking planes, even if they can't fly combat missions.

Re:We have already failed

[davester666]

Not really.

There is what, a 99.9999999999999% chance that Boeing is selected, and will promptly game the setup to gobble most of the cash. They will provide extremely well-written reports as to why they need more cash in order to deliver the results that are requested.

Re:We have already failed

[Anonymous Coward]

ME: HELLO KOKGOBBLER!

You: GOBBLE GOBBLE GOBBLE!

ME: Alrighty then! Carry on! *Leaves*

Re:We have already failed

[tisepti]

Well, reliability does seem like a good sort of attribute for the winner to possess.

Re:We have already failed

[Rei]

While that does present a conflict of interests, there is a big double-bind - namely, that these companies are doing development projects that are generally too large and risky for even large private companies to be comfortable gambling on by themselves; for smaller companies, the concept is right out. It'd be hard to get any serious bids at all without helping with development. So yes, what you mentioned is a serious critique, it's not without reason that NASA does development contracts. And it's a cash amplifier, too - landing a NASA contract makes it *much* easier to land other private funding.

Re:We have already failed

[catmistake]

Not really.

There is what, a 99.9999999999999% chance that Boeing is selected, and will promptly game the setup to gobble most of the cash. They will provide extremely well-written reports as to why they need more cash in order to deliver the results that are requested.

NASA has been steadily losing government funds since the Apollo program ended. I think the lucritiveness of government funding for commercial spaceflight is probably a myth. I have a feeling the government subsidies are going to be token payments and tax breaks, not amounting to much more than a negligible portion of the total budget for any individual spaceflight endeavor. The rest of the budget will have to come from investors, who no doubt turn around and pass the savings on to the customers.

Re:We have already failed

[Eravnrekaree]

This is really frightening. Many of the existing large contractors such as Boeing and those for the Space Shuttle are those who are largely to blame for the huge costs of American space technology that has really threatened the US space industry and its ability to compete with the Russians and the French/ESA.

People often blame NASA for the mess that was the shuttle, which was a very expensive launch vehicle to operate. The shuttle should have been abandoned years before and replaced with better technology, but the companies that manufactured the shuttle just loved it because it for the VERY REASON that it was a space craft that was far more expensive than a space craft needed to be. Corporations got wealthy because the US had a very inefficient launch platform.

People often blame NASA for the mess that was the shuttle, which was a very expensive launch vehicle to operate. But, this is misplaced, many do not understand that NASA does not really build the shuttle but it is contracted to private companies, and NASA itself was getting increasingly little capability to actually stop the shuttle and replace it with something better, because the funding is being controlled by Congress who is bought off by the companies that built the shuttle. This is why blaming NASA for the shuttle white elephant is nonsense from people who dont understand much about how things work, because Congress is to blame. Congress made efforts to lock in funding to the SLS programs which are completely uncompetitive as a kickback to large corporations that give kickbacks to congress members, usually Republicans. Shelby of Alabama (Republican) for instance tried to pass bills that would have locked in funding for SLS even though it is a mostly unworkable vehicle that seems to duplicate the massive inefficiencies of the shuttle program. This means that decisions about the space program were being attempted to be made by politicians based on bribery from corporations rather than based on science.

There were probably a lot of people in NASA who wanted to find a cheaper way to do launches, but due to the fact that it is controlled by Republican pork barrel in Congress, NASA has been under a toxic and politicized miasma imposed on it from congress.

In regards to CCP, I think that what we are seeing again is congressional meddling in these affairs which seems designed to once again to retard the US space industry by locking us into expensive technologies from the likes of Boeing. I believe all of the CCP programs really ought to continue to be funded, it sure is a hell of a lot better of a value than the wars in iraq and afghanistan.

Re:We have already failed

[Eravnrekaree]

PS: it Rep. Shelby of Alabama (R) who wanted to lock in SLS funding, represents the district in Alabama where the SLS is built, so it was pure pork barrel. It was in fact Obama and Democrats who stopped the SLS lock in and continued work on the CCP, because the SLS was primed to turn into another white elephant.

The launch technology should be based on science and technocracy rather than based on the good old boys networks of Republican politicians who are given kickbacks by corporations.

Re:We have already failed

[awrowe]

You don't mean....investors will actually have to take a risk, do you?

That's an entirely new concept. Its always been "1) invest in the bigass company which has all the government contracts, 2) profit."

If this is the case, it can only be a good thing. Time for governments to be less of a pork barrel and more of a background participant.

Re:We have already failed

[cheesybagel]

Well the F-18 Super Hornet seems to work perfectly fine. The US Navy just had to slide that under Congress's nose as an "upgrade program" for it to get funding. Hadn't they done that they would probably be still flying their 1970s F-14 Tomcats. Perhaps this is a repeat of the F-111 debacle and eventually the USAF will need to buy Super Hornets because their precious prima donnas F-22 and F-35 have too high acquisition and maintenance costs. Not to mention they spend more time in the repair yard than actually flying.

Re:We have already failed

[cheesybagel]

When the requirements are insane the project is probably going to be botched. That was the case with Shuttle. Well that and the funding cuts.

Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Usually Unlucky]

We all know which one will be dropped

Blue Origin and their SSTO nonsense should have never received a dime of public money to begin with.

Good riddance.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Teancum]

Blue Origin and their SSTO nonsense should have never received a dime of public money to begin with.

So you think the DC-X program was a terrible waste of tax dollars? Why are you upset that a private company without tax dollars is furthering the research into that flight concept and propulsion system?

Furthermore, do you even have a clue what part of the CCDev program that Blue Origin is even doing, what their spacecraft actually is supposed to look like, or how it is going to get into orbit much less return to the Earth? If you did, you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement presuming something that wasn't even true.

*Hint* -- Blue Origin proposed to use the Lockheed-Martin Atlas V for the launch of its spacecraft under CCDev. They aren't even planning on flying their own hardware for the first stage or two.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Immerman]

I have to disagree with you on SSTO being nonsense - only a small percentage of the cost of an orbital launch is the unavoidable fuel costs, much of the rest is in ground control and and the fact that we're basically throwing away everything except for the orbital capsule with every launch. That made great sense during the cold war when the space program was basically PR campaign piggybacking on ICBM technology to reach orbit - and an ICBM is pretty much by definition a single-shot vehicle and requires ground control because we're squeamish about both suicide missions and autonomous nukes. The space shuttle was a...change from that, but still used much of the same philosophy, just with a larger, more sophisticated orbital capsule

In the modern world where the space is becoming a thriving commercial destination a reusable launch vehicle that doesn't require extensive ground control makes a lot more sense. Granted SSTO has some problems - not really much call to carry the full mass of the launch vehicle all the way to orbit where you'll just be stuck shoving around a lot of useless mass, but the Blue Origin New Shepard seems to be moving in the right direction as a reusable, suborbital launch system with a separable crew module. Assuming the long term goal is to replace the expendable Atlas rocket family with a reusable Shepard descendant it actually makes a lot of sense - even if the eventual Shepard N were to cost 100x what an Atlas rocket does, the fact that it would require minimal ground support and could relaunch almost immediately with minimal maintenance means it could pay for itself within a year or two. The fact that they're doing something fundamentally new though does boost the development costs considerably, especially if you consider the current generation to be a research prototype with few if any direct applications. It could make sense to help fund its development not because you want this vehicle, but because you want the vehicle this vehicle's technology will enable once proven and refined. A true long-term investment if you will - exactly the sort of thing governments tend to be better at funding than private industry.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Rei]

Ah, SSTOs... It's not that the concept is wrong. It's not even that it's impossible with current fuels and materials. The problem is that it's so *close* to impossible that the difficulty of creating such a craft inevitably leads to big complications.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Rei]

New Sheperd in all regards hits me as pure naivete. For example, using HTP as an oxidizer. I'm well familiar with the logic here. "Oh, sure, it's got less ISP than LOX, but it's SIMPLER! And ISP isn't everything! We'll go simple and cheap, and get a simple, cheap craft!"

And that logic is wrong.

First off, the lesser issue: ISP may not be everything, but it's huge. The scaling factor for having bad ISP is pretty massive, and your other costs will add up quickly as your craft balloons, everything from your transport costs to your launch liability. People who just discount it like that do a big disservice to themselves.

But the bigger issue: HTP is *not* simpler than LOX. It's a giant pain in the arse. It's explosive, which requires that you have sterile, defect-free tanks and systems with very specific materials requirements and purity constantly maintained. Its explosivity can be greatly reduced by the presence of stabilizers, but therein lies the other problem: the more stable you make it, the less reactive it becomes, and if you're using any sort of catalyst pack (which themselves are full of problems), you tend to clog it. Peroxide vapors from even stabilized HTP are explosive. Stored HTP can become less stable over time, and leaks can be catastrophic (as many people, perhaps most famously in recent years the crew of the Kursk, have learned). Heat can set it off. It's difficult and dangerous to concentrate in terms of oxidizer production. It's illegal to ship in tanker trucks due to its hazardous nature. Etc.

People think about household H2O2 solutions and just picture a more powerful version of that. That is not what HTP is like. The Germans and later the US went with HTP a lot early in their rocketry programs. The fact that its usage became greatly curtailed over time should speak volumes.

Basically, HTP is just reinventing a bad wheel. There's one little explored fuel combination that I'd like to see more focus on, personally: LOX/Propane. Propane is of course widely available, cheap, and easy to transport. It's higher ISP than RP1 (LOX/RP1 being a common propellant combination), but the downside when you first look at it in a table is it's much lower density. BUT, at the same temperature as your LOX - aka, they can share a common bulkhead without insulative separation, reducing system mass -- it's actually quite dense. LOX/Propane is also easier to vaporize and ignite.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Map legend for non-rocket scientists:
HTP == High Test Peroxide, a high percentage Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2) solution.
ISP == Isp == Specific Impulse, basically MPG for rockets.
LOX == LOx == Liquid Oxygen, not smoked salmon.
RP1 == RP-1 == Rocket Propellant 1, a highly refined kerosene used as a rocket fuel.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Immerman]

Interesting points, I'll admit it's been a long time since I paid much attention to the details of launch systems, too many other interesting fields to keep track of. It does sound like HTP might prove to be an... interesting choice of oxidant, especially for a reusable vehicle where systems will inevitably develop stress flaws

One observation about propane though - unless the Propane has a notably lower total volume than the LOX it would seem a shared bulkhead will significantly *increase* the amount of insulation necessary. Before you only had to insulate the LOX from the environment, now you also have to insulate the Propane, and surface area increases with volume as V^(2/3).

Let's see... looks like the LOX/Propane ratio is ~3 by mass with LOX being ~2x as dense. Okay, wasn't really expecting that figured LOX would be the smaller player. So anyway unchilled propane would add ~2/3 the volume of the LOX, so about 40% more surface area. If it chills to the same density as LOX then +21%, or +11% if it chills to twice the density. Maybe not so bad.

There's also the fact that Propane has far more intramolecular freedom than LOX so will require considerably more energy to cool, but that effectively just raises the initially cheap fuel price and may actually help reduce insulation requirements as it will also require considerably more energy to heat, acting somewhat like blue-ice in a cooler.

Hmm, physical properties could be an issue though - LOX boils at about -183C, whereas propane freezes at about -188C. 5C isn't exactly a big window to work with, especially when you figure the tanks will begin cooling as soon as you start relieving pressure. Even if you could keep the temperature stable the liquid propane might also be "syrupy" so near it's freezing point, which could cause other complications. Plus there's the fact that instead of just opening the valve you'd have to heat your propane by over 100C if you want it gaseous again

Perhaps you could arrange a "nested" tank - LOX within insulation within propane within more insulation to keep the propane dense while also harnessing the "blue-ice effect" to reduce the total insulation needed, but frankly that sounds like an engineering, maintenance, and safety nightmare.

Hmm, and honestly now that I think of it insulation tends to be really light, while a double bulkhead between your fuel and oxidant sounds like a *really* good safety feature. Its a clever idea, but as a non-rocket-scientist it sounds like one giant headache in practice to me. Maybe someone else can chime in.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[tyrione]

Blue Origin and their SSTO nonsense should have never received a dime of public money to begin with.

So you think the DC-X program was a terrible waste of tax dollars? Why are you upset that a private company without tax dollars is furthering the research into that flight concept and propulsion system?

Furthermore, do you even have a clue what part of the CCDev program that Blue Origin is even doing, what their spacecraft actually is supposed to look like, or how it is going to get into orbit much less return to the Earth? If you did, you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement presuming something that wasn't even true.

*Hint* -- Blue Origin proposed to use the Lockheed-Martin Atlas V for the launch of its spacecraft under CCDev. They aren't even planning on flying their own hardware for the first stage or two.

Without tax payer dollars, from the beginning, Boeing, United Airlines, McDonnell Douglass, Lockheed Martin, etc., never exists. These ``leave it to private enterprise'' stalwarts seem to ignore history. Really big ideas require national support. Unless you have a company with the funding like Apple willing to fund billions nothing will evolve in space without the US Government.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Teancum]

The largest current problem the HTP is simply getting permission from the Department of Homeland Security to even let you ship it at all, where refineries which make the stuff generally won't ship to you unless you are already using it in large industrial scale quantities. That really stinks if you are using for R&D purposes or something like a small start-up company.

Armadillo Aerospace spent a whole bunch of effort on the stuff, and John Carmack even sent out a general request on several mailing lists and news groups begging for people to help him out in the acquisition of the stuff. There was essentially nobody who was willing to sell it to him at any price. I don't know if Jeff Bezos has had the same problems (who has a fair bit more money than John Carmack), but this does seem to be the current issue where there is a huge niche that nobody wants to fill in terms of providing the material. Making your own production facilities to make HTP is an option.... but it is sort of a chicken or egg problem as well and is something that is best done on a large industrial scale as well in terms of costs.

It may very well be that HTP is a more cost effective approach to spaceflight, but getting over that hump of costs when other options that are "good enough" are available can make it much harder to go down that path. It is sort of like the problem of introducing alternatives to gasoline for automobiles, as the infrastructure is already in place for gasoline distribution but not nearly so much for compressed natural gas, or more exotic fuels like Hydrogen gas or quick recharging stations for electric cars.

LOX is already being used for rocketry and the infrastructure is also set up to be able to deliver the material in quantities needed for orbital spaceflight, not to mention that it has other applications besides rocketry. I don't know precisely if the LOX/Propane issue you are suggesting here is any better or not than LOX/RP1, although I will take your word at face value on this issue. Getting permits to transport Propane in bulk is much easier to get and it is readily available from many companies who are willing to go through the necessary steps of dealing with companies and experimenters who work with rocketry.

What that has to do with the New Shepard as it applies to commercial crew development, I don't know. That Jeff Bezos sees some potential in the technologies developed for the DC-X and is trying to run a private research group experimenting with those concepts and pushing them in a different direction that may hold some promise is interesting and worth watching. Sometimes it is useful to find out what was going on with some of the older programs and what might be rescued from them.... particularly when the program is shut down for political reasons and not engineering reasons as happened with the DC-X. If anything, I'd put the DC-X program as one of the most successful alternatives to the Shuttle that ever happened, and certainly got further along on its development than other projects like the Dynasoar or even Constellation and soon to add the SLS program to that list of failed NASA spaceflight efforts.

One area where HTP+RP1 might be useful is with in-orbit refueling depots. LOX+Liquid Hydrogen are currently being proposed in that situation, but the boil off from long term storage is a huge issue where HTP and RP1 wouldn't be nearly so big of a deal in that situation. The only other alternative is to use something like Hydrazine, which makes all of the technical problems of HTP look like child's play.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Anonymous Coward]

You need something like 1/3 as much propane as LOX, on a mass basis, and LP at boiling point (dunno about @melting point, but obviously denser) is about half the density of LOX, so something less than 2/3 the tankage volume. Not dense enough to save on insulation, as you say.

But it's common to circulate fuel through the engine to cool it and preheat the fuel, so that's not IMO an issue. (And remember, you have to heat RP1 to vaporize it, too.)

I like the nested tank idea, with the caveat that the LOX tank should be as long as/longer than the propane tank, with both ends exposed; this allows filling, venting, and withdrawal plumbing to remain external, instead of passing through the fuel (that would spell trouble). And I'm not sure why you suggest insulation between the tanks -- it serves no apparent purpose, since you want the same temperature.

Remember, there's significant work on slushy (i.e. mixed solid/liquid) hydrogen, so keeping LP partially frozen doesn't even seem to necessarily pose a problem, and could eliminate LOX evaporation.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, just looked it up, and LP @ 90K is ~2/3 LOX density, so gonna be ~1/2 the LOx tankage.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[cheesybagel]

Blue Origin doesn't seem to have a credible roadmap for what they are doing in strategic terms. That is the problem.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[cheesybagel]

Yeah LOX has nearly the same density as H2O2. It is cryogenic but only mildly (certainly not as hard to handle as LH2). It is widely available for all sorts of industrial applications. Thankfully SpaceX didn't go that route.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Teancum]

Blue Origin gets most of its money from Jeff Bezos as more of a hobby than anything else. I'll let you look up his name elsewhere to see if he can afford a personal space program or not.

The commercial crew program is the first time that Blue Origin has even tried to go after a government funded project of any kind, and in the reviews I saw where they were selected, the NASA review committee seemed to have been quite impressed with not just the proposal but the kinds of things that Blue Origin has done already including an on-site visit of the Blue Origin facilities by NASA officials. You might just be surprised.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Teancum]

Blue Origin doesn't seem to have a credible roadmap for what they are doing in strategic terms. That is the problem.

Blue Origin doesn't discuss much of anything to anybody. As to if they have a roadmap or a strategic plan, I have no idea if they do or don't. If you know something I don't, I'd love to know how you found out about their lack of a plan.

Jeff Bezos runs the company like a skunkworks and the employees of the company are famously tight lipped about almost anything the company is doing. Far more is known about more esoteric things the company is doing like retrieving the original F1 engines used for the Apollo 11 Saturn V and the 10k year clock being built at their launch/test facility in Texas than is typically known about what they even do for building spacecraft.

About the only time you even know they are doing a flight is when they are issued a flight permit and a NOTAM is issued by the FAA just prior to the flight.

In short, I don't think there is any way to tell what plan they may of may not have in the future as Jeff Bezos isn't really saying much at all. The only reason anything is known about this particular project under CCDev is because Blue Origin is required by law to disclose certain pieces of information and make them available to the public. That is by far and away very different from SpaceX, where Elon Musk has a personal blog, sends tweets about the company, and routinely brings members of the press core on tours of the plant... the "press corps" being loosely defined as anybody with a blog that has more than a couple hundred people reading it.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[cheesybagel]

Just compare SpaceX with Blue Origin.

SpaceX developed the Kestrel and Merlin engines based on LOX/Kerosene. The Merlin (with modifications) is still used by them today. The experience they got with Kestrel can be applied more or less to the hypergolic engines they eventually developed which are also pressure-fed rockets. The US and the Soviet Union followed a similar path in developing rocket engines. The manufacturing techniques and avionics they developed with Falcon 1 got reused with Falcon 9. Falcon 1 was orbital from the get go even if the payload was small.

When you look at Blue Origin it is completely different. They develop a vehicle (Goddard) using monopropellant H2O2 (which is never going to turn out a reusable orbital vehicle because the performance is crap). It can't even be called suborbital. It doesn't even leave the atmosphere. Then Blue Origin posts they are searching for propulsion engineers which have worked on chemical bi-propellant engines (WTF? how were they planning to make an RLV without decent engines?). It's like the company is run backwards or something. Now they are planning to use H2O2/Kerosene when they can't even develop a much easier LOX/Kerosene engine. There is like one orbital launch vehicle using that propellant ever (Black Arrow from the UK in the 1960s) and it used silver plated catalysts...

They seem to be working with composite structures... and that is about it. Many aerospace projects historically failed because the project didn't manage to produce a working engine. Without having a decent working engine the vehicle isn't going to get there. Ever. Heck IMO even Sierra Nevada is a more credible company. At least they manage to produce working hybrid rocket engines. XCOR has been producing working bi-propellant rocket engines for yonks. Blue Origin still hasn't.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[Teancum]

Again I ask how you know so much about what Blue Origin isn't doing? I can name a few things they are doing, but due to the fact they are so tight lipped it is hard to say what they aren't doing because you can't prove a negative action.

In the case of SpaceX, you would know what they are not doing because if there was anything they were doing it would have been discussed a long time ago. It is thus easy to say that SpaceX isn't building inflatable orbital habitats because if they were it would be something found on their website or bragged about elsewhere. I can't say the same thing about Blue Origin though, or the secret base they have (or don't have) on Mars or anything else that company is doing.

I certainly think it is myopic to say that Blue Origin isn't working on an engine when there is no way to prove that, where if they were working on new engine technology it wouldn't be public knowledge. Perhaps you have a drinking buddy who has let slip out some information about Blue Origin who is also an employee there that knows some of the inside information. I'm not ruling it out completely but such an information leak would also likely get such an employee spilling inside information about the company fired as well. That is how Jeff Bezos is running Blue Origin.

There are some very skilled people with advanced knowledge of aerospace engineering working for Blue Origin, so I wouldn't put anything past them. What I do know is that the NASA people looking at the proposal from Blue Origin for CCDev was impressed enough to push them ahead of other similar proposals from other companies like ATK, which was soundly rejected in the screening process. And frankly the ATK proposal was pretty good as were several other CCDev proposals that didn't make the cut.

Re:Bye Bye Blue Origin

[cheesybagel]

Actually there is a lot of SpaceX we don't know. Do you know what their main propulsion team is working on? I have heard all sorts of rumors and read past publications and it still isn't clear what the heck they are doing or what will come out. They have one other team working on SuperDraco. Probably the same guys who worked on Draco. They also have another team (probably a splinter of the main team) doing the Merlin 1D. Yet that still leaves a number of people in their staff I haven't heard about for a couple of years now. I doubt they are doing nothing, it is a for profit business after all, and there are several things they could be working on at a preliminary level. But it isn't clear what it is and what will come out.

Inflatable habitats were conceived by the Transhab project at NASA and Bigelow bought the right to use those patents. It would be a bit suicidal to compete against him using that technology given the tremendous head start he has.

The reason Blue Origin was selected for CCDev is kind of obvious. The ship design is different enough from the others (blunt biconic) that NASA was interested in funding it. However if you look at where most of the money was put into (CCDev 2) Blue Origin is only getting a minor chunk of the action compared with Boeing, SNC, or Space X. Not even a tenth of the money those companies are getting. Contrary to what you said ATK's proposal wasn't good. It was crap. Why? They are basically using the 'Stick' (Ares I-X lookalike) as a launcher. The 'Stick' proved to have major design flaws during the conducted tests. The test launch had vibrations higher than the limits NASA has mandated for flights carrying human passengers because of the solid propellant first stage. It also has awful failure modes because of the solid first stage. Their second stage is proposed to use a Vulcain 2 engine. Well that was originally developed as a first stage engine in Europe for Ariane 5 ECA. So it is kind of understandable why that would be a reason for concern as well. The capsule is a smaller version of Orion which has so far proven to have weight issues and is already being funded under the SLS contract. So ATK's proposal for CCDev has no technical or economic sense. SNC is being funded because they are working on a winged vehicle contrary to Boeing and SpaceX (or even Blue Origin) which are working on capsules.

Lockheed? Orion?

[Mt._Honkey]

What happened to Orion? When I visited Lockheed in December they were all gung-ho building a spacecraft. Not that I'm pushing for it, just wondering why it is apparently no longer a factor.

SpaceX

[sconeu]

It's obvious that SpaceX will be selected.

How soon will Dragon be man-rated, and even more important, Falcon 9 and/or Falcon Heavy?

Re:SpaceX

[camperdave]

From what I understand, a few demos of their launch abort systems, and they should be shiney. The crewed Dragon and the cargo Dragon are the same pressure hull, and share the same liftoff and on orbit flight characteristics. So every cargo flight will be a test flight for the crewed vehicle.

Re:SpaceX

[AHuxley]

In Capitalist West exSoviets dock with you :)
The US has found some new "Germans" to help them with the complex space thing.
US entrepreneurs are going to rebrand expensive US and Russian gov tech to new dot com heights.

Re:SpaceX

[Jane Q. Public]

There should be at least a couple, perhaps similar, but with different specialties. Maybe Dragon is better to LEO with heavy cargo or to HEO, and someone else's solution works better for smaller satellites, etc.

There need not be only one.

Re:SpaceX

[jamstar7]

Boeing will get the nod of course. It's Boeing. It's been in the space funded corporate leech business for decades. I hate to say it, but I'm thinking ATX will get the nod as well, with SpaceX the third partially funded guy. ATX is another corporation much beloved by Congress for its bribe money^F^Fcampaign contributions.

Re:SpaceX

[0123456]

Nah, the troughers have to kick SpaceX out because they're the only company who have proven that they can do the job and do it cheaper than the competition. That cannot be allowed.

Re:SpaceX

[taiwanjohn]

While that's all more or less true, there's one detail missing: they're still building the launch abort system. I think Musk said they'll begin testing later this year, but he doesn't expect to be flying people for 2 or 3 years yet. Anyway, I agree that SpaceX will definitely continue the manned Dragon development, with or without help from NASA. Given the number of F9/FH flights they've already sold, they should have plenty of money to do the work.

Re:SpaceX

[Teancum]

Nah, the troughers have to kick SpaceX out because they're the only company who have proven that they can do the job and do it cheaper than the competition. That cannot be allowed.

The purpose of this down select is explicitly to hurt SpaceX and to drive them out of the market place through political maneuvering. If you claim it cannot be allowed, you really need to contact your member of congress and complain about this whole notion of a down select.

That Representative Frank Wolf, the guy behind this move to force the "down select", may have major egg on his face when these other commercial spaceflight developers have much cheaper vehicles than the things being built by Boeing and ATK is immaterial.

Re:SpaceX

[jamstar7]

Thing is, SpaceX isn't selling vehicles, it's selling launch capability. Boeing and ATX are selling vehicles on a cost-plus basis. And you better believe cost overruns are automatically built into the contracts.

Re:SpaceX

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, no. The super draco's are finishing testing NOW. Basically, they mod dragon, add the dracos, change the berth to docking, add seats, enhance Life Support, and add controls, and you have a crewed falcon 9/dragon. With funding, it is probable that they will launch in 2014. Even with the BS that wolfe is throwing at them, it will simply delay it until late 2014. Cut the funding, and it MIGHT be 2016.

Re:SpaceX

[Teancum]

Gwynne Shotwell certainly is selling vehicles. They just sold some to Bigelow Aerospace. If you send an email to gwynne at spacex dot com, I'm sure she will even quote a price for you if you are being serious about buying those vehicles. They will also provide launch services, but if you want to buy the vehicle and fly it yourself, that won't really be too much of a problem for them.

BTW, SpaceX doesn't sell launch services even on a cost-plus basis, and the Liberty vehicle is also being developed independent of a government contract. If there is a cost overrun, those respective companies eat those costs... and reap the profits if they can make those vehicles cheaper. I can't speak about the EELVs though, as those vehicles were built in a sort of hybrid environment, but you are comparing several different contracting models here and mixing up all sorts of pricing schemes simultaneously that I can't even respond to your issue about cost overruns and contracts.

Camel in the tent

[khallow]

SLS is the camel in the tent here. I think there is a subtle, partial neutering of this program and its competitors going on here. For example,

U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, the Virginia Republican who heads the House appropriation subcommittee with NASA oversight, said today that the program would fully fund two companies â" and could partially fund a third.

Thatâ(TM)s down from as many as four companies, according to Wolf.

âoeThis downselect will reduce taxpayer exposure by concentrating funds on those participants who are most likely to be chosen to eventually provide service to ISS,â he said in a statement.

IMHO, that's doublespeak for "I was able to take out two of four potential competitors to my favorite space pork, the Space Launch System."

The deal also would lay the groundwork for NASA to impose stiffer regulations on the companies competing to develop the rockets and capsules â" a priority for Wolf â" while giving NASA more leeway to nix contracts if it thinks aspiring companies are overselling their capability and financial health.

In other words, a series of irrelevant obstacles can be thrown in the way to hinder these companies even more. The "stiffer regulations" simply isn't needed. NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS. But it's a great tool for adding cost to these activities. We'll see how that gets abused in the future.

Similarly, more leeway to nix contracts means greater uncertainty (and resulting weaker financial health) for the contractors. NASA already is a problem child for bad contracts due to its considerable ability to renegotiate contracts, Darth Vader style. Being allowed even more excuses to renege on contracts will cause even more problems for these contractors.

This isn't going to kill the COTS program, but we should remember that some people are trying to. I think in part this is to remove competition for the SLS and in part just a ploy to eventually suborn COTS funding for the SLS.

Re:Camel in the tent

[DerekLyons]

NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS.

If you 'owned' an irreplaceable multi billion dollar asset - and would get scorched by your bosses and atomized by the public if it got so much as scratched... you'd be pathologically paranoid too. And that's on top of the issue of astronaut safety.

Re:Camel in the tent

[Anonymous Coward]

No, dumbass. The downselect is a fundamental part of how we (being the government) competitively select the prime for large projects. Would you rather have any larger defense corporation have no competition this early?

Re:Camel in the tent

[Jane Q. Public]

"NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS."

As much as I agree with much of what you say, it is perfectly understandable that NASA is extremely cautious about the ISS. It's their ONLY manned program right now, and it's not even really "theirs"!

Of course, as we well know, bureaucratic stagnation and bungling are behind that very situation, and NASA has been ordered by 2 different Presidents to clean up that act... which they still haven't done.

What the private space program does NOT need is more regulation or interference from NASA. We KNOW this. Look what SpaceX and Virgin and others have accomplished without it.

Re:Camel in the tent

[timeOday]

But SpaceX already docked with the ISS, last week.

I'm sure you know that. But how can we talk about Nasa not allowing things to get close to the ISS in light of it?

Re:Camel in the tent

[DerekLyons]

The requirements haven't changed just because SpaceX docked to it.

Re:Camel in the tent

[khallow]

The downselect is a fundamental part of how we (being the government) competitively select the prime for large projects.

Why "downselect", that is, rule out viable competition at this time? They're getting good outcome for the money. I think my explanation fits the bill. So that the primes for the eventual SLS contracts don't have real competition from the COTS competitors.

Would you rather have any larger defense corporation have no competition this early?

So the choice is "downselect" or "no competition". Do you realize how dumb that false dilemma is? Congress could have also fully funded COTS and its selection of four competitors as NASA requested. But instead they downselected. Again, I have an explanation for that which doesn't require competition among certain larger defense corporations.

Re:Camel in the tent

[khallow]

If you 'owned' an irreplaceable multi billion dollar asset - and would get scorched by your bosses and atomized by the public if it got so much as scratched... you'd be pathologically paranoid too.

I'm not sure why I got two replies on this particular statement. You do agree after all. Maybe it did need some nuanced explanation.

Re:Camel in the tent

[AHuxley]

NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS.
They have that Austrian feeling as a foreign architect takes way too many pics. Somewhere in the heavens, they are building.

Re:Camel in the tent

[Anonymous Coward]

He never said NASA being patholigically paranoid about what gets close to the ISS was a bad thing.

Re:Camel in the tent

[Anonymous Coward]

He did not say that it was wrong. He said that they are paranoid. And they are. More importantly, we have seen that Russia, USA, EU, Japan, and now SpaceX have obviously done these and made certain that the ISS is in great shape. IOW, NASA is doing a great jobs already and has a better sense of what is needed then do neo-cons protecting their jobs bill. Adding more regs from that group of idiots does NOTHING to add to safety.

Windbourne.

on time and on budget

[Anonymous Coward]

"on time and on budget"

I know there's an "oh, you" meme somewhere in that summary.

I think we all know it will take twice as long and cost 5 times as much as originally contracted.

Re:Lockheed? Orion?

[tipo159]

This "accord" is for low earth orbit commercial space launches. Orion is intended for beyond LEO. Or something like that.

Re:Lockheed? Orion?

[camperdave]

Orion is not meant for ISS operations. Orion is meant for Beyond Earth Orbit: asteroid and lunar exploration, that sort of thing.

Just as obvious.... ATK

[Teancum]

The other "selectee" will be Alliant Techsystems with the Liberty rocket. Yes, I realize they didn't even make the cut from eight or so to four, but they are going to drive everybody else out simply through a massive lobbying effort that will change the outcomes of several districts.

Re:Just as obvious.... ATK

[mark99]

You think ATK can out manuver Boeing? Boeing is 10 times bigger.

Re:Just as obvious.... ATK

[Teancum]

ATK has their fairy god-senators looking out for them and a very effective public relations team which knows how to do some serious lobbying.

I'm sure the hope is more for ATK and Boeing to get this contract and cut SpaceX out completely. Then again ATK was betting that last week's Dragon flight would blow up on the launch pad or otherwise go dead. SpaceX is hard to ignore at the moment, but that is sort of the point why this whole down select is real stupid.

They will be a major contestant for the down select, regardless of what else you think about them.

Re:Just as obvious.... ATK

[jamstar7]

They don't have to outlobby Boeing. All they gotta do is outlobby the rest.

Re:Just as obvious.... ATK

[timeOday]

Boeing is bigger and probably not too agile, but how can they lose after a 50 year head start? They were on the Gemeni program FFS. They make the Delta rocket. Isn't this just a matter of tweaking the terms of the their NASA contracts?

Re:Just as obvious.... ATK

[mark99]

Hard to beleive SpaceX would not be one of them at this point. In fact I think it is fair to say that Musk would drive the man rating of Dragon forward regardless of whether or not they get it, and that could potentially make the CCP program completely idiotic - i.e. if they went for something else and it cratered budget-wise, as space programs traditionally do.
Still, I am not convinced that a good deal of SpaceX's success is somehow begininers luck that could fade as the org grows and they take on too many goals (Man-rating Dragon, Falcon Heavy, Grasshopper, Bigelow, 10 Falcon launches a year, etc). Can they possibly do *all* of that?

Re:Just as obvious.... ATK

[mark99]

Are you sure they have a chance? The article clearly states that they are to be selected form the *current 4*...

Re:Just as obvious.... ATK

[Teancum]

ATK is currently a part of the CCDev program.... they are just "unfunded". Tweaking the language of the appropriations bill to get them included in the selection criteria would be trivial and would only take a couple steak dinners at a posh DC restaurant with the right congressional staff members... and I don't think the guys at NASA who are running the program would complain.

ATK having a chance? I would put them as one of the top contender not necessarily for their technical expertise (although they have cleaned up their proposal considerably) but because of their political connections.

Indeed, if ATK looks like it is in danger of getting cut out of the loop, I would even go so far as to suggest that this whole down select process is going to be jettisoned as a bad political idea that it really is anyway.

Re:Just as obvious.... ATK

[mark99]

It sounds like you know what you are talking about, ... so you are depressing me.

Although I am pretty sure SpaceX will build a human rated Dragon regardless of what the CCD program decides.

Re:Just as obvious.... ATK

[mark99]

Actually that last sentence doesn't parse. Are you saying that if ATK gets cut they wil somehow cause the selection process to be jettisoned? That sounds wrong...

Re:Just as obvious.... ATK

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, that last sentence would be AWESOME, if that happened. Lets hope that it DOES happen. BTW, it does not mean that ATK will be picked in the future. The problem is, that the neo-cons are pushing to MAKE the selection.

Re:Just as obvious.... ATK

[Teancum]

Yes, I'm suggesting that if ATK somehow is excluded from the process of being involved with flying crews to the ISS, that they will change the inclusion parameters so they will become included even if it opens the process up to other competitors. They have some very powerful friends in Congress (both in the House and the Senate) including some very long time supporters who will go to bat for them. The language of the SLS, to give an example, was written explicitly to include ATK components in the legal description for what NASA was permitted to build (hence in part why it is called the "Senate Launch System").

There is an outside possibility that they could be excluded from consideration, but ATK is pushing simultaneously for making a much better technical presentation (they do have some real rocket scientists on their payroll who know more than just the rocket equation and some real-world flying experience of rocket hardware) as well as the political connections to make things stick.

I have my own reservations about the Liberty rocket necessarily being competitive on a commercial basis, but I have to assume they got some people crunching the numbers and are presuming they are going to sell some of their rockets to somebody. The relatively recent announcement of the Liberty rocket + capsule system capable of flying people into space (with Astrium providing the 2nd stage and a derivative of the Orion capsule being used for the crew) seems to be almost perfect timing for this selection process.

Orion is a terrible name.

[Jane Q. Public]

The original Orion concept -- and it get serious attention, even today -- was for an enormous, massive parabolic dome with a spacecraft on top of it. The spacecraft injects small nuclear bombs into the dome, and they explode at the focus. It's pretty much guaranteed that thing will MOVE! And yes, it is quite feasible and technically possible.

I don't think anybody is seriously considering building one of those right now, but the name stuck, and Orion has now been known to generations as "the nuclear bomb powered spacecraft".

Kind of a negative name to pick for your newfangled, modern, but chemical-powered machine.

Re:Orion is a terrible name.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, Orion related spacecraft names should be restricted to those that use very high temperature fission for propulsion.

Happy D-DAY Anniversary Holland

[Anonymous Coward]

Light up a big doobie and think back of all the wonderful doobies you've had, thanks to the Americans who saved your ass all those years ago.

Re:Lockheed? Orion?

[Teancum]

Orion is not meant for ISS operations. Orion is meant for Beyond Earth Orbit: asteroid and lunar exploration, that sort of thing.

That isn't what NASA was saying back when the Ares I was still under active development. The Ares I was being designed specifically so the Orion capsule could get to the ISS (complete with an ISS mating adapter) that really makes it a direct competitor to the SpaceX Dragon, at least for manned spacecraft.

Orion really does a lousy job for areas beyond LEO though. While it has just under 2x the usable internal volume that the Apollo spacecraft used, that won't exactly be something to brag about. Perhaps reasonable for a trip to the Moon, but I don't see how it will possibly be used on a trip to an asteroid much less Mars. The "habitable volume" of the Orion is very much comparable to the internal volume of the Dragon. I just don't see how astronauts are going to be expected to hang out in that kind of volume for weeks and months.

What makes the Orion useful for beyond LEO is mainly that it has its own solar energy generator array, and that the heat shield is being designed to perform re-entry of a free-return trajectory from the Moon and a similar return flight coming from Mars. Then again the Dragon capsule is being designed with those same parameters as well.

Orion might be a piece of the puzzle in terms of getting to Mars or somewhere else in the Solar System, but by itself it won't get the job done.

In other words ...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

... the Democratic administration wants to encourage free market competition, and the Republicans in Congress want to limit it. This should not be a shock to anyone who pays attention to reality rather than party rhetoric.

Re:In other words ...

[mcgrew]

the Democratic administration wants to encourage free market competition, and the Republicans in Congress want to limit it.

And Republicans are supposed to be for lower taxes. Meanwhile, Ken Davlin, the Democrat who was Mayor here before he shot himself, didn't raise taxes once. Mike Houstin, the current Republican Mayor, raised electric rates (the city owns the power plant) last year, and raised property yaxes this year.

I wonder why nobody seems to notice that the Tea Party didn't seem to mind Bush taking us from a balanced budget to the biggest defecit in history until Obama was elected? Or why they think we're "Taxed Enough Already" when Federal taxes are lower than they've been since Truman?

We Americans are (collectively) incredibly stupid. What's worse, the politicians know it.

Terms and conditions

[timeOday]

It appears that the old model was for NASA to pay contractors to develop national assets, whereas the new model is for NASA to pay contractors to develop contractor-owned assets?

.

Also, I think we are bound for a cold-water-in-the-face moment of realization that the privatization of space launch means it is now divorced from nationalism/patriotism for the first time. It is no longer "we" or "us" or "our" space program. A private company can re-incorporate elsewhere to save on taxes or avoid regulations in a heartbeat. They can also provide services to the highest bidder (or more to the point, to all bidders) regardless of the payload. I am still in favor of privatization because it seems the US manned space program has finally collapsed under its own bureaucratic weight. Nevertheless people realize this is not just going to be a cost-saver.

Re:Terms and conditions

[mark99]

I think NASA showed that they hadn't a clue what they should do with their terribly expensively developed "National Assets". They are all now rusting hulks. And they are developing another one with no clue as to what it is for (jobs for retiring engineers maybe).
At least the commercial guys are likely to rack their brains out as to how they can get more money out of "their" assets.
And face it - if a war broke out and SpaceX had useful assets, who do you think would control them overnight?

Re:Terms and conditions

[gpmanrpi]

I had the same question. So instead of funding one project, they are now funding 2.5 projects? How is this any different than pet projects that distributed out NASA in the first place. I am amazed at how quickly the private sector could get these from concept, to testing/deployment. However, it is clear that the private sector is standing on the shoulders of giants. The fact that they could do this so quickly was because the information was publicly owned or at least easily available. I am curious as to if there will be an initial jump in creativity only to be hidden behind trade secret and patent(IP) wall. Ultimately, the cost really is the same as you say. It is the whole shell game. These are private companies ROI is not magical. At a certain point it will increase because it has to. Investors want dividends; they are not in it because space travel is cool. Eventually, you have to invent ways of generating revenue, and that means raising prices at a rate that is higher than inflation. There is no actual incentive to be under budget, and paying some lobbyists will insure that these companies will be paid. Perhaps I am being cynical, but privatization, in my experience, has generally not worked out in the long term if the goal is cost savings. In contract law, the concept of puffery always accompanies the sales pitch. The conversation that leads to the bargain that is not considered part of the contract, but may have affected the inducement. So you sell the public on the idea that the private sector is magically more efficient than a highly regulated government, but meanwhile in the terms of the contract you make sure that the government is the one holding the bag if assumptions were not correct, or there are "unexpected" over-runs. So the puffery is the "cost-savings," just like "this used car runs like a dream", but is sold "AS-IS" disclaiming all express or implied warranties.

Re:Terms and conditions

[Teancum]

What you are forgetting here is that this particular program, the commercial crew development program (commonly called simply CCDev) is not being operated like a traditional government contract in the fashion that the Manhattan Project of the 1940's was run (and how most major engineering projects have been paid for since).

When the Manhattan project was under development, the bureaucrats realized that they were asking companies to literally come up with stuff that nobody knew if it could be done at all much less be able to reasonably estimate the costs of building those things. The same expectation was true for the Apollo project, as well as many of the aircraft and ships being built for the U.S. military over the years (like nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers). A rough guess was made over the costs involved, but no company was willing to gamble billions of dollars on the off chance their estimates for the cost of these projects was wrong. Instead, the government took the financial risk in something called a "cost-plus" contract. In other words, the contractor was expected to accurately report what the actual costs of the project were, and when the whole thing was finished there was a reasonable expectation of a profit for the company... in other words the "plus" was a guaranteed financial bonus given to the company regardless of how much the contract cost.

This is also where you hear loud screaming with cost overruns, because a project that runs into some technical challenges or has the requirements change over the years of its development will end up driving up those "costs" that simply must be paid for by tax payers and not the companies involved.

For spacecraft being built by companies for NASA, this is the only way those spacecraft have been paid for. Some of this is understandable, as nobody before Werner Von Braun had ever built a spacecraft that took people to the Moon and brought them back to the Earth. To say that anybody in 1960 had a clue as to how much it really was going to cost to build a Saturn V is somebody somebody smoking some hemp or having a few too many beers. For crash programs where there is an issue of national security on the line, a cost-plus contract model even makes sense. There were slogans posted on walls of NASA contractors that openly bragged "waste anything but time".

What is happening with CCDev (the commercial crew development program) and COTS (commercial orbital transportation services) is something very different. There are also several very different things that are happening here too.

One of the things going on is that NASA is providing technical support for companies who want to provide commercial services that NASA could use, such as delivering supplies to the International Space Station (aka COTS) or providing a service to bring astronauts to Low-Earth orbit at various places, including the ISS as well. By technical support, NASA is providing consultants to explain some of the history and technical details for how their earlier spacecraft worked, what problems they had with historical spacecraft like the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, and other vehicles that NASA has worked with over the years. NASA also has huge libraries of technical studies and documentation about these spacecraft including performance data and details about all kinds of engine designs and all kinds of other engineering data that is very useful for anybody building rockets or trying to go into space. Providing these consultants or having people help in digging up that documentation does cost some money, so part of the program is simply paying for all of those people doing that running around, scanning documents if they need to be digitized (keep in mind that some of that data is from the 1950's and 1960's) and perhaps flying consultants to the factories where these commercial companies are building the rockets. Useful stuff and it doesn't go direct to these private companies, but is an ongoing expense.

Another thing NASA is doing is helping pro

Re:Terms and conditions

[the gnat]

A private company can re-incorporate elsewhere to save on taxes or avoid regulations in a heartbeat.

Wrong. Quoting a representative posting on the SpaceX careers page:

"To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State."

I guess this is one of those regulations they could theoretically avoid, but where exactly do you think would be a better place to do business, given that a large fraction of the potential customers will be in the US (either the government or companies)? And where else do you think has a sufficient labor pool? Right now the choices are the USA, Russia, or the EU. India might get there eventually. You'd have to be insane to relocate a commercial space flight company to China.

Taxpayer subsidises 'private' industry yet again.

[Anonymous Coward]

But the profits will all go private - nice deal for someone

Handout to the rich

[Stiletto]

So the public funds it and takes all the risk, and presumably, all the upside and profits go to private individuals/investors. Blatant transfer of public wealth into private hands. We're not even trying to hide it anymore.

Re:Handout to the rich

[toruonu]

You forget the alternative. If the public funds the development of new rocket systems by NASA and keeps using them at a cost of 5x that of the private company, then after N launches the total cost for the public is higher than had they developed it in cooperation with a private enterprise that then operates the technology under contracts at a much lower cost. As an example, Falcon 9 of Space X has lift capacity of 10 tons for a cost of $56M. The Delta-IV rocket had 22 tons and $300M so the cost per kg is 3x higher. The Ariane 5 rocket by ESA has 21 ton lift to LEO and cost of $200M. The Atlas V (earlier one) had lift on 9t at a cost of $125M.

Now if Space X can pull off Falcon Heavy (the first launch is planned already in 2013) then the planned cost of 53t to LEO is $80-125M. That gives it a per kg cost of 5.8x less than Delta-IV, 4x less than Ariane 5 etc. And that's assuming the high end of the price range. It's also a rocket that can deliver cargo to trans-lunar-orbit or even to Mars (14t to Mars, 16t to trans lunar). Why the hell would we need an SLS with 50-130t capacity with an outrageous price tag when we can just launch two Falcon 9 heavy's for the same capacity and probably less than the equivalent launch cost and if need be assemble the final inter-plantery spacecraft in orbit...

Re:Handout to the rich

[toruonu]

Oh forgot to add. Space X took the risk on themselves when the did the Falcon 1 and it failed 3x in row. They bet the company on the 4th launch and it worked and have been delivering cargo to LEO and now to ISS since. The Falcon 9 works (it has had 3/3 successes) and Falcon Heavy is basically re-using a lot of the Falcon 9 material so it's likely they'll make it work too. The maiden flight of SLS is planned in 2017 while I'd assume the Falcon Heavy or it's successor might easily be providing the service in 2017 for a lot cheaper (they'll probably have ironed out the reusability part of the first stages by then).

Re:Handout to the rich

[Stiletto]

I won't dispute your facts, but I don't think we're comparing apples to apples. What other differences are there between the platforms that would account for the different cost per kg? Safety? Redundancy? It has to be more than simple "government waste". Yes, some of the difference might be waste, but that's an argument for reducing waste, not for punting and instead simply handing public money over to private hands.

Re:Handout to the rich

[toruonu]

I think a lot of this is indeed coming from the fact that SpaceX is operating like a startup. They also have claimed a lot of the cost reduction comes from the fact that they manufacture every single component themselves in their own factory where the raw materials come in from one door and spaceships/rockets come out the other. They also re-use a lot of the tooling etc because of the design (Falcon 9 is basically 9x Falcon 1 and Falcon Heavy is basically 3x Falcon 9 with inter-exchange of fuel). Due to their relative size as a company their corporate overhead has to be an order of magnitude smaller than say Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. And their main interest is first off to get to be a major player in the space industry and to compete they have to be unique in some way and their way is the cost. I'm guessing their cross margin per launch is quite small while I'd not be surprised if others have a 100% or more cross margin. Musk's vision is to help make humans a space faring civilization with cost to orbit heavily reduced and allowing exploration of the solar system including colonization. As I've understood his hope is to retire on Mars so he's pushing with the company towards making that a reality within his lifetime (assuming he retires at 60/65 he's got 20/25 years left, it's not fully utopic).

And having worked for a private company and government contract and a large EU project I can tell you that the costs shown in a large EU project per person are far higher than you'd normally associate with the tasks done just because you can. And considering that there aren't too many players around I'd not be surprised if they've kept the launch device costs somewhat bloated because they can and it's being disrupter right now by an independent player that has different motives :)

Re:Handout to the rich

[toruonu]

Damn hit submit and then remembered your other parts of the question. With regard to safety and redundancy it's actually in favor of SpaceX. As an example from Falcon Heavy wiki: "The structural safety margins are 40% above flight loads, higher than the 25% margins of other rockets.[10]". They've designed the whole things from ground up for manned flight with extended safety margins so this is not the reason for cheapness...

And with regard to Musk and his motives for the company. Look at the recent 60 minutes interview with him. When Neil Armstrong etc claim that one shouldn't push for commercialization and NASA should do everything themselves (sounds like SLS lobbying to get the old guys out and get support without due consideration what they're doing) Elon's basically in tears. You can see that those guys were/are his heroes and motivation to do the same kind of stuff and it really hurt him. So he's not a fat CEO waiting for a fat paycheck, but this IS his vision and hope and that defines his priorities.

Re:Handout to the rich

[robot256]

SpaceX is saving money by NOT cutting corners in the design phase. The biggest driver of operational cost in these projects is when something goes wrong in the design process and complicated procedures are added to avoid a total redesign. By getting it right the first time, or having the guts to step back and fix what's wrong instead of slapping on a bandaid, their system will be both cheaper amd more reliable in the long run.

Also, you underestimate how much overhead there is in a 3-tier contracting scheme. 3x cost would be just about believable.

Re:Handout to the rich

[JWW]

Yep. Elon's response to the criticism of his heroes shows one thing:

This guy has a PASSION for achieving his goals and driving his company forward.

It is something that IMHO NASA needs to grab on to and embrace.

SpaceX is in this to succeed and they appear to be incredibly committed to their goals.

Its nice to see people with that kind of drive back in the space industry again.

Re:Handout to the rich

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully, that 60 Minutes article will help counteract competitors lobbyist money.
      They certainly appear to deserve it.

Both SpaceX in a good way, and Nasa, the congress and the space industry in another way.
    The problem is that with that much imbalance in interests, SpaceX (and whoever else does an honest effort for solving the problem) needs another friend.
          (Perhaps the Internet?)

Re:Taxpayer subsidises 'private' industry yet agai

[toruonu]

I'd like to point out that Space X did first prove they're capable of real life feats with Musk's own money. Yes the latest developments and the docking with ISS has been co-funded (or mostly funded) by NASA and they'll pay them more for additional launches, but they're getting a real deal out of it as SpaceX is doing it way cheaper than any alternative and they actually deliver already today, not far fetched promises.

history repeating

[Anonymous Coward]

Losers may come out on top after all. Those who drop out of government contracts will offer their services internationally, creating global manned space operations market. It happened in past with revolutionary designs of small arms, as well as with electronic computers. There are probably more examples which I don't remember at the moment. Other, smaller countries who can't afford fully fledged space program funding, and wealthy individuals from around the world will find their commercial offerings tempting and useful for their own plans. We might get proliferation of corporate owned SSs in LEO, and in the long run proliferation of space industries in other technologically advanced countries as well.

Great name, unworthy new owner

[Immerman]

I don't know about the name being negative, I was quite disappointed to learn the "new Orion" was chemical powered. Hardly seems fair to give a glorified orbital space-taxi the name that once belonged to a design that would have put the the entire solar system at our feet. Sort of like resurrecting the retired jersey number of a football superstar only to give it to the water-boy.

Of course the "old Orion" could never have been used as a launch vehicle or even in near orbit without serious ecological and EMP-related side effects, not to mention treaty violations. But in deep space... well the flash wouldn't hurt anything there, and the whole place is already bathed in radiation far beyond what a little rapidly-dissipating fallout cloud could possibly contribute. I mean come on, before you were anywhere close to cruising speed you'd have multiple Earth-diameters between detonation points.

They could have at least saved the name until building a high-thrust ion drive vehicle with similar potential.

Re:Great name, unworthy new owner

[Jane Q. Public]

Yes, there are certainly very strict limitations on its normal use. But on the other hand, if a big sacrifice (of a rather large area) were really necessary, technically there is nothing preventing it from being single-stage-to-orbit... and far beyond.

Read "Lucifer's Hammer" by Niven and Pournelle. (And maybe you already have.) But the Orion concept has been around far longer than their book. They borrowed it, they didn't invent it.

Re:Great name, unworthy new owner

[Jane Q. Public]

"They could have at least saved the name until building a high-thrust ion drive vehicle with similar potential."

It's a different concept. An ion drive of any size could probably not power such a beast off the Earth, for the simple reason that ion drives rely on low mass at extremely high velocity to power their acceleration. But that velocity is necessarily limited by the currently known laws of physics. It probably would not be sufficient for escape velocity by itself.

But agreed. Ion thrusters are, today, designed for extremely efficient thrust / mass ratio, but only over time. If that same efficiency could be brought to bear in huge quantities all at once, you could have liftoff. Cheap.

But we're not quite there yet. It's kind of like saying, "We need the output of a standard 100W light bulb for 10 straight years, all in 0.0001 seconds."

We'll get there. Not just yet.

Re:Great name, unworthy new owner

[Jane Q. Public]

In contrast, Orion (the old-school Orion concept) gives you the output of a couple of billion of them, in a few microseconds. Nobody said it was efficient, but if nobody's using the key you can always use the sledgehammer.

Re:Great name, unworthy new owner

[Immerman]

An ion drive of any size could probably not power such a beast off the Earth

Very true, but the getting off Earth part isn't really that interesting, we can do it already and it's *really* not something you would have wanted to use a nuke-drive for anyway, unless you have to do so very quickly before the space-elephants drop a kinetic weapon on you (loved Lucifer's Hammer, a battered old copy still holds it's place in my personal library)

For getting around the solar system though - if a state of the art ion drive is 1000x too weak to do what you want, strap 1000 drives to your hull and add enough nuclear reactors to power them all. Not at all an elegant solution, but then I think that would only qualify it even more for the name. Granted the specific impulse is probably well below what could be managed with a true Orion design, but then massive overkill was the name of the game there, so we don't really need to get anywhere close to be useful - I mean come on sustained 1g acceleration will have you beyond the orbit of Pluto in ~12 days, but even 1/100g will get you there in 4 months. And a paltry 1/1000g is enough to get you from Earth to Mars in only 46 days at conjunction, or 100days at opposition - if the sun weren't in the way... and you didn't mind doing all your deceleration in the last few microseconds of the journey.

Hmm, of course all those are assuming flat-space accelerations, the whole climbing out of the sun's gravitational well thing would start factoring in at lower accelerations. Still I think the point is obvious - if you can sustain any sort of acceleration at all the solar system isn't actually that big a place, it's just that it's not possible to sustain thrust with a chemical drive.

An interesting talk on the Orion project from a fellow that managed to salvage a lot of research lost by NASA, if you don't mind seeing stuff still technically classified as Top Secret Orion

Re:Great name, unworthy new owner

[Jane Q. Public]

Generally agreed. Though "specific impulse" is kind of a hard measure to try to use for continuous drives. It rather presumes a fixed energy exerted over a fixed amount of time.

Which of course is one of the reasons we should be re-thinking these things from scratch. The old chemical-explosion model is probably, mostly, outmoded.

Re:Great name, unworthy new owner

[Jane Q. Public]

BTW, contrary to much of contemporary thinking, getting off the earth is VERY interesting and is in fact probably the single most central issue.

The gravity well is the single largest obstacle to complete conquest of local space. As long as missions continue to be launched from Earth, they will continue to be unnecessarily expensive. By a factor of 10 to 100 at least.

Put industrial plants on the moon (a completely feasible, if expensive, concept today) and you divide those costs by many times.

We must have a lunar colony. Must... not maybe.

Re:Great name, unworthy new owner

[Immerman]

Not quite -it's simpler if you don't think of (non-specific) impulse in terms of energy, but rather momentum. Let me use a battery as a metaphor: A rechargeable AA battery contains about 3Watt-hours of energy, and you can extract that energy at whatever rate you want, within the physical constraints of the battery. 3W for 1h, 1W for 3h, or any other combination so long as #Watts * #hours = 3Wh. Similarly a rocket's fuel tank contains a certain amount of impulse, say 100Ns (for an itty-bitty rocket). You can then draw on that impulse however you like, within the limits of your rocket. 100N for 1s, 0.25N for 400s, whatever you like. No matter how fast you draw on it, as long as you travel in a straight line when you run out of fuel your rocket's momentum will have changed by 100Ns ( or kg*m/s, impulse and momentum use the same units). That assumes massless fuel though, the reality is not quite so straightforward.

Specific impulse simply normalizes for fuel mass: how much impulse is in the tank divided by how massive the fuel is. technically speaking it has units of m/s, but writing it that way makes it easy to confuse with velocity, so Ns/kg is generally used instead. Conceptually specific impulse (Isp) can be mapped to velocity change (accelerating in a straight line) by the equation:
deltaV = Isp * (mass of fuel) / (mass of craft + remaining fuel),
except that the masses are continuously changing as the fuel is consumed so you need to use calculus to get the actual answer, which I believe should give you an equation dominated by a natural log of the fuel mass if that significantly exceeds the mass of the craft itself - hence the ridiculous increases in necessary fuel as Isp falls

Re:Great name, unworthy new owner

[Immerman]

I'd say getting off the Earth is more challenging than interesting, some of the potential solutions are interesting, but the task itself not so much. A fuel-mining moonbase is probably a big part of the answer because it's not actually terribly difficult and manages to sidestep a large part of the challenge. An Earth-based railgun that extends out of the atmosphere could be another part of the solution, but that's a *massive* engineering project with some almost completely untested technology. In the long term a beanstalk would be cool, but that exponentially increasing diameter on a 45,000+km cable presents a pretty drastic engineering and materials challenge - even our strongest coaxial carbon nanotubes are only just barely strong enough to do the job, theoretically, and any engineer that would even consider building such a thing without a safety factor in the 10 to 100 range should be shot before they get a *whole* lot of people killed.

Personally I like the tumbling-cable idea, a variant of which I've been working on as a hobby project - a few thousand kilometers of cable and a couple good-sized asteroids, and we could conceivably manage almost-zero-energy transfers between the surface of Earth and the Moon, and be able to launch craft out into the solar system with some pretty drastic velocities, all with no moving parts(except for fine-tuning systems), I wrote about it in another thread just a yesterday:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2906501&cid=40278121

Another handout

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA and congress? I believe many of you forgot to understand what you read. They reached a deal to give away our money to a "company". Private development? for the good of mankind, never heard of patients, Never heard of secret proesses that are part of the "secret sauce?", that makes your product better.
This actually legitimizes taking space out of education.Giving the able student one less dream, or asperation for the future. Government science was hard to get into, but the processes were open for transfer to all other, not just one, company.

Re:Another handout

[queazocotal]

I misread the topic as 'Nasa, Congress Reach Around'

Re:Another handout

[__aaeihw9960]

This actually legitimizes taking space out of education.Giving the able student one less dream, or asperation for the future. Government science was hard to get into, but the processes were open for transfer to all other, not just one, company.

NOPE! It just takes the astronaut dream from science majors and gives it to the business majors. I can see it now: Come to THE University of Chicago, where ASTRONAUTS are made!

Re:Lockheed? Orion?

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps competition happened to Orion?
    Lockheed, welcome to good, quick, AND cheap. (and eventually better, faster, and cheaper).

SpaceX has demonstrated that with today's technology base,
      getting to orbit is not as hard as it was in the 60's.
It's still hard, but doesn't require the unlimited resources that it did in the space race.

They did this because their money was on the line and they had only a limited amount of it.
They litterally had to succeed or die as a company.
This, coupled with a belief in space, appears to be a severe motivation to make a good and simple working gadget.
NASA paying a company to develop a system appears counterproductive.
It rewards failure with more money whereas paying for rides rewards success.

So as a taxpayer, I should be happy that we are now only paying 2.5x the going rate for a ride to orbit?
    Hopefully, NASA had a better idea of how to structure the multiple source system.
      A development contract doesn't seem to make sense any more.
      Offering to pay for a limited number of successful rides to orbit might be better.

Re:Lockheed? Orion?

[camperdave]

Yes, Orion was, back in the Ares-1 days envisioned as going to the ISS. However, that was only meant as a stop-gap, a temporary solution until Commercial Crew came online. Back in those days, the plan was to fly the shuttles to 2015 as well.

Unfortunately, as built, Ares-1 could not even put Orion into orbit, and it's big brother, Ares-V, would have been prohibitively expensive to build and launch (and further, wasn't meant to take crew). One was overkill, and the other, anemic.

I too wonder about long duration flights on the Orion. I envision a secondary capsule, something along the lines of a transhab module from Bigelow, being added to the Orion for such trips.

Re:Lockheed? Orion?

[Teancum]

The commercial crew program wasn't even a part of the planning under Constellation. To suggest it was a "stop gap" is completely misrepresenting how it was sold to Congress. Commercial crew has been perceived as the "stop gap" until Constellation could be built, as a sort of "insurance program" if there might have been problems. In fact, in congressional testimony and other public discussion about the future of manned spaceflight, it was almost as if the commercial crew didn't even exist as a program with many members of congress trying to go out of their way to kill the program... just as is being done again by Frank Wolf. They simply can't conceive a situation where a private company on their own dime could develop a spacecraft.

I agree with you that as a practical matter there were numerous problems with the Orion. One of the largest problems with the vehicle is that it was explicitly engineered in such a way that it couldn't fly on either the Atlas V or Delta IV rockets, so it simply had to fly on something like the Ares I or Ares V. That wasn't an engineering decision but rather a political decision made explicitly so EELVs couldn't be considered in the process and that so much money would be dumped down the rathole of Orion development that it became "too big to fail". That is also why Orion development has continued, and why the SLS program was developed.... to build a rocket large enough to carry the Orion capsule since obvious none of the existing launchers could possibly be able to carry a spacecraft capable of putting people into space.

Then again it sort of stings when you point out that Atlas rockets have been used in the past to put people into space. John Glenn didn't mind the ride... 50 years ago. If it could be done then, why not today?

Re:Lockheed? Orion?

[khallow]

One can always chain capsules to make larger volumes. But I must admit that it'd probably make much more sense to attach the capsule to some sort of inflatable habitat, such as Bigelow's proposed BA 330 (which would have over 35 times the interior volume of an Orion capsule).

Boeing for partial funding?

[maroberts]

It would probably keep the competion tight if Boeing were the company kept on partial funding whilst SpaceX and Blue Origin (or maybe Sierra Nevada) duke it out.

After all its not a company thats heavily dependent on the space program, and could keep a project ticking over easier than any of the others...

Re:Lockheed? Orion?

[camperdave]

"Stop gap" was perhaps the wrong term. However, it is definitely the case that commercial crew would be the primary means to get to the ISS, and Orion merely a backup: "NASA shall make use of United States commercially provided ISS crew transfer and crew rescue services to the maximum extent practicable." [/include #PDFWarn]

Re:Lockheed? Orion?

[Teancum]

That is where you get things like the NAUTLUS-X proposal.

It was sort of sad though, at a recent "press day" at KSC prior to the launch of the Falcon 9 there were several NASA public relations guys that were hyping up the Orion capsule and the SLS as the "deep space" alternative to the Dragon capsule, and waxing on and on about how Orion was the "solution" to deep space travel and that the Dragon would only be used for trips to places like the ISS.

One of the participants at the gathering asked the NASA official about the NAUTLUS-X program, and it totally stumped the guy to the point he sort of suggested that it was a private program, or something made up out of whole cloth by some troll on Wikipedia.

I sure hope somebody talked to the guy. A video of this can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjutZLmKchs

The statement was made about an hour and a half into the video. The beginning of this video is worth watching just to see Gwynne Shotwell talk candidly about SpaceX and discuss some upcoming project they are working on, but the later half sort of shows the political climate all of this commercial crew program is working in and how even major players like NASA PR guys who should know this stuff are misinformed about even their own agency.