SpaceX and Boeing Slated For Manned Space Missions By Year's End (fortune.com)

schwit1 shares a report from Fortune, covering NASA's announcement last week that it expects SpaceX to conduct a crewed test flight by the end of the year: SpaceX's crewed test flight is slated for December, after an uncrewed flight in August. Boeing will also be demonstrating its CST-100 Starliner capsule, with a crewed flight in November following an uncrewed flight in August. NASA's goal is to launch crews to the ISS from U.S. soil, a task that has fallen to Russia's space program since the retirement of the U.S. Space Shuttle program in 2011. NASA began looking for private launch companies to take over starting in 2010, and contracted both SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to pursue crewed launches. The push to restore America's crewed spaceflight capacity has been delayed in part, according to a detailed survey by Ars Technica, by Congress redirecting funds in subsequent years. The test flights could determine whether Boeing or SpaceX conducts the first U.S. commercial space launch to the ISS. Whichever company gets that honor may also claim a symbolic U.S. flag stuck to a hatch on the space station. Sources speaking to Ars describe the race between the two companies as too close to call, and say that a push to early 2019 is entirely possible. But in an apparent vote of confidence, NASA has already begun naming astronauts to helm the flights.

Comments

Re:Where have we heard this before?

[mschwanke97402]

Didn’t SpaceX set a record last year for most flights in a calendar year? Weren’t quite a few of those flights actually commercial flights, as in paying customers? Hasn’t SpaceX carried commercial and government cargo on re-used boosters this year. Space is one of the hardest things a company could ever set out to do. Targets will be missed and the there will be failures along the way. SpaceX has stuck it out and accomplished much.

Re:Too late

[LostMyBeaver]

I'm not completely sure I agree with you. In sentiment I certainly do. You're right, we should have had 30 years more experience in space now.

But here's a few things.

1) I'm a globalist. Consider that almost every single "Great American Achievement" during my short lifetime of 42 years are credited primarily to immigrants. This isn't to speak poorly of Americans, but there's a general rule of history and that's that greatness almost always comes from people willing to give up absolutely everything and take the greatest risks to achieve it. This generally means leaving everything you know and love to go someplace which may be even openly hostile towards you to make something great. American's do great things abroad, but rarely in America.

The moral of the story in this sense is that we as humans should have accomplished a great deal more in collaboration to reach space. And to a certain extent we really did. We built the space station and people have lived in space for over a year. We have created a lot of technology able to function and operate in space and we're not far from starting to do more than just put people there, we should be able to build habitats where we may produce food and may build things we need too.

We are almost experts on water recycling now. We can scrub air like crazy. In those 30 years, we have learned so incredibly much about space that now companies can take that information and privatize it.

2) The price is dropping fast. My household income is only a few hundred thousand a year and I think I'll be able to take a family trip to space at some point before I die. SpaceX and Blue Horizon are amazing companies who will increase the infrastructure into space. Virgin should eventually have the capacity to transport people to LEO. It's an issue of supply and demand. As soon as we have the means to reach space with lower fuel cost and at a much higher frequency, prices will drop substantially.

3) Space belongs to no one too. Consider there's an awful lot of space. There is more than enough to go around. We will have no problem sharing and if someone wants to claim property rights on a square kilometer on a dusty planet somewhere, I suppose most people won't begrudge them the right to do so. I don't really think ownership will matter beyond small personal items when the space age truly happens.

4) If we did this 30 years sooner, we wouldn't have been ready. To accomplish it, the space craft would have had to be government owned / operated / whatever. They would have been public projects. That means bureaucracy and politics. It also means cutting corners, wasted spending, etc... we spent 30 years learning an incredible lesson. While organizations like NASA can do this stuff, the government can't. Privatizing space changes everything. Right now, there are a small number of players. Someday, there will be more. If an entire country is only able to go to space if the government chooses to launch a rocket, then any space missions which are not specifically government will be of little interest and will be very expensive. The government as a whole has a responsibility to flood the economy with money produced by the deficit and produce massive numbers of jobs, therefore making space cheap was always a bad idea for the government.

Now, multiple companies are launch capable. Soon, more will be capable and some will be human rated. We'll soon move past the thrill of simply getting into space and move onto going somewhere in space.

Let's be honest, Elon Musk is a dreamer and by most standards a mad man. We can't tell whether he should be locked up for mental health, arrested for running his company stocks just short of a ponzi operation, or if we should place him on a pedestal and try and change the laws of the US to allow for a foreign presidential candidate. He sometimes seems like he's learned how to live by reading Iron Man comic books and he models himself after Tony Stark. I'll die laughing if he all of a sudden makes an Iron Man suit.

Wha

Re:Too late

[Kjella]

2) The price is dropping fast. My household income is only a few hundred thousand a year and I think I'll be able to take a family trip to space at some point before I die.

My guess is that this is extremely optimistic at least for an orbital flight. The Dragon is supposed to have a crew of 7 when it's operational. Musk has said the fuel cost alone is $200k, so just gas money is almost $30k/seat. The second stage which still has no technical or economically proven recovery is about 30% of the cost which would be $60M*0.3 = $18M = $2M+/seat. And that assumes the first stage and capsule are free with infinite reuse. Note that NASA is expected to pay around $150M for an ISS flight or $20M+/seat, so I've already assumed a 90% drop from the current rate. Maybe it gets cheaper carrying passengers by the busload and construction costs will drop with further scale, but I still think you're well into fantasy land doing it on a salary of a few hundred grand.

Maybe a suborbital joyride with Blue Horizon just peeking across the 100km limit, but that's going to be a much shorter ride straight up, peek out the windows hey there's space then back down again. The Lynx will give you 4-5 minutes of weightlessness on an hour's flight. Is that worth >$100k? It's a fancier vomit comet where you get your astronaut wings, but my guess is that once you have joyriders doing that in bulk we'll move the goal post to "proper" space flights. Same reason Yuri Gagarin is way, way more known than Alan Shepard. Reaching orbit is a completely different beast with a completely different price tag, SpaceX is great but physics dictates there's some miracles I think even they can't pull off. It's never going to become a mass market thing.