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Astronauts Won't Be Flying To Space In Boeing's Starliner Until 2018 (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Boeing Starliner, one of two new spacecraft meant to break the Russian stranglehold on sending people to orbit, has hit a snag. Originally scheduled to start flying next year, the Starliner won't carry a crewed mission to the International Space Station until 2018 at the earliest. Six years is long enough. Ever since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle NASA has been pushing for privately built craft capable of ferrying astronauts to orbit, which would let the agency buy American-made ships and end its dependency on renting seats aboard Russian spacecraft. The Starliner and SpaceX's Dragon were chosen, and 2017 was to be the year. But while SpaceX has sent its ship to the ISS on multiple uncrewed cargo resupply missions, the Starliner won't make such trips until 2017 and won't carry people until 2018 at the earliest. SpaceX maintains that it will be able to send crews to orbit in 2017.GeekWire explains: "For Boeing to shift its crewed test flight from 2017 to 2018 isn't as much of a slip as it might sound: The company's earlier schedule had called for the visit to the space station to take place in mid-December."
It's not really american when the Atlas V, the rocket which this capsule ist built for, still uses russian RD-180 rocket motors. A rocket is a fuel tank and a rocket motor mostly. It's not the fuel tank that's hard to build....
SpaceX has repeatedly had delays also and pretty much nothing they do is on time to the point where people jokingly refer to "ElonTime." The Falcon Heavy for example was supposed to originally fly in 2012 and it still hasn't flown yet. So it isn't clear that Dragon will be ready when they say it is either. There was a flag left at the ISS to be taken back by the next American manned spacecraft to go to the station. http://www.space.com/12335-shuttle-astronauts-flag-model-space-station-tribute.html The race in the 1960s was to plant a flag and that race was between two countries. Now the race is to retrieve a flag and it is between two corporations.
FTFS:
SpaceX has sent its ship to the ISS on multiple uncrewed cargo resupply missions
To be fair, the Dragon that SpaceX has flown is a very different vehicle than the Dragon V2, which is the capsule rated to carry astronauts. So while they do have a leg up on Boeing in some respects (and will likely beat them on schedule) neither capsule is really flight-proven at this point.
Assuming it doesn't get pushed back again.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Although we proved it in the 60's, this stuff is hard. You've now got private companies competing, not cooperating via NASA to deliver this stuff.
The problem here is our federal government hot cancel contracts and retire heavy lifting vehicles. Frankly, the shuttles were not in immediate need of retirement. Endeavour, the newest, was built in '92 and could have been kept in rotation until there was a viable American-controlled alternative.
In the Reagan administration, the USS Iowa and Missouri were pulled out of mothballs to patrol the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, the USS Missouri served longer in this second period than it did in its maiden one.
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
CST is not reusable, can't do a powered landing on solid ground, and although it's supposed to be launch-vehicle-agnostic, it is currently planned to use Atlas 5 and we don't have a US engine for that yet.
Contrast the Dragon, which is in the heritage of a flying spacecraft, is designed for powered landing on solid ground so that it can bring experiments back even more quickly than a space-plane - and SpaceX has proven its ability in powered landings now, and is intended to be reusable.
Obviously everyone who is still in the game will aim higher with their next complete redesign, but SpaceX does seem to have made a technical jump over everyone else.
Bruce Perens.
...what could we accomplish if we spent that on making better robots?
And use them to replace politicians? AI FOR PRESIDENT!!! Seriously, I'm all for it....
This universe shipped by weight, not by volume. Some expansion of the contents may have occurred during shipment.
Boeing is concentrating more on human-rated flight from the start. This kind of delay is not unexpected.
Kriston
If the contract is fixed price, as with the original cargo contracts awarded SpaceX and Orbital ATK, Boeing will have no incentive to delay, as they won’t be paid anything until they achieve specific milestones and will get no additional monies to cover the added costs of the delay. If the contract is cost-plus, however, NASA’s traditional contract system used for SLS, Orion, and almost every other boondoggle since the 1960s, then Boeing will be paid regardless of the delay, and NASA will also be on the hook for paying the additional delay costs, thus giving Boeing an incentive to slow walk the construction.
Russia does not have a stranglehold; like they are preventing others from doing so. The US has dropped the ball, which is shameful.
"the Russian stranglehold on sending people to orbit". we wouldn't have an iss if we depended solely on nasa.
There is a more detailed analysis and commentary at Space Flight Now:
http://spaceflightnow.com/2016/05/12/first-astronaut-flight-on-boeing-capsule-slips-to-2018/
I don't know why the US Govt paying to develop both Dragon for humans and Starliner. Only about 20 people go into outer space each year, worldwide. Why not license manufacture the Chinese Shenzhou in the United States instead of developing Starliner?
This is counter to the prevailing Slash space religion. Man belongs in space, because:
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=35c278x&s=9#.VzYk-JZwVhF
From the Space Shuttle, to 1960's era tin can. My how the mighty have fallen :(
SpaceX has done some amazing things (halved launch costs, proven rocket return capabilities, etc), and hopefully will continue to do so. But they also still have a lot to prove before they can be given the credit you seem to be assigning them. They still have to (reliably) re-fly their returned boosters, there are still some kinks to iron out of landing their boosters, Dragon V2 has a lot of testing/usage to go through before it is proven practical and it would really help if they kept their launch success rate up. If anyone can do it I bet SpaceX will be the one to achieve it, but they still have a lot of work to do.
The CST is reusable, and the plan is at least 10 flights per capsule.
But why let facts interfere with ignorance?
aside from all the national security concerns about relying on a Russian rocket engine for national security launches.
Dear gods, please tell me you don't really believe we use Russian rocket engines/motors for the national security flights.
In fact, we do. When this was first baselined, the Air Force demanded a back-up plan to manufacture the engines in the United States... but the funding for this somehow kept getting cut when other projects needed money.
The Falcon Heavy is scheduled to do a demo launch in November. I would not be surprised if they put a Dragon 2 capsule on it to do the unmanned flight test at the same time. If they do, it would be cool if they launched the Dragon around the moon. SpaceX has a history of doing experimental landings during real launches. Launching a Dragon atop of FH would be more efficient than just having a dummy payload and going around the Moon would certainly make the launch worthwhile.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Before there was a viable replacement. He hoped the replacement would be in 2014. Probably not realistically until the early 2020s. There have to be several full configuration unmanned tests before building trust. The shuttle were rated for a hundred missions each. They retired less than a third into their lifetimes.
The giant defense contractors Boeing (who the government allowed to gobble-up North American, Douglas, MdDonnel, Rockwell, and Textron (which had absorbed Bell helicopter, Cessna, and Beechcraft) etc) and LockheedMartin (which had been Lockheed and was allowed to gobble-up Convair, Ryan, Martin, Sikorski, etc) were permitted to smash their rocket businesses together into a monopoly called the "United Launch Alliance" which as a monopoly on all US space activity would save the taxpayers money (What could POSSIBLY go wonrg, go wrong, go wrong...). On another related (but non-space) set of actions, Northrop was allowed to gobble-up Grumman and become NorthropGrumman.
In doing so, the government made itself almost entirely dependent upon three big defense firms, two of which dropped most commercial products and therefore became dependent on military contracts. Now the government pays these big boys as much as they demand for stuff out of fear that by not doing so we might los one of the three and thereby lose a vital strategic capability. This massive corruption served the shareholders of these firms very well, and the members of congress who get campaign funds very well, and members of several administrations of both parties very well (who moved through revolving doors between government and contractor jobs). The taxpayer is the loser.
These three firms have become so fat, dumb & happy that they are no longer used to having to compete, having to control costs, having to deliver on time, or having to deliver products that actually perform as promised (Adam Smith could have easily predicted this natural consequence). The result is a pile of grossly-overpriced incompetence. Boeing started working on the "Starliner" (albeit under a different name) when Bill Clinton was in the White House in the 1990s as part of a project to replace the shuttles. They dusted-off the same Apollo-based design as a bid for the "CEV" of the George W Bush admin post-Columbia disaster "Constellation" project (they lost the bid to Lockheed for what was named "Orion" then renamed "MPCV" by Obama, and then re-renamed "MPCV Orion"). When the Obama admin extended the Bush "commercial cargo" program to "commercial crew" Boeing dusted-off their Apollo-derivative again and this time called it "CST-100 Starliner". Here they are, 20+ years after starting, and 12 years after re-restarting, and 6 years after re-re-restarting the effort to make an improved 1960s Apollo capsule (where the mechanics and aerodynamics were already well understood) and they are slipping schedules and will provide a capsule ultimately far less capable than the one Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins took to the Moon in 1969. (The Apollo could seat 6 in rescue mode to LEO and was configured but not flown that way once during Skylab, and as normally configured could do Moon missions, whereas Starliner is LEO-only and only supports a crew for a few hours in Earth orbit with its only advance being the ability to hibernate at ISS for months)
There's no surprise here. Monopolies serve shareholders and sometimes serve certain interests in government, but NEVER the general public or the taxpayer. This is not a Boeing-only issue: LockMart has spent billions and over a decade on Orion (their Apollo capsule recreation) and will not be ready to put people into it until about 2023. Meanwhile, their F-35 is the most expensive warplane program in world history, while being far behind schedule and severely under performing.
Bush cancelled shuttle, but with a concrete plan for the replacement and actual metal being bent. The Constellation program was underway and without a big funding increase from congress, it was thought that the money saved by no longer flying shuttles would speed-up the replacement making the gap in US manned spaceflight capability shorter than the post-Apollo gap before Shuttles (undesirable, but manageable and not unprecedented).
When Obama entered office, shuttles were still flying and the program was not irreversibly doomed. Some vendors had halted spare parts production, and in 2009 NASA determined that it could un-cancel the program with only a minor disruption (either a gap of about a year waiting for parts, or no gap with a slight spacing-out of scheduled flights). As the plans were studied more seriously, they appeared to concentrate on retiring one orbiter and using it as a source of spare parts while awaiting re-start/re-cert of the affected suppliers. There was even consideration of shifting the orbiters to a vendor like ULA for commercial ops, and there were no "showstoppers".
What ended all the consideration for un-cancelling the shuttle program was the Obama administration 2010 NASA budget proposal which cancelled all US manned spaceflight. Congress panicked and rejected the proposal and then ordered Obama, by law, to build SLS and Orion. The Obama administration, eager to preclude any other "meddling" ordered the demolition of various shuttle facilities, the firing of many shuttle workers, and the crippling of the orbiters (all of which had their engines removed and replaced with dummies, large sections of the aft-bay fuel and oxidizer plumbing chopped out, and their OMS pods and forward RCS bays stripped and made non-functional). After the orbiters themselves had their guts ripped out, they were only useful as museum displays and it would be cheaper to build new ones.
Bush43 scheduled the end of the shuttle program in a classic "bird in the hand vs two in the bush" error, but Obama was the eager and forceful executioner, while the executive branch OMB, which has always been an agency that wanted to gut NASA as a money-saving action, was there as a bi-partisan wormtongue (LoTR reference) cheerleader and encourager.
at places like NasaSpaceflight.com, which gets its hands on NASA documents rather frequently and is frequently posted to by people in the industry and in NASA and space journalists.
The subject was also covered in press conferences back then and was also discussed publicly by then-shuttle-manager Wayne Hale.
Here is just one of the related docs to wet your appetite, and here is an NSF article about it, although this one is not related to the study of turning the shuttles over to industry.
Here is a link to an NBC news story about one of the 2011 (3 years into Obama admin) options considered to keep shuttles flying until 2017.
Here's another thread from back then for you to tug on.
Now that you have a starting point and evidence that my post was not the fevered imaginings of an Obama hater, I leave it to you to dig around and discover that some of this stuff was just journalistic fluff as usual, but several of the studies were very serious and involved high levels of NASA people.
The whole "Bush killed the shuttles and Obama was a blameless and helpless victim of it" meme is politically convenient for Obama's more space-geeky followers and fanboys, but as usual when politics are involved, the story is far more complex and the mess is far more bi-partisan. This president is no shrinking violet when resisting Republicans in congress, who have greatly angered their base voters by caving-in to him on everything for many years, so his supporters have long pretended that his allowing the shuttles to die was because it was a locked-in irreversible situation before he got into office. That's simply never been the truth. Note: I am no Bush fan and am not trying to remove any blame from him, I'm just debunking the myths of the koolaide-drinking, pudding-eating, NikeShoes-and-purple-napkin-wearing Obama fans who deny well-documented reality while planning their future lives on the comet of perpetual happiness (google: famous suicide cults).