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NASA Commercial Crew Program for Space Station Faces Delays, Report Says (reuters.com)
Plans to launch the first NASA astronauts since 2011 to the International Space Station from the United States look set to be delayed due to incomplete safety measures and accountability holes in the agency's commercial crew program, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing a federal report released on Wednesday. From the report: SpaceX and Boeing Co are the two main contractors selected under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's commercial crew program to send U.S. astronauts to space as soon as 2019, using their Dragon and Starliner spacecraft respectively. But the report from the Government Accountability Office said the issues could cause delays in the launch of the first crewed mission from U.S. soil by a private company and could result in a nine-month gap in which no U.S. astronauts inhabit the ISS.
...SpaceX is still scheduled for an unmanned crew dragon test in August, mid-flight abort/escape test in October, and first manned flight in late December. (Source: Spaceflight Now's Luanch Schedule)
The first flight article just left the Plum Brook test center bound for Florida and mating to a Falcon 9 Block 5.
I fail to see where SpaceX is behind on this. Now, if you want to look at Boeing, last I heard the first flight article has yet to even finish being built, much less undergone vacuum, vibration, and cold testing like the Crew Dragon has.
But, hey, their capsule only costs the taxpayer 50% more than the Dragon, and was started 4 years earlier.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Rocket Rider's Prayer
© 1986 Stephen Savitzky. CC-by-nc-sa.
When the rocket stands before us like a tower of glass and steel
Then no words in any language can express the way we feel
Mingled joy and hope and terror as we're starting on our way
And we suddenly consider that it just might help to pray.
So first let's pray to Vulcan, ugly god of forge and flame,
And also wise Minerva, now we glorify your name,
May you aid our ship's designers now and find it in your hearts
To please help the lowest bidders who've constructed all her parts!
Complete poem at http://steve.savitzky.net/Songs/rrprayer/
Both Boeing and SpaceX look to miss the deadlines, but Boeing looks ahead on the unofficial NASA internal eval...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/nasa-commercial-crew-analysis-finds-boeing-slightly-ahead-of-spacex/
I read this interesting piece yesterday "The War on Tesla, Musk, and the Fight for the Future".
Quote: "people with 10,7 billion dollars bet against Tesla stand to utterly lose their shirt".
Musk doesn't seem too bothered because, quote: "Musk can create contracts at will from SpaceX (and, to a lesser extent, Boring Company). SpaceX is on a roll and flush with cash." and this "Musk can sell off a portion of his SpaceX stake to personally bail out Tesla. There’s a massive demand for buying into SpaceX that hasn’t been able to be filled because it’s privately held. And Musk has shown repeatedly throughout his history that he isn’t, if anything, afraid to go personally “all in”."
I wonder how much Musk is relying on US Government contracts to keep his cash cow nice and fat if it needs to be slaughtered for Tesla?
Of course the other reason for this will be to allow Boeing to catch up but who'd pass up the chance to kill two birds with one stone.
I'd expect more to follow this If I'm right. I hope not.
My favourite space news and analysis site is www.nasaspaceflight.com. (This is a misnomer - it covers space stuff world wide, not NASA specific, and so far as I can tell has no affiliation with NASA.) They last looked at the commercial crew program in April in a pair of articles:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
Both were pretty up-beat about prospects, however the SpaceX article says:
[...] SpaceX aims to conduct a crew test flight of Dragon, known as DM-2. This mission is currently slated for December 2018 but is likely to slip into early 2019.
And the Boeing article says:
Officially, Boeing is targeting August 2018 for its Orbital Flight Test (OFT), their uncrewed certification mission for Starliner, to be followed in November 2018 with their Crew Flight Test (CFT). Those dates are based on the last quarterly review by the Commercial Crew Program in February, and there is some indication that those dates are likely to slip at the next quarterly review in May – with the CFT slipping into 2019.
TFA takes early 2019 as a start point:
SpaceX and Boeing Co are the two main contractors selected under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s commercial crew program to send U.S. astronauts to space as soon as 2019, using their Dragon and Starliner spacecraft respectively.
and seems to be talking about delays beyond this.
“Boeing and SpaceX continue to make progress developing their crew transportation systems, but both contractors have further delayed the certification milestone to early 2019,” the report said.
Reading between the lines, I take it that there is a significant time between certification and first crewed flight, so certification in early 2019 means no crewed flight in early 2019. Both capsules will have an uncrewed test flight some months before the first crewed flight. I don't know whether certification comes before or after the test flight.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Here is a daring article from 1945, maybe you can catch up?
Satellites are MANNED? Wow, I *really* need to catch up! I also didn't know these satellites were in LEO. I thought Clarke postulated THREE manned doohickeys in geo orbit? And they had to be manned ... to swap the vacuum tubes?
Almost as if you don't even understand what you replied to.
Well the ISS is a manned satellite...