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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."
How is an IPA going to get people into orbit?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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.
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?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
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.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
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.
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.
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.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!