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Congress Decides To Delay US-Launched Astronauts, Keep Using Russian Services
New submitter surfdaddy writes: In order to protect the entrenched big aerospace companies, the Congress has increased NASA's budget for FY2016 but has cut funding for "commercial crew." Commercial crew is the funding used by SpaceX for the planned initial manned launches in the first half of 2017. With this cut, the launch of U.S. astronauts from U.S. soil using U.S. rockets will be delayed two years, and we will continue to send millions of dollars to Russia for launch services. "Senate appropriators suggested that NASA’s plans announced earlier this year to procure Soyuz seats for missions in 2018 indicated that the agency was not confident at even this early stage that the two companies with commercial crew contracts, Boeing and SpaceX, could remain on schedule to begin flights in 2017. ...
Sad Sad... Pathetic really,truly...
40 years after the faked(sarcasm) moon landings and they can't even pretend to send humans into orbit.
IMO lets put 1 years military budget into real space exploration, 1 way trips to mars (several at that budget) etc... be more useful than bombing tents.
Sort of reminds me of what happened to Preston Tucker, just not quite to that extent yet.
Being able to do military launches means SpaceX neatly outmaneuvered this attempt to cut them off at the knees.
I guess that means the the overall budget will be smaller than last year?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
I think it will be funny if Russia subcontracts the launches back to SpaceX and pockets the profit. Would make Congress and Boeing look stupid.
are more anti Obama than they are pro usa
This would still be cheaper than paying Boeing to do the launches.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
There will never be a Delta IV Orion with humans on it. Even ULA is planning to sunset Delta and Atlas for a new rocket to replace these. Probably will somehow manage to make it even more expensive for taxpayers and a way to keep retired Air Force colonels employed.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Is it cheaper to launch by Russia? Will we tax the US economy, weaken ourselves, to hoard our activities here, to hoard the illusion of physical dollars staying in the economy?
People are so simplistic in their views. "Shop locally! Locally-produced will strengthen your local economy!" Not if your local economy expends twice as many resources as it would to import; then it only makes you twice as poor.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Outrage!
Scandal!
fat-cat politicians and their greedy elite
the car insurance news you won't believe is true!
best hair color 2015 announced!
how this company is disrupting shaving!
sure feels like friday around here.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"a Soyuz spacecraft docked at the station unexpectedly started" yep, that would do it.
http://www.space.com/29632-soy...
1. Orion is too heavy so it can't be launched on anything less than a Delta IV Heavy. That's assuming its weight doesn't increase further.
2. ULA is cutting Delta IV core production.
3. Delta IV Heavy is not man-rated. The rocket just ain't reliable enough.
This is the same congress that has specifically said that DoD payloads can't be launched using the RD-180 after a certain date to PREVENT us from spending more money buying RD-180 engines from Russia... but in order to get to the ISS we are willing to pay the Russians for a ride.
Ugh!!!
4. It's expensive like heck.
Orion costs 320x more than Commercial Crew (SpaceX AND Boeing capsules):
http://mic.com/articles/11354/...
Last I checked, spacex wants to charge less than Russia. Also last I checked, Russia isn't a corporation.
The bias is actually very visible in the article with the Freudian slip of "send Russians money" instead of "paying Russians for services rendered" which is the actual case.
It's pretty rare for fanboy crowd to slip that badly though. Usually it's at least masked as a more reasonable argument.
muh muh muh Republican muh muh muh...
Hey, genius - RTFA, because the vote was decidedly bi-partisan.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
i am sure hollywood can also fuck up china. you just have to drag them down to your level...
No boas here
That's right... Strictly Python and Cobra
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I bet there will be a no subcontract clause or a clause specifying what launch vehicle is used.
If they succeed and are not put in the line-up for manned deliveries then just of the shear hell of it, SpaceX should send their own man up with a stack of Pizzas, for delivery to the ISS, COD!
Your leadership just wants to make things a bit more fair, you know spread the wealth. They have such a long history of coddling SpaceX, won't someone think of the Russians!
This would still be cheaper than paying Boeing to do the launches.
Boeing has to charge more, to fund all their political donations, and jobs for ex-bureaucrats. But the sleaze pays off. That is how they got the contract for the KC-X contract over a better and cheaper bid from Northrup-EADS. The USAF picked the better bid, but congress forced them to give the contract to Boeing.
If SpaceX wants to compete in this market, they need to use a lot more grease.
I thought we we're gonna solve this shit with a space elevator, what's the current progress on such?
I don't understand. If China is the rising star, why go to Canada?
How much Cobra do you need to know to be useful?
>> spacex wants to charge less than Russia
everybody "wants" to be cheaper, better, more reliable than Soyuz.
Nobody suceeded in 6 decades.
aaaaaaa
Did you even read about what they did with the funding?
Yes, they cut funding to SpaceX efforts (commercial crew) in favor of securing additional seats with the Russians on future dates. However the reasons where clearly due to Space X's failure to get their act together and provide confidence that they will be human rated in time to take over when the contract with the Russians was set to end. So NASA really doesn't have much choice, because if Space X isn't ready when the current seats we have from the Russians end, we'd be in a place where no US crew replacements would be possible.
It's also not a total abandoning of Space X, they remain funded, albeit at a lower level. They will still be doing cargo delivery and working towards human rated transport. Congress just moved future funding to the sure thing of Russian transport in order to de-risk keeping the Space Station going.
Congress DID fund NASA's Orion project fully, and then some, meaning that the idea here is to get the US back to where we had human rated systems and can transport our own people in our own equipment. So, where the short term effect is to fund the Russians, the LONG term idea is to use US built equipment to transport US personnel to the station as soon as Orion can human rated and made available. Plus, if Space X get's it's act together and manages to get human rated, you can bet that congress will GLADLY abandon the Russians in future budgets. In fact, they are COUNTING on doing so after 2018 at this point.
And here I thought the leftist where all upset with the republicans for being aligned with big business all the time, here they are cutting direct funding for Space X (a private business enterprise) and all you can say is they are off shoring work? If Musk wants to make up the measly $334 million with his own investors, he can keep development going just fine thank you... They don't seem to be lacking investors and they seem to have at least SOME ability to make money from cargo flights for the ISS and other launches so coughing up another few million shouldn't be an issue.
Offshoring jobs, give me a break, 334 Million is a drop in the bucket in that world.... My guess is you are upset about Congress choosing to defund programs going to huge democratic supporter owned companies... You want welfare for these kinds of companies, because they support your political views...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I was expecting this to happen at some point. Most people think of NASA as a space program, but to Congress it's just a fund to be used for political horse trading. I need a few more votes to pass the budget? Then this representative gets farm subsidies, that representative gets funding for a new highway, and the other rep gets a piece of a NASA program.
What that means is they want Constellation, even though it's going to be waaaaaaaay more expensive than comparable SpaceX offerings. What Congress doesn't want is for people to start wondering "Hey, if SpaceX can give us what we need for a fraction of the price, why do we need Constellation?"
Competitors already are in big trouble trying to compete with SpaceX. Now they force SpceX are forced to cut prices even further.
Politicians expect Elon Musk to complain loudly, run at a loss or go bankrupt, giving competitors a better chance.
Many Slashdot readers know how a man like Elon Musk will actually respond: If he complains, he will be doing it while designing an even cheaper solution, and then offer a price well below the cut budgets, and still make a healthy profit. _Then_ his competitors will be in deep shit.
Democrats are just complaining because Congress decided to defund a public project where the money went to a private company owned by a number of their big supporters. But it's not like they totally defunded anything, they just moved some money to another account because said private company wasn't going to be able to deliver the service the money is supposed to obtain. Space X will be short $344 million from what they expected because Congress had to make sure they still had transportation to the ISS to keep a US presence there, or do you propose we risk just giving the Russians the whole thing?
It's like you where building a house, but one of your contractors wasn't able to complete his work within the schedule you need. Well, now your house will not be ready for another 2 months, so you will need to pay rent for your current apartment for that time, you are going to have to get that money from someplace. So you cut back your budget for your new home and sacrifice someplace.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
At the moment they're kinda killing that reputation. Rampant corruption seems to be leading to terrible quality control. All it will take is the inevitable manned mission to go horribly wrong to redirect the spigot back where it belongs.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
"Senate appropriators suggested that NASA’s plans announced earlier this year to procure Soyuz seats for missions in 2018 indicated that the agency was not confident at even this early stage that the two companies with commercial crew contracts, Boeing and SpaceX, could remain on schedule to begin flights in 2017."
Clearly the correct approach is to put all your eggs in one basket at any given time.
If you delay American crew launches until 2019, then NASA is going to procure Soyuz seats for 2019 and maybe 2020.
Aren't the russians under sanctions, in a horrible dictatorship and all that nasty s**t flung by the US media?
And these same russians still allow us to use their launch vehicles?
Yes, but what you fail to point out is that Congress continued to fund the entrenched players, while the upstart that has far lower costs was drastically cut and delayed two years.
At least SpaceX can boost there numbers about how many times cheaper they are than SLS.
Congress cuts funding for a program that (at least on the SpaceX side) is well advanced in producing a man-rated booster and capsule to replace the Russian rides to the ISS and yet they INCREASE funding for a program that has yet to even produce a full-size prototype, doesn't have a proper mission yet, just some thought bubbles AND is costing far more than it would cost if you just said "this is what we want the rocket to do, who can build it for us"
I think there are 2 things going on here.
First is that there is an election comming up and the votes of a bunch of ATK workers in Utah who have been promised jobs in the SLS program to replace the jobs they had in the shuttle program are somehow important enough to matter (which is a reflection on just how broken the US political system is). Hence the increase in funding for SLS to get it to the "actually building stuff" phase much faster. (and to assure the workers in question that their jobs are safe)
And second is that SpaceX has the lead in producing a crew rated capsule right now (their crew capsule and rocket are a modified version of the capsule and rocket they are launching to the ISS already whereas Boeing has to develop a capsule from scratch) so the cut in funding and the delay is a chance to give Boeing time to catch up (since Boeing is too politically and economically important to allow SpaceX to win this race on its own)
SpaceX has been doing fine keeping pace with their milestones. NASA wasn't wanting to put all their eggs in one (CCP) basket. Boeing and SpaceX capsules aren't flying yet, and you don't know what you don't know. Better to have a rainy day contingency. That was a thin excuse to redirect the spigot to the good old boys. I wouldn't doubt in part payback for SpaceX stepping on toes with the Air Force launch contracts. In part because Bolden slapped Cruz around a bit and poked him in the eye with COTS recently.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
It's all about the pork, and protecting those Shuttle-era jobs. (Never mind that NASA is a relatively small budget item and there's no good reason they couldn't add to SLS while keeping Commercial Crew funded.)
Remember those Shuttle main engines that they removed (replaced with mock-ups) before sending them off to museums? Yeah, well the test stands are still at Stennis, and the 2010 legislation ordering SLS required NASA to use existing Shuttle technology where possible, so SLS will launch with SSMEs removed from Shuttle orbiters before they were sent to museums. Those SSMEs are being test-fired once again at Stennis. That's right, the actual same Shuttle engines that they had to refurbish after every flight.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
As soon as the upstart can actually deliver a human rated vehicle that makes trips to the ISS and back, that will surely change.
Remember the issue here that nobody has confidence that Space X can provide the necessary service by the time it is needed in 2017, so other arrangements simply have to be made now with the Russians to make sure we can keep crew on the ISS. The commercial crew program wasn't the only NASA budget item to get hit because of this, and it 's not totally defunded but lost $344 Million and is still getting $900 million.
So, don't be too upset.... It's not what some people think it is..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The upstart is much closer to doing this than the entrenched players - they don't have a capsule that has flown. The Dragon has already been to the station many times. I don't see how you can claim that the entrenched players are somehow safer or farther along than SpaceX.
All supposition without any facts to back them up.
They requested $1,244 Million for commercial crew, they only got $900 million from congress. They are still funded at a significant level. If this was about payback, why didn't the rascally Republicans just pull it all? Surely they could have yanked more than 1/3rd if it was about politics.
Then there is the bi-partisan support of this budget. It seems to me that if the democrats are on board and not yelling bloody murder about it, there isn't much they find punitive about it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You don't mean the Russians? As I recall, they have vehicles there now which are human rated, and where the bulk of the money taken from Space X was moved to.
What are you saying when you talk about entrenched players?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It's also not just for LEO.
The Delta IV can't afford lose an engine either. The Falcon 9 is designed via their 9 pack to suffer multiple engine out and still complete mission objectives. Same reason most aeronautic systems have at least double redundancy. In the case of SpaceX, they went one better with triple redundancy in the flight control systems. ULA and Arianespace are developing new vehicles largely in response to SpaceX. You know, that terrible communist idea of market competition.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
That was Bolden's jab in response. I personally feel it was well placed.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Because he doesn't know chinese? :P
As opposed to Roscosmos getting *their* act together? Hell they will be lucky if they can responsibly claim to have a human rated launch capability by 2018 if their currently plummeting quality issues aren't resolved. I'll be interested to see how ESA see this shaking out.
"“I am deeply disappointed that the Senate Appropriations subcommittee does not fully support NASA’s plan to once again launch American astronauts from U.S. soil as soon as possible, and instead favors continuing to write checks to Russia.
“Remarkably, the Senate reduces funding for our Commercial Crew Program further than the House already does compared to the President’s Budget.
“By gutting this program and turning our backs on U.S. industry, NASA will be forced to continue to rely on Russia to get its astronauts to space – and continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into the Russian economy rather than our own.
Why is that a big deal ? I just order by the numbers.
Space-X is working hard to reduce spaceflight costs. If they develop a way to send people to orbit that's less expensive than their competitors, we all win. They are investing in their own private platforms, so I don't see what you're complaining about.
That said, NASA does need to send some people into orbit, and it's wise to have plans other than "We're sure that somebody in the US will have proven human launch capability by 2018", however likely that looks.
Where we can have commercial spaceflight, commercial spaceflight makes sense. NASA is better off doing the cutting edge stuff, and leaving the other launches to enterprises less hamstrung by Congress.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Wait. What? Are you seriously going to try to apply logic as a response to that post?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It's their fault that the past inadequate funding led to delays, therefore they don't deserve the full amount of funding required to meet their schedule? You're seriously making that argument? Delays resulting from underfunding are not justification for continued underfunding.
And Orion? Orion won't fly until around 2025 at best, will cost several billion to fly if it ever does (just the SLS to launch it will cost about a billion), and won't ever visit the ISS or any other space station...it would be gratuitously wasteful to use it for such a mission.
"Mikulski's amendment would have added $300 million for commercial crew above the subcommittee's recommendation, bringing it close to the requested level. She also sought to add funds for NASA programs in science ($96 million above the subcommittee's recommendation -- $46 million for WFIRST and $50 million for Mars 2020), space technology ($54 million), and the Orion spacecraft ($50 million). The NASA additions were part of an overall $2.784 billion increase Mikulski sought for various activities in the CJS bill. The amendment was defeated by a 14-16 party line vote."
However the reasons where clearly due to Space X's failure to get their act together and provide confidence that they will be human rated in time to take over when the contract with the Russians was set to end. So NASA really doesn't have much choice, because if Space X isn't ready when the current seats we have from the Russians end, we'd be in a place where no US crew replacements would be possible.
Source for that? Really I think you are making it up. Space X just finished their launch abort test for their capsule. They are likely going to be ready on time. They have been delivering Dragon 1 capsule to the station for a while now. What this really sounds like is a full court press by incumbent aerospace companies to derail SpaceX before they can demonstrate successful launches of humans to space. The committees in Congress and the Senate that underfunded the commercial space program were largely in the pockets of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, or other existing space companies. Here is a tweet from Charles Lurio, who is a fairly reliable source of space information:
Understand that Boeing pushing HARD to reduce Commercial Crew funds to force NASA to 'downselect' to one provider - them.
There are a lot of established companies who want to kill Musk's businesses. These competitors have sunk costs, and Musk is threatening their monopolies by doing what they do cheaper and better. Examples: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, ULA are used to getting fat "cost plus" contracts for government launches. Space X looks like it will stop that. Tesla will be coming out with a $35000 electric car, that will likely sell very well. Energy companies don't what this to happen. Musk's enemies are competing using political subterfuge, bribery, and stealth "public relations" campaigns, rather than improving their business and manufacturing processes. Really all of this stinks like the worst forms of crony capitalism. America is showing its corrupt side. And so called "free enterprise" republicans are behind much of it.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Besides you, who specifically doubts that SpaceX or Boeing (the other commercial crew contractor) will be unable to fly crew by 2017? Crew Dragon is supposed to fly (unmanned)in 2016. Boeing early 2017.
Given the money remaining in the budget for Commercial Crew, NASA should reduce the number of entrants from 2 to 1 and fully fund SpaceX. Tell Boeing that their CST-100 is no longer needed, thanks for playing, and get lost.
I actually think the two-year delay is to buy time until ULA's Vulcan can fly; since CST-100 was slated for Atlas V and all purchased RD-180 engines are slated for the military block buy.
And so called "free enterprise" republicans are behind much of it.
It's the Progressive "establishment" Republicans and Progressive Democrats vs more small-'L' libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats. It's the Progressives in *both* major US political parties. The same Progressives that want to maintain/expand NSA-style 4th-Amendment-violating dragnet domestic surveillance and weaken encryption, etc., who use government agencies like the IRS & BATF as partisan/ideological political WMDs.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
However the reasons where clearly due to Space X's failure to get their act together and provide confidence that they will be human rated in time to take over when the contract with the Russians was set to end. So NASA really doesn't have much choice, because if Space X isn't ready when the current seats we have from the Russians end, we'd be in a place where no US crew replacements would be possible.
Bullshit. SpaceX recently did a test of their crew escape mechanism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.nasa.gov/press-rele...
If the project has had any delays so far it has been purely because of continued Congress underfunding. They keep cutting it below what NASA asks. While the pork barrel SLS just got itself a budget increase.
SpaceX is more likely to sell them a trampoline.
The bias is actually very visible in the article with the Freudian slip of "send Russians money" instead of "paying Russians for services rendered" which is the actual case.
It's pretty rare for fanboy crowd to slip that badly though. Usually it's at least masked as a more reasonable argument.
Yeah, they forgot the "at gunpoint" whenever talking about govt. (taxpayer) bucks.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
This INCREASES commercial crew over the previous year by 200 Million dollars.
The President's supporters are calling this a "cut" because he is yet again playing the anti-deep-space shell game he has played his entire time in office and the congress is not going along with him. Just because Obama proposes spending more on Commercial Crew than congress does, that does NOT make the congressional action a "cut" as it increases funding year-over-year.
President Obama is on a warpath against deep space exploration. He initially cancelled the Constellation Program to return to the moon and go on to mars. He has shifted funds that would have funded probes to other planets into "climate change" instead - nearly choking-off planetary science. Every year he sends his lap-dog administrator up to Congress to testify that he has too much money for SLS and Orion .... and then he sends the guy back to testify that these programs are slipping and will launch later and later. Simultaneously, he keeps trying to shift cash from SLS and Orion into Commercial Crew which is producing far less-capable-than-shuttle LEO access vehicles. Sure, Obama has a vague asteroid mission (no schedule, nor budget) penned-in for some distant future date, but that's using the SLS and Orion which he keeps trying to strangle. If Obama truly wants to spend that much on Commercial Crew, all he needs to to is ask for it WITHOUT cutting it from the SLS and Orion which Congress wants. Obama does not do this because he actually does not want the extra money, he just wants to use Commercial Crew as an excuse to shift funds away from the deep space systems the Congress wants.
In the future, can we please have HONEST headlines that only call actual cuts "cuts"? This scam where somebody proposes an INCREASE but it is smaller than somebody else's INCREASE so it gets dishonestly called a "cut" is how the hyper-partisans play their dishonest political manipulation games.
That would be perfect.
I quote NASA themselves to cut your bullshit:
For fiscal year (FY) 2012, NASA received $397 million for its Commercial Crew Program; less than half its $850 million request. In light of this development, in August 2012, NASA revised its Commercial Crew Acquisition Strategy to rely on Space Act Agreements rather than FAR-based contracts for the integrated design phase of the program. The Agency also delayed the expected completion date of the commercial crew development phase from 2016 to 2017.
https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/re...
Congress is the cause the delays you little shill. Not SpaceX.
Do you really think the upstart will have a man-rated launcher in less than 2 years???? Sending an unmanned cargo capsule is way different. At this point I don't think NASA has a choice other than buying seats on Soyuz in 2017.
Corruption? Are you talking abut Russia or USAF/Boeing? I'm confused.
Why is Snark Required?
Um, why? Do you imagine the system in Russia operates that differently than in the United States? Russia won't subcontract the launches to SpaceX even if they could, for exactly the same reason that Congress doesn't want to contract with SpaceX.
John Kerry met Sergei Lavrov and Vladimir Putin in Sotchi a few weeks ago, and since that time US and Russia seems to be able to talk together again.
What happened? Obviously the US administration realized the Ukraine government was just impossible to control, but that kind of consideration did not prevented them from supporting weird regimes in the past.
Do you really think the upstart will have a man-rated launcher in less than 2 years????
I think they already have a launcher at least as safe as a Soyuz is likely to be, if the Russians' recent launch debacles are anything to go by.
Sending an unmanned cargo capsule is way different.
Why?
Hey, genius - RTFA
Whoa whoa whoa, hold up there Cowboy. You can't go making suggestions like that! People might pay attention or something!
Rampant corruption seems to be leading to terrible quality control.
We'll give you a grand if you stop posting this --Roscosmos management
Really? What was the vote? And why did the dems vote down their leaders amendment that would restore it?
Fact is this bs is purely neo-cons.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
was a supplier (started a few companies) to the automotive industry back in the 50's and lost $10,000 on Tucker. He died before I was born, but my grandmother always called him a scam artist and crook. I don't know any more details than that, but always wished she'd told me more, but I was too young to know about these things, but I knew about Tucker from the rare rant decades before the movie (I've never seen it, but my father told me it was mostly a lie).
After all, our Russian friends are not invading Ukraine. And we love Putin.
Both I would think. It is just that one country view money as free speech, the other just demands it. I wonder which is worse.
Shouldn't we be happy Congress is being more restrained? Everytime there is a cut the same people who whine about taxes being too high whine about the cuts.
Fact is SpaceX is not ready. That's it. They completed less than half their scheduled launches last year and have only done a few of the 14 scheduled for this year.
If you were in Congress and had to make a decision about 2018 or 2019 - what would you do? There is no data to show that SpaceX or Boeing will be ready - I guess you could give them more money and push the problem down the road (then get questioned for "why did you give them so much money when you knew they couldn't meet the timelines")? This is the right and prudent decision. Boeing and SpaceX have consumed a lot of taxpayer dollars so far to develop something which will be sold at a high margin. Congress did the right thing here, I am sure it was a tough decision.
Not at all. Ohh were you under the mistaken impression that the U.S. Congress works for the American people. Not at all. Congress works for the highest bidder. In this case it happens to be Russia.
President Obama could easily ask for proper funding for commercial crew and there are plenty in congress including Republicans who would fund it - it's a tiny sliver of a rounding error in the budget. The Republicans are NOT hard-wired against CC - remember: THEY were the ones who drove the whole Commercial Cargo agenda which produced the current SpaceX supply runs to the ISS. It was former Bush's last NASA administrator who oversaw the creation of Commercial Cargo and said it could eventually be extended to become Commercial Crew.
Obama does not just propose to add the money to fully-fund Commercial Crew because he does not really care about it - it's a corporate thing and he's more of a big government guy. He keeps playing a passive-aggressive political game with the congress in which he keeps lying about the project priorities THEY have for Orion and SLS and gettiing back out of low Earth orbit, and he keeps trying to strip funds from those projects to use the cash for Commercial Crew to/from LEO.
He has done the same thing with "flagship" exploration missions. He keeps shifting money to study global warming, and as a result the James Webb telescope is sucking-up nearly all the remaining cash from robotic probes to other planets. We are not building any more Cassini-style planetary probes under Obama - we are having to go cheap with recycled parts for a couple of mars landers and another mars rover. The public has not yet noticed the effects of this because so many pre-Obama probes are still operating. Messenger (the pre-Obama Mercury probe) was only recently ended. New Horizons (the pre-Obama Pluto probe) is only now reaching its planet. Even Cassini continues to work.In a few years when these are all finished and there are no new Obama-era probes reaching their planets the public might finally notice the huge slump in new data.
Again: No cut to Commercial Crew has happened. the congress has simply resisted Obama's effort to shift MORE money into Commercial Crew from a program he knows full-well is a priority for them. Turning the tables, this is about equivalent to congress trying to shift money from Obamacare to fund trips to Disneyland for terminally-ill kids - both sides might agree it's a good cause, but it would clearly be about more because everybody knows Obamacare is a priority item for Obama. Same thing here: SLS and Orion are a priority for congress and the constant effort to rob funds from it has seriously irked some critical people in congress who will not give-in.
SpaceX is more likely to sell them a trampoline.
Especially after the Russians refused to sell their rockets to Elon when he went there many years ago.
But then again, money is money, and they need funding for manned missions to develop the Mars project, so who knows.
The problem is probably that funding research is a different budget than funding launches. So they will prefer to postpone the research and pay more for the Russians to do it, rather than save money in the long run by letting SpaceX finish their program and then do the launches much cheaper. That's the way bureaucracy works.
Delta IV can't even survive an engine loss. Falcon 9 could survive up to two engine losses, and presumably the reusable version will be able to survive even more if the control system has an option to ditch the stage and use the landing fuel reserve to compensate for higher gravity losses and to complete the ascent instead.
Furthermore, the Merlin 1C engine that failed was already being phased out at that point. If I recall the events correctly, it was the manufacturing process (electroplating) that isn't being used anymore that exhibited a slight anomaly during the manufacturing that specific unit. Since the 1D units are different, this mode of failure was eliminated. The Merlin engines actually ought to be more reliable than the RS-68s, since they need a less extreme turbopump assembly (they don't have to pump the voluminous liquid hydrogen (with 70kg/m^3) at high pressures). Simplicity and less extreme operating conditions ought to directly translate into reliability. The high pressure hydrogen pump was the most problematic failure-prone component of the RS-25, and I don't think that the RS-68 is any different in this respect.
Ezekiel 23:20
President Obama could easily ask for proper funding for commercial crew
That's exactly what happened, and look how it ended up.
Ezekiel 23:20
BTW, what does the JWST have to do with Obama? JWST went horribly wrong years before Obama got into office. Are you saying Obama is a time traveller? And what does JWST have to do with "studying global warming" anyway?
Ezekiel 23:20
You forgot to blame former President Bush.
Absolutely - they are on target for this. At least SpaceX is. And cutting their funding is not a way to get there.
Maybe we shouldn't have had the CIA lead a coupe in Ukraine, eh?
I was with you right up until you went all stupid with your political rhetoric. You should have stopped while you still sounded smart. WTF? Why not just let your argument stand instead of throwing stupid crap like that in and loosing your audience?
You fail to mention Boeing's CST-100 because you know it disproves your entire train of thought, and shows your shill intentions.
NASA is worried that SpaceX might not complete in time? NASA has a backup for just such a predicament. It is why Boeing is getting so much more funding than SpaceX. Boeing has been very careful to avoid the risk of developing new technologies, unlike SpaceX, AND they have been sticking to their milestones carefully.
You further expose yourself by claiming cutting these funds and giving them to SLS/Orion is somehow redirecting money away from Big Business, when SLS/Orion is being built by Big Business, just much more expensively than Commercial Crew. Furthermore, Orion will not be able to go ISS this decade, even with more funding. There is zero chance it will be able to do ISS crew replacement before Dragon. Maybe it could do so before CST-100, if CST-100 is cancelled because Congress stops funding it.
I thought it was a sedan or maybe a brougham...
At least this House vote gives us some clarity about what the GOP *really* think of Russia: "No problem". I'm inclined to agree. Mr Putin isn't perfect, but he's a long way better than most world leaders and it can be argued he is defending his own country's interests effectively and isn't really a threat to the US. Pretty much what Putin himself has been saying. We should remember to discount GOP fear mongering and bluster on the subject of Russia. They don't really mean it.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Plenty of things to blame on him, but he was a supporter of new private space. Hell, COTS started under him (via griffin), though it was the neo-cons that killed off COTS-D, which would have created multiple manned launchers.
So, no. I am not going to blame the man for what he started, when it was a good thing.
But, I am going to put blame where it belongs. The senate under dem control has gone between what O wanted and the neo-con controlled house voted. Now, that the senate is under neo-con control, and that includes this sub-committee, now voted to gut it further than the house neo-cons.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I was with you right up until you went all stupid with your political rhetoric. You should have stopped while you still sounded smart. WTF? Why not just let your argument stand instead of throwing stupid crap like that in and loosing your audience?
My mistake for not including the original post I was replying to...
Here it is for your listening pleasure (as well as to explain why I said what I said.. )
You can tell congress is run by a bunch of corporate minded Republican douchebags, when their answer to budget problems is just to offshore the work.
So... My point was that the "republican" congress wasn't acting badly, but actually had good reasons for doing this, and bipartisan support for the budget being discussed. Which really just says that the original poster was the one with the issues... Now I'm wondering about you having issue too....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Absolutely - they are on target for this. At least SpaceX is. And cutting their funding is not a way to get there.
NASA doesn't believe Space X is "on track" for this. They are at HIGH RISK for not meeting the 2017 deadline. NASA's the one that made this determination, not Congress. Cutting their funding is necessary to fund other things which are *more* necessary because of the program risk. However, this line item still gets $900 Million, so it's not like SpaceX get's nothing.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101