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Sierra Nevada Corp. Files Legal Challenge Against NASA Commercial Contracts
New submitter Raymondware sends an update to last week's news that NASA had awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to provide rockets for future manned spaceflight. Now, one of their competitors, Sierra Nevada Corp, has announced it will launch a legal challenge to the contracts. The company claims the government is spending $900 million more than it needs to for equivalent fulfillment, and they're demanding a review. They add,
Importantly, the official NASA solicitation for the CCtCap contract prioritized price as the primary evaluation criteria for the proposals, setting it equal to the combined value of the other two primary evaluation criteria: mission suitability and past performance. SNC’s Dream Chaser proposal was the second lowest priced proposal in the CCtCap competition. SNC’s proposal also achieved mission suitability scores comparable to the other two proposals. In fact, out of a possible 1,000 total points, the highest ranked and lowest ranked offerors were separated by a minor amount of total points and other factors were equally comparable.
Leaving out Boeing would be budget suicide for NASA.
Sounds so exciting until you realize that low Earth orbit is closer to me than New York City is to Montreal, and I can go there by bus and explore something infinitely more fascinating than a sucking void.
inevitable, apart from costing the tax payer lots of money and the lawyers getting rich the net result will be another company added to the corporate welfare tit.
Is this going to hurt the beer supply?
I love their beer!
Really they want to challenge because the government favored Boeing by 1.5B over SpaceX which they favored by 900M over SV?
It's all fair in a corrupt faux government.
Cure the "bitcoin replaces fiat currency and that's what makes the yoke of governments work" music.
E
Boeing almost had their own budget suicide in the 70s
It couldn't possibly be the fact that the two companies that got approved use a simple capsule like the Russians and Sierra Nevada uses a spaceplane. After the issues with the Space Shuttle I can see why NASA rejected that plan.
So how is the Dream Chaser on past performance for orbital flights? No such flights? I see why it was not chosen because of past performance or lack there of.
NASA didn't really have any other choice. They couldn't give the entire contract to Boeing without risking falling into the same defense contractor cost plus revolving door situation that has held back our space program for decades. They couldn't give the entire contract to SpaceX without causing an uproar in the "space belt" congressmen/women that could possibly scuttle the entire CCtCap/CCDev/CCDev2 program (which they've been trying to do anyway). So they took a middle of the road approach, with both SpaceX and Boeing providing launch services they keep enough political support to keep the program afloat but down the road having the two compared side by side either encourages Boeing to keep its prices reasonable to stay in the game or gives NASA the evidence to say "hey, we've got two proven launch systems and one is costing us a whole lot more than the other, why are we still using them" in a public congressional budget hearing. SNC just had the position of being the lesser of the two second chair choices, not saying its right but that's politics unfortunately.
Wait... So they're serving a different beer on rockets?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Let them handle delivering their own packages, without NASA support
To me, the fact that I don't know who they are tells me all I need to know about how successful they've been at launches...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
who the fuck are Sierra Nevada??
I know who Boeing are: they have a long history and a fantastic pedigree in aerospace engineering. Including STS components.
I know who SpaceX are as well, they're the guys who have already demonstrated the viability of a private concern running shuttle to the ISS.
Answers on a postcard, please.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
They also have a very extensive Wikipedia entry for the Dream Chaser which goes into minute detail about every contract they have received and every milestone they have achieved. It is so detailed and gleaming that it was obviously crafted by someone in the pay of SNC.
However, it you read the whole thing you can find some very interesting information in he very last section listing their technology partners.
It turns out that Lockheed-Martin is responsible for "airframe construction and human rating of the spaceplane". SNC has designed a lifting body capsule, and hybrid rubber/NO rocket engine. Based on the partners list, it seems that they are acting as a systems integrator, and everything outside the design and rocket is not in house technology.
So if NASA is making the step to commercial human rated spaceflight, are they better off choosing companies who have already demonstrated orbital launch capabilities, or someone that does not even have the ability to build their own space capsule? When something goes wrong (and something will) imaging the finger pointing in the SNC scenario. This explains why NASA made the safe choice.
This suit, although filed by SNC, seems like an attempt by Lockheed-Martin to get a chunk of the billion dollar pie. What do they have to loose? Their name isn't on any of the legal paperwork, so they can pretend to be out of the loop. Meanwhile the congress-critters from Lockheed will be fighting it out with their counterparts from Boeing behind closed doors. This won't be decided in the courts, or in any public forum.
It's not about public policy or access to space, it's about corporate profit. If you want to know why NASA seems so screwed up, just follow the money.
Why is Snark Required?
Orbit is all about horizontal velocity (generally over 14K mph, and therefore requiring LOTS of energy) and NOT a matter of distance... the reason we go up 100+ miles to orbit the Earth is simply to get above the atmosphere so we CAN go horizontally fast enough to orbit. One could orbit the (airless) moon at an altitude of 2000 feet as long as one chose a ground track that did not intersect any mountains (and assuming the ground track also threaded the lunar masscon needle (therefore probably a polar orbit)). To say " low Earth orbit is closer to me than New York City is to Montreal" is about like saying you see nothing special in deep-diving submarines because, after all, the deepest point in the sea is only about 7 miles down (a mere bicycle trip length). In the case of the ocean the critical thing is NOT distance but rather PRESSURE.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One reason NASA abandoned capsules-and-parachutes in the 1970s is that the technology is a dead-end; it does not scale up. There are limits to how much mass (and therefore how many people or how much cargo) the capsule can have and still come down under a parachute or parachutes that is both big enough to do the job and yet small enough to be stowed for most of the mission. A space plane or lifting body can scale to be any size (the space shuttle was nearly the size of a DC9 airliner) as long as you stick it on a large enough launch vehicle; you could have a lifting body that carries 150 people IF you could justify it with a budget and missions. NASA has spent billions and nearly a decade to make their Orion capsule (originally sized to haul 6 people) work and the test version that will fly unmanned this December would only be capable of carrying 4 people if manned (it's current structure is too heavy and would destory the parachutes when they deploy if manned with a crew of 4 on this flight - currently an unsolved design problem). The Boeing and SpaceX capsules which are designed for 7 (with much lighter structures and designed to be manned for much shorter times) are pushing the limits of capsule paracutes.
Another reason NASA abandoned the capsule-and-parachute scheme decades ago is that they had some VERY close calls. Parachutes are emergency survival devices they are not supposed to be the way you normally fly - they are quite risky. The current return to parachutes is driven by both political fears after the orbiter losses and budgets (NASA is not being given the budgets to support design of a new big space plane replacement for the shuttles). Going back to Apollo-style conical capsules and chutes was a "cheap" and nostalgic move in the aftermath of Columbia with the shuttle loss fresh in the memory of NASA and all the parachute scares of the 60's and 70's very distant memories within the agency.
Neither shuttle was lost in a situation where a capsule would have been superior; Had an Apollo capsule been ripped apart on ascent by an exploding booster as Challenger was the crew would have died just the same way (capsule crews generally have no personal escape gear like personal chutes because the capsule scheme cannot handle the extra mass, whereas post-Challenger shuttle crews DID get such equipment). Had an Apollo capsule suffered a basketball-sized hole in its heatshield its crew would have perished just as surely as Columbia's crew. Capsule crews generally have no way to inspect their heat shields in space and they cannot afford the weight of any tools or supplies to attempt any repairs. Sadly, while most shuttles had such inspection options and could haul the extra mass, Columbia was the one orbiter that had no such inspection capability and NASA did not choose to carry any repair kits on pre-Columbia flights even though they had studied the idea all the way back in the 70's. The Challenger and Columbia losses were due to management decisions. In BOTH instances, NASA managers ignored a huge pile of warning signs (o-ring near-failures in cold weather, and TPS damage from foam strikes over a number of pre-disaster missions) which should have alerted any competent managers that they did not know what they were doing... and in Challenger's case managers actually intentionally operated the vehicle outside its design limits. These failures were NOT caused by the fact that these were not capsules.
SNC has a solid track record in satellites, but is probably better-known in aerospace for its aircraft work - they take production aircaft of ALL types (from small prop-jobs to big jets) and do modifications to their structures and systems to adapt them to very special (generally) government missions. As such they have excellent teams with solid experience in all aspects of all types of aerospace structures and systems as well as aerodynamics. You have not heard about them because you do nou buy satellites and you are unaware of most government specialty aircraft. SNC is every bit as solid as Boeing, LockMart, Northrop, etc. but if you've ever seen their work you just did not recognize it... you would have thought is was an unusual Boeing, or Cessna, or Beechcraft, etc. plane
> One could orbit the (airless) moon at an altitude of 2000 feet
That's what I thought, but former NASA engineer Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) says you can't. Something about orbital physics involving gravity that I don't understand. I wonder who is right. I'm guessing the guy who did orbital physics for a living, although I don't understand it.
SNC doesn't have a launch vehicle! The contract was for LAUNCH services for the satellites they are planning to put in orbit, not for the satellites. SpaceX and ULA (Lockheed-Martin and Boeing) both have successfully tested, and currently being used by NASA (Falcon and Atlas V, respectively), launch vehicles. SNC doesn't. This case is going to go nowhere and I am guessing was simply a publicity stunt by SNC, because who the Hell heard of them before today? I hope the court dismisses the case with extreme prejudice!
"...the highest ranked and lowest ranked offerors were separated by a minor amount of total points and other factors were equally comparable."
AKA: "We were bottom, but dammit, not by that much!"
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I looked and found more about it. You could of course fly around the moon at an altitude of 500 meters. Orbit has a specific definition it seems - centripital force being equal and opposite to gravity, so they balance out. Anyone inside the craft therefore feels zero gravity. If gravity pushes your into your seat as the craft flies around, that's not orbit, that's flying around.
Centripital force is small when you're moving almost in a straight line. Traveling just above the earths's surface, for example, the turn radius is several thousand miles. Therefore, for gravity to be balanced by centripital force, you need to be far enough away that gravity is reduced sufficiently that the small centripital force can balance it.
not similar at all to launching them.
> The centripetal force that is needed for any circular (or curved) movement is provided by the gravitational pull of the moon/earth, e.g. the gravitational force.
Think about what that would imply, it would mean that it's impossible to turn in space, away from the earth's gravity. In fact, it woild mean that here on earth you could only turn downward, toward the earth. Nascar drivers couldn't turn left, because all curved movement must curve downward.
G-force and gravity behave in indistinguishable ways, so it appears that they are the same thing (per Einstein). That does not mean that all G force is EARTH'S gravity. Orbital centripital force is gravity(-like), so it can therefore balance the gravity coming from another source (earth), resulting in net zero g aboard the spacecraft.
for government contracts.
Enter the lawyers. It will end up costing more in the end, after they extract their many pounds of flesh. In the true tradition of the private market, money that might have gone into research or equipment goes to Marcus and Mack.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
MASCONs is the reason you are not remembering AND the caveat I DID mention.
No moon or planet has perfectly-uniform mass distribution, but our moon is rather extreme. Some minerals are "heavier"/denser than others and when you have a big blob of them you have a spot that "pulls" more than other spots. The moon is unusually gravitaionally "lumpy". These big blobs of more-mass are called "masscons" (mass concentrations) and were a bit of a surprise in the Apollo era when small satellites left in lunar orbit by the astronauts suffered much more rapid than expected orbital decay. As you orbit the moon and you pass over one of these masscons you first get accellerated by its pull as you approach it and then slowed by its pull after you pass it and concentrations to your left or right cause disturbances in your orbital plane. This means any generic stable circular orbit does not stay that way for long. The distribution of these lumps in the moon's mass have two big effects:
1. The most-stable orbits around our moon are polar orbits.
2. One side of the moon is more dense than the other, which is why the one side always faces us... the tidal forces imposed on the moon by the Earth have caused the moon's "heavy side" to point "down" into the Earth's gravity well (incidentally, some man-made satellites have been made intentionally asymmretical (in mass terms) in order to have this effect make one end of them point down at the Earth without the need for propellants)
1. Satellites ARE more directly related to spacecraft than anything YOU likely do
2. Aircraft ARE directly related to every aspect of a manned lifting body (what the DreamChaser is)
3. They are building a SPACECRAFT not a "launch vehicle" and you appear to not know the difference, thereby disqualifying yourself from the discussion. DreamChaser is slated to fly on an Atlas (could also fly on a Delta or other since it is explicitly designed to be launch vehicle agnostic). As such, it is ULA's job to deliver the DreamChaser to orbit as they deliver any other manned or unmanned spacecraft to orbit. Sierra Nevada has plenty of experience in building spacecraft and contracting with launch service providers to carry them to orbit.
You would have been better-off remaining silent and letting everybody assume you were knowledgable, rather than posting as you did and bursting the illusion.
I did read what you wrote. What I'm talking about is more general, it applies even to a perfectly homogeneous gravitational body.
I'm talking about the minimum gravitational altitude in terms of \frac{Gm_1m_2}{r^2}=\frac{m_2v_{T}^2}{r}.
it depends on your definition of "simplicity"
Nothing about a vehicle like the DreamChaser (FAR simpler than the shuttle) is all that complex. Nothing has to "deploy" for it to safely get from orbit to a runway and, unlike shuttle, it does not have APU's that need to be started before reentry in order to power the flight controls. The control surfaces of DreamChaser are all present and configured properly for reentry and landing while the vehicle is on the pad atop the launch vehicle. Aircraft control surfaces are century-old absolutely reliable technology.
Let's examine a capsule and parachutes, shall we?
NASA's Orion has a "foward bay cover" that covers the chutes and MUST be in place for launch. After reentry this MUST be explosively jettisoned or the chutes cannot deploy and the crew dies. The forward bay cover has its own drogue chutes which must be explosively deployed to pull the cover clear from Orion or the two objects could "re-contact" potentially damaging Orion and possibly its stowed parachutes (killing the crew when they hit the Earth with no chutes). The Orion must then fire mortars to deploy small chutes to stabilize the otherwise unstable capsule - if these fail to deploy or deploy-and-tangle the capsule can end up in a tumble that causes the main chutes to tangle on deployment (potentially even wrapping around the capsule) - killing the crew (this scenario happened on a test drop in Yuma that destroyed the test capsule on impact). After the stabilizing chutes cut loose (which they MUST in order to avoid fouling the other chutes) a second set of pilot chutes is deployed by mortar shot, and these in-turn pull the main chutes out of their bags. If this fails the crew dies. The main chutes deploy in reefing stages (if this scheme fails and they deploy too broadly too early they will be shredded by the sudden spike in load caused by aerodynamic drag and the capsule's inertia - a failure mode well-known to the military). NASA has tested a bunch of redundancies in all this, testing single minor failures (like skipping a "reefing stage"), but they have not done tests for any of the "big" failures because there is no solution and the result is "loss of crew and vehicle". This does NOT mean I think Orion is super dangerous or a secret disaster-in-the-making - it's just that any organization (like NASA in this instance) will decide to do what it WANTS to do and then back-fill the justifications (with things like a phony "complexity" argument) to justify. NASA is the same agency that launched the Shuttle MANNED on its very first flight WITHOUT any "launch abort system" and then operated the system that way FOR THIRTY YEARS - but now insists the commercial crew providers cannot be "man-rated" without a proven LAS and unmanned demonstration flights.
Yeah, capsules are a proven way to go to and from a station (like Soyoz to/from Salyut/Mir/ISS, Apollo to/from Skylab, etc) BUT so is a "spaceplane" (Shuttle not only went to/from ISS many times with no problems but also BUILT the station).
"Simple", like "proven" is in the eye of the beholder and biased by the preferences of the individual.
" in the Challenger accident, two things would have been different. First, the capsule would have been on top of the vehicle"
DreamChaser rides on top of its launch vehicle. Also, you ignored the assertion I made that Apollo would have also killed the crew if its launch vehicle had exploded and ripped it apart in the process (as happened to Challenger). We all ASSUME the Apollo LAS would have worked, but this was never proven (tested on Little Joe II, but NEVER on Saturn). There was always the possibility that a Saturn could fail without the abort system detecting the failure in time or that the LAS would fail, or that the capsule could be hit by debris and the shockwave from the explosion - the Apollo capsule was QUITE fragile (to save mass) and its skin was too thin to hold-in a normal 14.7 PSI atmosphere against the vacuum of space (hence the approx 5psi pure O2 atmosphere during missions) so the capsule's ability to withstand the overpressure wave of an exploding Saturn was always in doubt. The Apollo LAS was never a CERTAINTY - it was a "chance" to save the crew, like an ejection seat is a "chance" to save a jet pilot (they do not always succeed)
" Second, it would have a launch abort system attached"
DreamChaser has an integral launch abort system, so this shortcoming of the shuttle is not a generic "spaceplane" shortcoming
"The capsule would not have been situated on the side of the launch vehicle where it could receive an impact"
Ah, yes ... the well-known "protected heat shield" argument of the capsule lovers. Except of course that Apollo 13 very nearly put the nail in that coffin. Had the Apollo 13 explosion been a tad more energetic, it could well have cracked or holed the heat shield (and indeed nobody knew it had not at the time) whereas a shuttle-type arangement would have been safer in THAT incident (its TPS in a less-vulnerable position and the by-that-point-in-the-mission inert main engines being in the position to be hurt). The mass limitations of capsule-chute schemes meant that the crew of Apollo had no ability to inspect or repair their heatshield and they had to re-enter with the same crossed fingers that the crew of Columbia did. In the case of the capsule scheme, there's generally another severe and dangerous limitation: separation from the service module must happen so close to reentry that there is no time to do ANYTHING between when the shield is exposed and inspectable and the time when plasma begins to surround the vehicle... there is no possible option to repair a capsule's TPS. Obviously nobody would have sent an orbiter on a lunar profile, but my point is that single-data-point unique disasters say NOTHING about how often the same sort of thing is likely to repeat, end even less about whether the same strengths/weaknesses apply.
Your final note about size is exactly why DreamChaser (the POINT of this discussion) is so much smaller than shuttle (NOT the subject of the discussion). DreamChaser is sized for the same number of crew as CST-100 and Dragon, and has three more seats than the (now crippled) version of Orion LockMart is spending BILLIONS and more than a decade building for NASA...
"Boeing was the only competitor to meet all of the required milestones"
Each company wrote their own milestones. SpaceX and SierraNevada wrote milestones that required them to build actual hardware; Boeing did not. This is why Sierra Nevada actually built (and flew at Edwards) a DreamChaser airframe (like the Enterprise drop tests of the 1970's) and SpaceX has gotten an extension and will be flying their abort tests in the next few months. Boeing showed a fiberglass mockup of their capsule and told congressmen that they would have to pull-out of some leases and fire a bunch of people if they did not get the contract... (very impressive "milestones"...)
I said centripital when I meant centrifugal and started a long subthread / argument basically about nothing. Yeah, gravity is the centripital force in an orbit. The balancing, opposite force is what I was calling centripital.
I said centripital when I meant centrifugal I guess and started a long subthread / argument basically about nothing. I understand gravity is the centripital force in an orbit. The balancing, opposite force is what I was calling centripital.
I'm not sure what your point is. You spent 98% of your post building a case against SNC, then in the very last sentence you took a swipe at NASA.
So what is your point?
That doesn't really make sense. In an ideal, hypothetical situation, there are no perturbations that are too difficult to overcome. When there is an atmosphere to contend with, atmospheric drag bleeds away orbital energy as heat. Above the Moon, though, gravitational anomalies are the biggest problem, and they just pull the spacecraft in less than optimal directions (i.e. far less added heat to deal with). In both cases, the spacecrafts require station-keeping to maintain their orbits. That's kind of cheating if you are strict about the definition of orbiting, I guess, but as long as you allow for it, spacecrafts can relatively simply orbit really low over the Moon.
so one company has actually a capsule/launcher system flown successfully and is working on its man-rating. The other has drop tests and a history of large human rated airframes. The third, has actually flown nothing a monkey could survive in, and requires someone else's boosters to do it.
Of course they're not going to get a contract. they've got no history. Hell, BOEING shouldn't really be getting a contract since they've never designed and flown a soup -to -nuts orbital delivery and recovery system designed for humans.
Sierra Nevada is like a kid with a model rocket upset he can't get a military satellite contract. Sour grapes.
While the only thing keeping SpaceX from launching a manned flight next month is their steady cautious progression and a desire to remain compliant with all regulations to keep themselves viable for future government contracts. the Dragon has already been flown and recovered pressurized and with all necessary manned flight hardware installed.