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Orbital Becomes Second Private Firm To Send Cargo Craft To ISS
An anonymous reader writes "Orbital Sciences Corp.'s unmanned Cygnus spacecraft delivered 3,000 pounds of equipment, fresh fruit, and Christmas presents from the families of all six ISS spacemen today. 'From the men and women involved in the design, integration and test, to those who launched the Antares (rocket) and operated the Cygnus, our whole team has performed at a very high level for our NASA customer, and I am very proud of their extraordinary efforts,' said David W. Thompson, president and chief executive officer of Orbital, in a written statement from the company."
This is the second time they've done it, so the they became the second private firm last year.
In other words,
Thanks, Obama!
If we assume ISS shouldn't just be deorbited as a waste of money, space policy is one of the very few things Obama got right. Possibly because he doesn't really care about it.
EADS-Astrium/AirBus (they are going through a reorganization at the moment) is arguably a major contender for private commercial spaceflight launch as well. RKK Energia (the company who makes the Soyuz rockets) is also a private company who is competitive with the launch costs of both SpaceX and Orbital. You can debate if they really are a private companies or not (they do have shareholders and private investors... but also governments as investors as well).
Richard Branson has said he has his sights upon orbital spaceflight with Virgin Galactic, and there is also Stratolaunch, but those are the only other companies I can see being real competition. I had high hopes for ARCA, the Romanian space group that is doing some interesting things, but their projects seem to take even longer to happen than I thought. I'm sort of pleasantly surprised they are still doing stuff. Another group to watch is Copenhagen Suborbitals, who is building flying hardware (they have sent aloft more than a couple missions) and have technology that could at least theoretically make the trip into orbit over time.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/01/orbitals-antares-loft-cygnus-orb-1-mission/
This whole "look how gr8 commercial spaceflight can do so much better than government!" stuff is nonsense propaganda.
Again, SpaceX built a new rocket engine and two new rockets and launched them into space for less than NASA spent to put a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launch it into the Atlantic Ocean.
Aerospace, except in perhaps the first 5 years of flight, has always been about the government making the long-term investments and R&D, and private companies delivering final products.
So, you're claiming that government developed and funded the 747 and 787?
Most people don't realize that getting to orbit takes almost an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more energy than getting to space (suborbitally). Given that Branson has taken 10 years to get (almost) to commercial suborbital flight, I wouldn't hold my breath for Virgin Galactic anytime soon. I suspect that running commercial suborbital operations will be more complex and difficult than he suspects, but I'm still glad he's doing it.
Branson is more focused on creating a new space-related business than on creative new engineering to service existing business. I'm not sure whether such a market exists in the first place, but he's more about exploring new markets than new planets. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't think VGal will ever be about putting payloads in orbit.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Except for the fact that Lockheed and Boeing have been NASA's contractors for decades.
The difference is how these contracts are funded. The COTS contracts for SpaceX and Orbital have two huge things going for them:
1) These are not "cost-plus" contracts, but rather fixed price contracts where any cost savings during operations is kept entirely by the launch provider. If either company can save even a few hundred dollars by doing something cheaper or avoiding a purchase of the proverbial $10k wrench & hammer, those companies see that savings directly. Neither Lockheed-Martin nor Boeing care about stuff like that as they simply pass those "costs" in the "cost-plus" contract on to taxpayers. There are no cost overruns in a fixed price contract too, so if either Orbital or SpaceX have some unexpected costs showing up.... they need to eat those costs.
2) Both SpaceX and Orbital are free to use these launch vehicles for any other purpose as everything they've made belongs to them and not NASA or the federal government.
I do think there is a time and place for cost-plus contracts where there is a genuine national priority that something absolutely must be made. None the less, this really is a different thing and in a great many ways these other companies have been extensions of the government in how they made their vehicles.
Had the shuttle been capable of taking us to the Moon or to at least Lunar orbit
The problem with the shuttle wasn't that it didn't go beyond LEO. It was a space shuttle, that's what they're for, surface to orbit. For longer trips you take the main ship.
The problem was that is was intended to be a low-cost all-purpose reusable truck that would free up funding for other projects. (For example, that "main ship" I mentioned.) But in reality it became the entirety of HSF, consuming vast amounts of funding. Too much to allow its own replacement to be developed, too much to allow iterative development of Shuttle MkII MkIII MkIV... Too much to commercialise. Too much to allow HSF to advance.
By now pushing LEO-work into the commercial sphere, there's a chance to finally turn to other things... ...Except SLS has been carefully designed to make exactly the same mistakes as the shuttle. The shuttle, okay, they were trying something new, they didn't know better. This time it's wilful and vindictive.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Once you get something to 60,000 ft you can design the nozzle to be 20% more efficient for that altitude and higher vs one that was efficient at lower altitudes. This gives you a pretty big advantage other then the height and that rocket can take you all the way to space. Now you are only throwing out one stage and have a rocket that can carry a higher mass vs it's size to orbit.
Like maybe deciding to go with the cheaper o-rings with the narrower operating temperatures; just how cold could a Florida launch be anyway?
Engineers from Thiokol wanted to use the more expensive o-rings in that case.... and NASA overruled demanding the cheaper ones. Furthermore, Thiokol also wanted to scrub the launch on the day that Challenger flew.... and NASA administrators thought it was politically a bad idea and flew anyway.
This whole line of thought is bullshit as it presumes that a commercial company would risk lives to save $10, as if they want to pay higher per launch premiums to their insurance providers not to mention want the blood of people on their hands. Look at the problems RKK Energia is facing right now with their vehicles because there have been failures last year and tell me launching companies don't worry about that stuff.
Not disagreeing with your point about the need to reduce costs, but I'm not sure if India is a good reference in prices. What are they paying to their engineers and technicians? Is their hardware on par of American, Russian and European in terms of safety, reliability or capabilities? Is that number even correct and not made up? As a guy with no knowledge in the matter it's really hard to judge whether Obital/SpaceX costs are overpriced or not without knowing the reason those costs exist in first place and how India is doing their magic.
You're arguing that commercial spaceflight stands on the shoulders of necessarily-government-funded, unprofitable research; the parent post seems to be arguing that going forward, it is more efficient to let private enterprise do the work. You both seem to be correct from where I'm standing. If it's cheaper to let private businesses run the launches for publicly-funded space operations, then I'm all for it.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Sending a probe to Mars and sending 3,000 lbs to the ISS are two totally different things. First, if your programming is off just slightly, you miss Mars, or as we have seen previously, you crash into the planet and loose your probe. Hit the ISS with a capsule carrying that extra weight and you loose just more than the capsule.
But the real difference between the Orbital price and India is that India is reporting its actual cost. What Orbital charges NASA includes a hefty profit margin. The actual costs are significantly lower.