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SpaceX and Boeing Battle For US Manned Spaceflight Contracts
An anonymous reader writes: $3 billion in funding is on the line as private space companies duke it out for contracts to end U.S. reliance on Russian rockets for manned spaceflight. The two biggest contenders are SpaceX and Boeing, described as "the exciting choice" and "the safe choice," respectively. "NASA is charting a new direction 45 years after sending humans to the Moon, looking to private industry for missions near Earth, such as commuting to and from the space station. Commercial operators would develop space tourism while the space agency focuses on distant trips to Mars or asteroids." It's possible the contracts would be split, giving some tasks to each company. It's also possible that the much smaller Sierra Nevada Corp. could grab a bit of government funding as well for launches using its unique winged-shuttle design.
Contracts this big never go to just one company. They'll both get a slice of the pie - the only question is who gets the bigger slice.
More accurately, the "exciting" choice is the inexpensive choice, and inexpensive means more launches, or more money available for other programs.
I don't know any astronauts, more's the pity. But since SpaceX costs something like a quarter of Boeing, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd support the cheaper option in the hopes that it would mean four times as many launches and hence four times the chances to actually make it into space. These guys tend to be repurposed test pilots, after all.
SpaceX closed 9 deals, w/possible 2-3 heavies. Four more in the next few weeks, incl one non-GEO, then maybe 4 more before end of the year.
Source: https://twitter.com/AvWeekPari...
Since when does Volvo cars starts fucking?
Swedish. You know. Like the Norskies, but looser in the morals department.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
As an astronaut, I wonder which would appeal to me more? The "Exciting Choice" or the "Safe Choice?"
Depends... is your surname "Kerman" ?
=Smidge=
In the case of the "Exciting Choice", Astronauts will be riding in the same basic design as what Commercial Passengers will use, which means more flights and (theoretically) higher reliability due to a continuously refined manufacturing process, plus the loss of commercial passenger dollars. Going with the "Safe Choice" means you're riding in one of perhaps only four or five of a series that will ever be produced. The loss of commercial dollars is a big deal to SpaceX as it represents a much larger market than Government spaceflight will in the next five decades.
moox. for a new generation.
"There is no purpose to manned spaceflight. The scientific return comes from unmanned spaceflight."
You are currently modded +4 Insightful for having claimed, essentially, that the HST repair and upgrade missions could have all been done by unmanned systems. I have points, I could have modded you as you deserve. I could just ask for a citation - you're making an extraordinary claim there and you really do deserve to have to back it up or retract it. Instead, I'm taking a couple of months vacation from Slashdot - there's too many like you around - the signal to noise ratio keeps dropping towards an absolute zero, and I join all the 3 digit old farts in saying "This site just ain't what it used to be!" .
Who is John Cabal?
Nope. NASA are building The Precious, sorry, SLS, and no-one else will ever have the money to use it. Heck, NASA probably won't ever have the money to use it, since there are no funded missions that need it.
As I understand it, the Dragon will continue to fly on Falcon 9, and Boeing's Powerpoint Spaceship can theoretically fly on Atlas, Delta or Falcon... if it's ever built.
Yeah, people's lives are on the line here. You've got to go with the company who's got a proven track record in safely launching a modern human-capable spacecraft.
http://www.spacex.com/dragon
Wait, which is the exciting choice then?
We could learn how to play nice with this very comfortable spaceship that just popped up out of nowhere.
Says some hippy who has no clue about the real world.
Yeah, maybe we could all go and live in little hippy communes after 99% of the population magically vanish, but, in the real world, we have to get off this rock before some wacko starts spreading the new geneticlaly-engineered super-plague they knocked together in their garage. We'll be lucky if we have decades, let alone centuries.
SpaceX is already in the process of man-rating Dragon. NASA is, apparently, perfectly willing to let SpaceX run through the man-rating checklists as long as NASA doesn't have to pay for it.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It's peculiar that TFA labels the Boeing design the 'safe choice' when it hasn't flown yet, despite $0.5B of investment from NASA. And the Atlas V launch vehicle may have flown a lot of missions, but it isn't man-rated yet.
The SpaceX Dragon has flown several times, and has spent months in orbit docked to the ISS. Now I realize the manned Dragon has many new systems, but it seems to me SpaceX is a lot closer to a man-rated capsule than Boeing.
While commercial corporations interested in launching their product into space may go with the best price/performance ratio, the chances of a USG contract even being written in a vendor-agnostic manner are slim. It's all about whose district or state the potential money will go.
Actually the commercial cargo and commercial crew contracts were written specifically to avoid those sorts of shenanigans. Congress has no say in who wins. Of course Senators and Congressmen are still trying to play games for their constituents (like the latest accusations that SpaceX has had unreasonable flight anomalies from senators in competitors states.) They are also trying to starve the entire program of money specifically because it is a threat to ULA. But all in all, the commercial contract approach is a huge improvement and it looks likely that SpaceX or SNC will win the bid (possibly both, if Congress will fund that. It makes sense to have two launch providers so an "incident" doesn't completely halt flights - like the shuttle disasters did.) Funny that the article doesn't even mention SNA (Dream Chaser.)
One of the reasons that SpaceX and/or SNC will likely win is that they both are dedicated to developing their spacecraft regardless of the outcome of the bidding process. Losing the contract would slow development, but not stop it. Where as Boeing, with all their money and resources, has publicly stated that they will mothball development if they don't win. (This is a strange attitude given the fact Boeing and Bigelow are partners in the commercial crew competition.) One of the criteria for winning is the commercial viability of the spacecraft. NASA does not want to be in the position of being financially black mailed with threats like "we need more money or we can't survive". The fact that SpaceX and SNC are pursuing non-NASA missions is seen as a major advantage according to insiders.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
If I'm already scheduled, that doesn't impact me unless it puts me on the schedule more often. If it only means OTHER astronauts get to go up too, well, screw them! :-)
You are currently modded +4 Insightful for having claimed, essentially, that the HST repair and upgrade missions could have all been done by unmanned systems. I could have modded you as you deserve. I could just ask for a citation - you're making an extraordinary claim there and you really do deserve to have to back it up or retract it. Instead, I'm taking a couple of months vacation from Slashdot
Good, because you're putting words in his mouth. I could do math with pen and paper, without computers and calculators and my answers would at least theoretically be just as correct but it wouldn't be cost-efficient at all. It's an apples and oranges comparison but Hubble cost:
From its original total cost estimate of about US$400 million, the telescope had by now cost over $2.5 billion to construct. Hubble's cumulative costs up to this day are estimated to be several times higher still, roughly US$10 billion as of 2010.
Space Shuttle program cost:
The total cost of the actual 30-year service life of the shuttle program through 2011, adjusted for inflation, was $196 billion. The exact breakdown into non-recurring and recurring costs is not available, but, according to NASA, the average cost to launch a Space Shuttle as of 2011 was about $450 million per mission.
The numbers we'd really like to know though is that out of those $2.5 billion to design and construct, how much would it cost to just make a new Hubble and launch it. Just the five servicing missions (confusingly named 1, 2, 3A, 3B, 4) alone at $450 million each - that's aggregate, not marginal cost though - would be $2.25 billion. It is certainly possible to argue that science would have progressed further without the Shuttle program, all things considered.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
While I'll concede some truth to what you say about NASA, with SpaceX (and competitors) we will soon have bootstrapped the manned spaceflight industry enough such that no one will care anymore whether people like you make blanket statements about the value of manned spaceflight.
The only people's opinions that will matter will be the paying customers. Presumably, those willing (and waiting) to pay for a manned launch think there is a purpose and value to it.
If even a short trip off this tiny rock of a planet becomes affordable in my lifetime, I'll be buying.
- Necron69
All the $ savings in the world won't help you when every news organization in the country is frantically sticking a mic in your face asking you what you should have done differently to prevent the death of several astronauts.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The "upgrade" to Hubble could have been accomplished more cheaply by launching another Hubble.
Also, SpaceX is trying to commercialise their systems. Boeing has no interest in anything except the NASA contract. That means that, if Bigelow achieves their goal, SpaceX will not only be flying to ISS, but also to private Bigelow stations. That's a secondary career for astronauts, and an alternative career path for NASA's astronaut-candidates who didn't make the cut.
And for that reason, there's nothing "safe" about choosing Boeing's capsule. That's just spin from Boeing's own PR pukes lobbying for funding. Boeing is the furthest behind of the three main participants. It is the most expensive. It will have the least flight time. It will have no upgrade path, and every development will need to be funded entirely by NASA, at increasing costs as it mutates back into a cost-plus program. Boeing has put it none of its own funding into the project, unlike every other participant, and has been lobbying behind the scenes to remove the current Commercial Crew NASA team and replace them with a traditional NASA cost-plus management structure.
Boeing is poison for Commercial Crew, a cuckoo in the nest. The sooner they are excluded from the program, the better.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
It's what SpaceX are currently calling the BFR will switch to Methane instead of Kerosene. The Falcon Heavy is effectively three Falcon 9 stages in parallel, similar to the existing Delta IV Heavy but with added fuel cross-feed. With cross-feed the core stage will still be fully fueled when the boosters detach.
Methane has the advantage it doesn't need the tank to be pressurised with Helium, a bit of excess heat can be diverted back into the tank to boil off enough to keep the pressure up. The current Helium pressurisation has been giving problems and accounted for a few launch delays because of leaks. The tank needs to be bigger, but overall complexity drops.
I think for the cost of the shuttle program, you could treat the HST as disposable, and just keep building and launching them until you get it right.
OTOH, the cost of JWST has blown out even further than Hubble (approx $9b, from an initial budget below $2b) precisely because there's no human servicing, which means everything in the overly-complex design must deploy perfectly or the entire mission is a bust. Eliminating the added cost of making the spacecraft serviceable is more than made up for by making the need to ensure the spacecraft can't fail.
So "the science guys" aren't a guarantee of savings, once a robotic mission becomes the flagship program and everyone tries to latch on to the teat to fund their idiotic ideas.
The problem with HSF at NASA is the legacy of Apollo, the hundred thousand employees and contractors, the scattered NASA centres and even more scattered contractor networks, which all make HSF unaffordable. (For example, the annual cost of the Shuttle program was the same regardless of how many missions they flew that year, 6, 4, 2 or none. The annual budget for operating the completed ISS is, by amazing coincidence, exactly the same as the annual budget during the construction, which was by yet another amazing coincidence, exactly the same as the annual budget during the last four years of development.)
By developing private human space-flight, we can reduce the cost of doing on-orbit repairs until it's cheaper to send humans to fix something than to write off the spacecraft and send up a new one.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I thought I also read something about kerosene leaving some sort of residue in the plumbing, turbopumps, etc. For a disposable it just doesn't matter, but for a reusable it means extra maintenance. The other thing was Zubrin suggesting that methane/oxygen was relatively easy to generate on Mars, for a return flight. Since Musk probably isn't planning on returning, that would be for a Mars space program.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
neither the government nor either company could afford that. NASA has to pick one and fund it.
Can you explain the logic behind that?
If the launches are fixed price, it costs NASA a fixed price per-launch whether they have one vendor or ten. If one vendor (say, Boeing) can't compete, they'll drop out and their launches will go to other vendors who can.
Dropping back to a single vendor on a cost-plus contract is the most expensive option.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
As an astronaut, I wonder which would appeal to me more? The "Exciting Choice" or the "Safe Choice?" On one hand, I'll be strapped to it as it launches it (and me) into space. On the other hand...I'm an astronaut! My choice of car is probably NOT a fucking Volvo.
How about the tested choice. Space X has a built capsule, whose first version has returned from the space station several times. They are quite close to flying...they just need to test the launch abort system and the capsule will be almost ready to fly. From what I understand, Boeing hasn't built a capsule yet. They only have a paper/electronic design and a few "mock ups". Given the capsules are supposed to fly in 2016, I think the capsule that has actually been tested is the "safe choice". The article seems to me to be Boeing propaganda.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Uh, yeah.
So, now:
1. You need to redesign it to not need a fairing to protect it during launch.
2. Provide an abort motor which can launch it at several gs away from the exploding booster.
3. Build wings strong enough that they won't be torn off when you're boosting away from an exploding booster at Max Q, said booster probably no longer pointing 'into the wind'.
4. Design your launch trajectory so you can now turn around and return to a runway somewhere.
Which will be simple, right?
Hint: you might want to look at the excitement the X-20 guys went through trying to make it abortable.
Wouldn't the safe choice be... Soyuz?
Sent from my PDP-11