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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.
This will be good practice for SpaceX's crewed trip to Mars in 2024. We truly live in exciting times!
Who volunteers for that mission?
You would be surprised at how many would.
Not me though. Never buy Version 1.0 and all that.
Even if Boeing (who has the knowledge and a successful track record) builds the capsule, fact is SpaceX has yet to have a single fully successful mission (they always had a major problem) and has a track record of ignoring problems.
Ok. There's so much wrong here, I'm not sure where to begin. First of all, Boeing and SpaceX have different capsule systems. Space X is using the Dragon 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_2 on top of a Falcon 9. Boeing is using the Starliner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CST-100_Starliner on top of an Atlas rocket. As for the idea hat SpaceX has yet to have a single successful mission, this is demonstrably not true as a glance at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches where for example you can see 17 successful launches in 2017 alone. While SpaceX has had some very high profile failures, there success rate at this point is close comparable to other major rocket companies, and the Dragon spacecraft has also successfully returned to Earth. Moreover, one of the major things that people think of a as a "failure" of SpaceX is when one of their rocket's first stages doesn't land successfully. In fact, that didn't happen at all in 2017, and moreover isn't an issue anyways because it isn't an issue for mission success, simply an issue for if they have a rocket available for cheap reuse later.
I suppose one could point to the rumors of failure of Zuma, but it is pretty clear that if anything failed there it was on the Northrop-Grumman payload end, not SpaceX, as demonstrated by the fact that SpaceX did not halt flights after the Zuma launch.
All of that said, there are some signs that SpaceX has been too fast and loose with some safety issues. A recent set of government audits found serious safety and protocol issues at pretty much all the major space contractors but with more issues at SpaceX than any of the others https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-22/top-u-s-space-contractors-cited-for-lapses-by-pentagon-watchdog. However, none of those issues have so far translated into any substantial problem.
Meanwhile other rockets such as the Delta are at 100% success rate.
So, almost no one has a 100% success rate. Note by the way, that this is part of why both the Dragon and Starliner(the Boeing capsule) have an ability for the capsule to separate if there's an issue with the rocket. It is interesting that you mention the Delta, since around 9% of Deltas have failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_(rocket_family)#Launch_reliability. Last I checked, 91% is not 100%. (Granted, many of the failures were early Deltas and many of those failures were partial failures where people in a capsule above might survive). But, in fact, NASA doesn't think that man-rating any version of the Delta makes sense https://www.wired.com/2008/07/why-nasa-isnt-t/, whereas NASA is in favor of man-rating the Falcon 9, Block 5, so the people who think about this sort of thing have thought very carefully about this. Part of why NASA won't man-rate the Delta is because its regular flight profile subjects payloads to 6 gs, but a major part is also its lack of redundant systems where adding them in would require massive work.
NASA is insisting, quite appropriately on at least a few Falcon 9 Block 5 flights before they put people on it. The Block 5 is going to be the final version of the rocket and has a lot of tweaks which will make reuse easier but also other bits that will improve safety and reliability.
Have you ever heard of what we used to call a "test pilot"? IOW, the guys that were all the early astronauts?
The Zuma failure is only a rumour, and if it happened, it was caused by hardware which SpaceX was not allowed to see or touch, so it isn't their fault.
Falcon has had two full failures: CRS7 failed in flight AMOS-6 failed on the pad. Falcon has had one partial failure: CRS1 was successful but a secondary payload did not make its intended orbit and was lost. They also blew up a 'grasshopper' experimental vehicle but that is in no way comparable to a Falcon failure.
Two and a bit failures from 48 flights (or intended flight in the case of AMOS-6) is neither great nor terrible.
To be allowed to fly people, SpaceX and Boeing have to convince NASA they have less than 1/270 chance of losing crew.
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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.
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.
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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.
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