Japan had twice the per capita GDP over America... twenty years ago. While substantial, they are dealing with some very tough problems.
One of the largest problems Japan has been facing is that they have a huge population of senior citizens compared to the number of children that have been born. It has forced Japan to deal with very different issues than many Islamic countries are facing which have a large youth population. These issues are also going to be facing America relatively soon, particularly when the Baby Boomers finally start to hit retirement age (they already are right now and are arguably a part of the housing price collapse).
The Wright Flyer was hardly a danger to buildings and by far more dangerous to the pilots using them. There is a reason they were often called "kites" as they were really not much more robust. Being made of lightweight wood with thinly stretched canvas (as was the case for most early aircraft), neither their airspeed nor their mass was something of concern for building construction.
Robert Goddard, on the other hand, ran into all kinds of problems with his rocketry experiments being done in Massachusetts, so he ended up moving most of his experimentation to New Mexico where a major disaster wouldn't really do too much damage to "uninvolved participants". It should be little wonder that Werner Von Braun used the same facility when developing his early rockets for NASA in the 1950's.
Again I ask how you know so much about what Blue Origin isn't doing? I can name a few things they are doing, but due to the fact they are so tight lipped it is hard to say what they aren't doing because you can't prove a negative action.
In the case of SpaceX, you would know what they are not doing because if there was anything they were doing it would have been discussed a long time ago. It is thus easy to say that SpaceX isn't building inflatable orbital habitats because if they were it would be something found on their website or bragged about elsewhere. I can't say the same thing about Blue Origin though, or the secret base they have (or don't have) on Mars or anything else that company is doing.
I certainly think it is myopic to say that Blue Origin isn't working on an engine when there is no way to prove that, where if they were working on new engine technology it wouldn't be public knowledge. Perhaps you have a drinking buddy who has let slip out some information about Blue Origin who is also an employee there that knows some of the inside information. I'm not ruling it out completely but such an information leak would also likely get such an employee spilling inside information about the company fired as well. That is how Jeff Bezos is running Blue Origin.
There are some very skilled people with advanced knowledge of aerospace engineering working for Blue Origin, so I wouldn't put anything past them. What I do know is that the NASA people looking at the proposal from Blue Origin for CCDev was impressed enough to push them ahead of other similar proposals from other companies like ATK, which was soundly rejected in the screening process. And frankly the ATK proposal was pretty good as were several other CCDev proposals that didn't make the cut.
Of course this is why it should be abundantly clear that the U.S. State Department works against the interests of the American people and in some ways acts strictly on its own interests and goals rather than actually trying to follow "the advise and consent of the United States Senate"... which is how treaties are supposed to be negotiated.
Such treaties should never have been negotiated in secret in the first place, which is the problem. In this regard, the U.S. State Department is a rogue organization that has exceeded its authority and constitutional boundaries. The question is then, will the U.S. Congress have the balls necessary to slap the State Department back down to the Earth and throw out such sausage making?
Blue Origin doesn't seem to have a credible roadmap for what they are doing in strategic terms. That is the problem.
Blue Origin doesn't discuss much of anything to anybody. As to if they have a roadmap or a strategic plan, I have no idea if they do or don't. If you know something I don't, I'd love to know how you found out about their lack of a plan.
Jeff Bezos runs the company like a skunkworks and the employees of the company are famously tight lipped about almost anything the company is doing. Far more is known about more esoteric things the company is doing like retrieving the original F1 engines used for the Apollo 11 Saturn V and the 10k year clock being built at their launch/test facility in Texas than is typically known about what they even do for building spacecraft.
About the only time you even know they are doing a flight is when they are issued a flight permit and a NOTAM is issued by the FAA just prior to the flight.
In short, I don't think there is any way to tell what plan they may of may not have in the future as Jeff Bezos isn't really saying much at all. The only reason anything is known about this particular project under CCDev is because Blue Origin is required by law to disclose certain pieces of information and make them available to the public. That is by far and away very different from SpaceX, where Elon Musk has a personal blog, sends tweets about the company, and routinely brings members of the press core on tours of the plant... the "press corps" being loosely defined as anybody with a blog that has more than a couple hundred people reading it.
Blue Origin gets most of its money from Jeff Bezos as more of a hobby than anything else. I'll let you look up his name elsewhere to see if he can afford a personal space program or not.
The commercial crew program is the first time that Blue Origin has even tried to go after a government funded project of any kind, and in the reviews I saw where they were selected, the NASA review committee seemed to have been quite impressed with not just the proposal but the kinds of things that Blue Origin has done already including an on-site visit of the Blue Origin facilities by NASA officials. You might just be surprised.
Yes, I'm suggesting that if ATK somehow is excluded from the process of being involved with flying crews to the ISS, that they will change the inclusion parameters so they will become included even if it opens the process up to other competitors. They have some very powerful friends in Congress (both in the House and the Senate) including some very long time supporters who will go to bat for them. The language of the SLS, to give an example, was written explicitly to include ATK components in the legal description for what NASA was permitted to build (hence in part why it is called the "Senate Launch System").
There is an outside possibility that they could be excluded from consideration, but ATK is pushing simultaneously for making a much better technical presentation (they do have some real rocket scientists on their payroll who know more than just the rocket equation and some real-world flying experience of rocket hardware) as well as the political connections to make things stick.
I have my own reservations about the Liberty rocket necessarily being competitive on a commercial basis, but I have to assume they got some people crunching the numbers and are presuming they are going to sell some of their rockets to somebody. The relatively recent announcement of the Liberty rocket + capsule system capable of flying people into space (with Astrium providing the 2nd stage and a derivative of the Orion capsule being used for the crew) seems to be almost perfect timing for this selection process.
That is where you get things like the NAUTLUS-X proposal.
It was sort of sad though, at a recent "press day" at KSC prior to the launch of the Falcon 9 there were several NASA public relations guys that were hyping up the Orion capsule and the SLS as the "deep space" alternative to the Dragon capsule, and waxing on and on about how Orion was the "solution" to deep space travel and that the Dragon would only be used for trips to places like the ISS.
One of the participants at the gathering asked the NASA official about the NAUTLUS-X program, and it totally stumped the guy to the point he sort of suggested that it was a private program, or something made up out of whole cloth by some troll on Wikipedia.
The statement was made about an hour and a half into the video. The beginning of this video is worth watching just to see Gwynne Shotwell talk candidly about SpaceX and discuss some upcoming project they are working on, but the later half sort of shows the political climate all of this commercial crew program is working in and how even major players like NASA PR guys who should know this stuff are misinformed about even their own agency.
The largest current problem the HTP is simply getting permission from the Department of Homeland Security to even let you ship it at all, where refineries which make the stuff generally won't ship to you unless you are already using it in large industrial scale quantities. That really stinks if you are using for R&D purposes or something like a small start-up company.
Armadillo Aerospace spent a whole bunch of effort on the stuff, and John Carmack even sent out a general request on several mailing lists and news groups begging for people to help him out in the acquisition of the stuff. There was essentially nobody who was willing to sell it to him at any price. I don't know if Jeff Bezos has had the same problems (who has a fair bit more money than John Carmack), but this does seem to be the current issue where there is a huge niche that nobody wants to fill in terms of providing the material. Making your own production facilities to make HTP is an option.... but it is sort of a chicken or egg problem as well and is something that is best done on a large industrial scale as well in terms of costs.
It may very well be that HTP is a more cost effective approach to spaceflight, but getting over that hump of costs when other options that are "good enough" are available can make it much harder to go down that path. It is sort of like the problem of introducing alternatives to gasoline for automobiles, as the infrastructure is already in place for gasoline distribution but not nearly so much for compressed natural gas, or more exotic fuels like Hydrogen gas or quick recharging stations for electric cars.
LOX is already being used for rocketry and the infrastructure is also set up to be able to deliver the material in quantities needed for orbital spaceflight, not to mention that it has other applications besides rocketry. I don't know precisely if the LOX/Propane issue you are suggesting here is any better or not than LOX/RP1, although I will take your word at face value on this issue. Getting permits to transport Propane in bulk is much easier to get and it is readily available from many companies who are willing to go through the necessary steps of dealing with companies and experimenters who work with rocketry.
What that has to do with the New Shepard as it applies to commercial crew development, I don't know. That Jeff Bezos sees some potential in the technologies developed for the DC-X and is trying to run a private research group experimenting with those concepts and pushing them in a different direction that may hold some promise is interesting and worth watching. Sometimes it is useful to find out what was going on with some of the older programs and what might be rescued from them.... particularly when the program is shut down for political reasons and not engineering reasons as happened with the DC-X. If anything, I'd put the DC-X program as one of the most successful alternatives to the Shuttle that ever happened, and certainly got further along on its development than other projects like the Dynasoar or even Constellation and soon to add the SLS program to that list of failed NASA spaceflight efforts.
One area where HTP+RP1 might be useful is with in-orbit refueling depots. LOX+Liquid Hydrogen are currently being proposed in that situation, but the boil off from long term storage is a huge issue where HTP and RP1 wouldn't be nearly so big of a deal in that situation. The only other alternative is to use something like Hydrazine, which makes all of the technical problems of HTP look like child's play.
Robert Bigelow seems to have the money and the will to go into space on his own dime, and apparently even has the customers needed to make his space enterprises profitable. Enough that he even went through a significant planet expansion, even if he had to lay off a bunch of his employees temporarily.
The main problem that Robert Bigelow has been facing is trying to get people into space, and he has been insisting that he must have at least two different launch providers using completely different sets of engineering history in order to be able to get started and launching his stations on a regular basis. If he could get more launch providers, he would be happier. The idea here is that once he starts to launch his stations, he doesn't want to shut down operations because of a launch failure or some other serious problem which shows up forcing that particular vehicle to cease operations.
NASA has been operating with a single vehicle with a single engineering history, which is why they had to crash Skylab without follow up visits, and why the space program had to halt after the Challenger and Columbia disasters. If Bigelow Aerospace had to shut down for a couple of years after ramping up to full production, testing, and hiring... they would simply go bankrupt. NASA didn't go bankrupt only because Congress kept funding them... but NASA still had to end up paying the army of workers at KSC and all of their sub-contractors or they wouldn't have been able to fly the Shuttles afterward. Robert Bigelow simply doesn't have that kind of luxury.
I'd like to add that Bigelow Aerospace is hardly the only company needing this redundant service into space from multiple companies, which is precisely why this down select is foolish and clueless on the part of Representative Frank Wolf. Rep. Wolf thinks that somehow he is going to save some tax dollars, and over the short term he might be correct. But the future of American spaceflight is on the line here, which needs competition and some seed money to get it going.
The seed money is mainly needed to accelerate the commercial crew development so NASA doesn't need to depend upon the Russian Soyuz spacecraft for transportation to and from the modules on the ISS that were put up there by American taxpayers.... but which NASA can't reach now on their own because of ineptitude and mismanagement. There should be other alternatives, but the old way of doing things just isn't working any more nor really worked very well in the first place even when it was sort of working.
Gwynne Shotwell certainly is selling vehicles. They just sold some to Bigelow Aerospace. If you send an email to gwynne at spacex dot com, I'm sure she will even quote a price for you if you are being serious about buying those vehicles. They will also provide launch services, but if you want to buy the vehicle and fly it yourself, that won't really be too much of a problem for them.
BTW, SpaceX doesn't sell launch services even on a cost-plus basis, and the Liberty vehicle is also being developed independent of a government contract. If there is a cost overrun, those respective companies eat those costs... and reap the profits if they can make those vehicles cheaper. I can't speak about the EELVs though, as those vehicles were built in a sort of hybrid environment, but you are comparing several different contracting models here and mixing up all sorts of pricing schemes simultaneously that I can't even respond to your issue about cost overruns and contracts.
What you are forgetting here is that this particular program, the commercial crew development program (commonly called simply CCDev) is not being operated like a traditional government contract in the fashion that the Manhattan Project of the 1940's was run (and how most major engineering projects have been paid for since).
When the Manhattan project was under development, the bureaucrats realized that they were asking companies to literally come up with stuff that nobody knew if it could be done at all much less be able to reasonably estimate the costs of building those things. The same expectation was true for the Apollo project, as well as many of the aircraft and ships being built for the U.S. military over the years (like nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers). A rough guess was made over the costs involved, but no company was willing to gamble billions of dollars on the off chance their estimates for the cost of these projects was wrong. Instead, the government took the financial risk in something called a "cost-plus" contract. In other words, the contractor was expected to accurately report what the actual costs of the project were, and when the whole thing was finished there was a reasonable expectation of a profit for the company... in other words the "plus" was a guaranteed financial bonus given to the company regardless of how much the contract cost.
This is also where you hear loud screaming with cost overruns, because a project that runs into some technical challenges or has the requirements change over the years of its development will end up driving up those "costs" that simply must be paid for by tax payers and not the companies involved.
For spacecraft being built by companies for NASA, this is the only way those spacecraft have been paid for. Some of this is understandable, as nobody before Werner Von Braun had ever built a spacecraft that took people to the Moon and brought them back to the Earth. To say that anybody in 1960 had a clue as to how much it really was going to cost to build a Saturn V is somebody somebody smoking some hemp or having a few too many beers. For crash programs where there is an issue of national security on the line, a cost-plus contract model even makes sense. There were slogans posted on walls of NASA contractors that openly bragged "waste anything but time".
What is happening with CCDev (the commercial crew development program) and COTS (commercial orbital transportation services) is something very different. There are also several very different things that are happening here too.
One of the things going on is that NASA is providing technical support for companies who want to provide commercial services that NASA could use, such as delivering supplies to the International Space Station (aka COTS) or providing a service to bring astronauts to Low-Earth orbit at various places, including the ISS as well. By technical support, NASA is providing consultants to explain some of the history and technical details for how their earlier spacecraft worked, what problems they had with historical spacecraft like the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, and other vehicles that NASA has worked with over the years. NASA also has huge libraries of technical studies and documentation about these spacecraft including performance data and details about all kinds of engine designs and all kinds of other engineering data that is very useful for anybody building rockets or trying to go into space. Providing these consultants or having people help in digging up that documentation does cost some money, so part of the program is simply paying for all of those people doing that running around, scanning documents if they need to be digitized (keep in mind that some of that data is from the 1950's and 1960's) and perhaps flying consultants to the factories where these commercial companies are building the rockets. Useful stuff and it doesn't go direct to these private companies, but is an ongoing expense.
Nah, the troughers have to kick SpaceX out because they're the only company who have proven that they can do the job and do it cheaper than the competition. That cannot be allowed.
The purpose of this down select is explicitly to hurt SpaceX and to drive them out of the market place through political maneuvering. If you claim it cannot be allowed, you really need to contact your member of congress and complain about this whole notion of a down select.
That Representative Frank Wolf, the guy behind this move to force the "down select", may have major egg on his face when these other commercial spaceflight developers have much cheaper vehicles than the things being built by Boeing and ATK is immaterial.
ATK is currently a part of the CCDev program.... they are just "unfunded". Tweaking the language of the appropriations bill to get them included in the selection criteria would be trivial and would only take a couple steak dinners at a posh DC restaurant with the right congressional staff members... and I don't think the guys at NASA who are running the program would complain.
ATK having a chance? I would put them as one of the top contender not necessarily for their technical expertise (although they have cleaned up their proposal considerably) but because of their political connections.
Indeed, if ATK looks like it is in danger of getting cut out of the loop, I would even go so far as to suggest that this whole down select process is going to be jettisoned as a bad political idea that it really is anyway.
The commercial crew program wasn't even a part of the planning under Constellation. To suggest it was a "stop gap" is completely misrepresenting how it was sold to Congress. Commercial crew has been perceived as the "stop gap" until Constellation could be built, as a sort of "insurance program" if there might have been problems. In fact, in congressional testimony and other public discussion about the future of manned spaceflight, it was almost as if the commercial crew didn't even exist as a program with many members of congress trying to go out of their way to kill the program... just as is being done again by Frank Wolf. They simply can't conceive a situation where a private company on their own dime could develop a spacecraft.
I agree with you that as a practical matter there were numerous problems with the Orion. One of the largest problems with the vehicle is that it was explicitly engineered in such a way that it couldn't fly on either the Atlas V or Delta IV rockets, so it simply had to fly on something like the Ares I or Ares V. That wasn't an engineering decision but rather a political decision made explicitly so EELVs couldn't be considered in the process and that so much money would be dumped down the rathole of Orion development that it became "too big to fail". That is also why Orion development has continued, and why the SLS program was developed.... to build a rocket large enough to carry the Orion capsule since obvious none of the existing launchers could possibly be able to carry a spacecraft capable of putting people into space.
Then again it sort of stings when you point out that Atlas rockets have been used in the past to put people into space. John Glenn didn't mind the ride... 50 years ago. If it could be done then, why not today?
Richard Branson's involvement is to use the Dream Chaser as the orbital spaceflight vehicle for Virgin Galactic. He is investing "seed money" and essentially offering a hard purchasing contract for the vehicles once they are built. That may not translate into actual stock ownership of the company, but it does make him an investor after a fashion and somebody important to consider in terms of company finances.
There are other people involved, and what is now known as the Dream Chaser has a fairly interesting development history that is worth looking at as well.
Of these four companies, the only one I could possibly see being "bought out" is Sierra Nevada. They have other projects going right now and while the Commercial Crew is a wonderful bonus and useful for the development of their company, they aren't necessarily dependent upon just this one contract in order to continue to exist as a company.
There is no bloody way upon this green Earth that either Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is going to sell out to Boeing, although I could see those two possibly proposing a merger or joint venture to buy out Boeing. Of course that would be like a guppy eating a whale in terms of the relative size of those companies.
The only real down select that is going to halt further development of space vehicles would be if Boeing is cut out, as they are oriented towards meeting government contracts. Even that seems dubious in terms of commercial ventures with the CST-100.
Of course I think this whole down select is pointless as well. None of the CCDev contracts are really anything more than some minor seed money to help encourage what these companies are already doing and hoping it will translate into proven vehicles that will go to the International Space Station once they are built. ATK with their Liberty rocket is technically in the program as well, even though they aren't receiving any money (but ATK is getting technical assistance from NASA under this program). Down selecting as worded with this particular congressional amendment would cut out even this "technical consulting" similar to what ATK is getting at the moment.
Blue Origin and their SSTO nonsense should have never received a dime of public money to begin with.
So you think the DC-X program was a terrible waste of tax dollars? Why are you upset that a private company without tax dollars is furthering the research into that flight concept and propulsion system?
Furthermore, do you even have a clue what part of the CCDev program that Blue Origin is even doing, what their spacecraft actually is supposed to look like, or how it is going to get into orbit much less return to the Earth? If you did, you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement presuming something that wasn't even true.
*Hint* -- Blue Origin proposed to use the Lockheed-Martin Atlas V for the launch of its spacecraft under CCDev. They aren't even planning on flying their own hardware for the first stage or two.
ATK has their fairy god-senators looking out for them and a very effective public relations team which knows how to do some serious lobbying.
I'm sure the hope is more for ATK and Boeing to get this contract and cut SpaceX out completely. Then again ATK was betting that last week's Dragon flight would blow up on the launch pad or otherwise go dead. SpaceX is hard to ignore at the moment, but that is sort of the point why this whole down select is real stupid.
They will be a major contestant for the down select, regardless of what else you think about them.
Orion is not meant for ISS operations. Orion is meant for Beyond Earth Orbit: asteroid and lunar exploration, that sort of thing.
That isn't what NASA was saying back when the Ares I was still under active development. The Ares I was being designed specifically so the Orion capsule could get to the ISS (complete with an ISS mating adapter) that really makes it a direct competitor to the SpaceX Dragon, at least for manned spacecraft.
Orion really does a lousy job for areas beyond LEO though. While it has just under 2x the usable internal volume that the Apollo spacecraft used, that won't exactly be something to brag about. Perhaps reasonable for a trip to the Moon, but I don't see how it will possibly be used on a trip to an asteroid much less Mars. The "habitable volume" of the Orion is very much comparable to the internal volume of the Dragon. I just don't see how astronauts are going to be expected to hang out in that kind of volume for weeks and months.
What makes the Orion useful for beyond LEO is mainly that it has its own solar energy generator array, and that the heat shield is being designed to perform re-entry of a free-return trajectory from the Moon and a similar return flight coming from Mars. Then again the Dragon capsule is being designed with those same parameters as well.
Orion might be a piece of the puzzle in terms of getting to Mars or somewhere else in the Solar System, but by itself it won't get the job done.
The sad thing is that Sierra Nevada is in some ways doing more to help drop the cost of going into orbit than almost anybody else around. The Dream Chaser spacecraft is really an amazing vehicle that is just beginning to reach a point of getting a payoff, which the early flight trials going on.
If they get cut, I hope that the investors in Sierra Nevada (and apparently Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic fame is one of them) continue to press forward without NASA funding.
They really don't deserve to be cut, at least so far as the investment being made by NASA into this company will likely produce some impressive long-term results. It is mainly sad that a jerk of a congressman who doesn't like these programs (COTS and CCDev) instead wants to dump 10x the amount of money on a fiscal black hole that will never fly (namely the SLS... aka the "Senate Launch System").
This move to reduce the options for CCDev is not going to save much money, and in fact it will set back commercial spaceflight by several years if not a full decade.
The other "selectee" will be Alliant Techsystems with the Liberty rocket. Yes, I realize they didn't even make the cut from eight or so to four, but they are going to drive everybody else out simply through a massive lobbying effort that will change the outcomes of several districts.
The Enterprise was intended to go into space, and wasn't designed as merely a testbed. The main differences that you might have seen is because of two big factors:
* The Discovery actually went into space... more than once. Going through re-entry a few times can put a few scorch marks and make it look "more real".
* The Enterprise was sort of "frozen in time" having missed a great many "upgrades" that were applied to the rest of the Shuttle fleet
The main problem was the internal airframe of the Enterprise was made a little too sturdy and as a result was a little too massive for actual spaceflight, or rather the payload they could take into space was a fair bit less than for subsequent shuttles that were able to learn from the experience of building the Enterprise in the first place. An even earlier prototype built before the Enterprise was instead retrofitted and turned into the Challenger (which is why the Challenger has the serial number OV-99 and the Enterprise has a later serial number OV-101). The same process used to build the Challenger could have been applied to the Enterprise, but it would have involved taking the whole thing apart and reassembling it as essentially a whole new vehicle... so it was left in tact as a base line engineering reference for future Shuttle upgrades.
There was nothing stopping the Enterprise from actually flying though, as attaching an external tank and running it through the normal launch prep work could have put it into space. There were just legitimate reasons for not doing that. Regardless, the Enterprise did "fly" on its own as an independent vehicle in the Approach and Landing Tests and deserves to be recognized with the rest of the Shuttle fleet. When you look at the Enterprise, you are looking at roughly what the Columbia looked like when it was launched with STS-1. As such, it really is a unique museum piece
Why not simply filter content based upon categorization, where you can filter or not filter content based upon pre-selected categories (of your own choosing)? If that happens to include in the "filter out" list of categories those items which fit in "Category: Porn Stars" and "Category: Adult Themes", how is that different from what is being proposed?
If you want, you can filter out "Category: Star Trek" or "Category: Republican Party" from your own personal search filters. That isn't really a POV... or is it?
Slashdot Mirror
Japan had twice the per capita GDP over America... twenty years ago. While substantial, they are dealing with some very tough problems.
One of the largest problems Japan has been facing is that they have a huge population of senior citizens compared to the number of children that have been born. It has forced Japan to deal with very different issues than many Islamic countries are facing which have a large youth population. These issues are also going to be facing America relatively soon, particularly when the Baby Boomers finally start to hit retirement age (they already are right now and are arguably a part of the housing price collapse).
The Wright Flyer was hardly a danger to buildings and by far more dangerous to the pilots using them. There is a reason they were often called "kites" as they were really not much more robust. Being made of lightweight wood with thinly stretched canvas (as was the case for most early aircraft), neither their airspeed nor their mass was something of concern for building construction.
Robert Goddard, on the other hand, ran into all kinds of problems with his rocketry experiments being done in Massachusetts, so he ended up moving most of his experimentation to New Mexico where a major disaster wouldn't really do too much damage to "uninvolved participants". It should be little wonder that Werner Von Braun used the same facility when developing his early rockets for NASA in the 1950's.
Again I ask how you know so much about what Blue Origin isn't doing? I can name a few things they are doing, but due to the fact they are so tight lipped it is hard to say what they aren't doing because you can't prove a negative action.
In the case of SpaceX, you would know what they are not doing because if there was anything they were doing it would have been discussed a long time ago. It is thus easy to say that SpaceX isn't building inflatable orbital habitats because if they were it would be something found on their website or bragged about elsewhere. I can't say the same thing about Blue Origin though, or the secret base they have (or don't have) on Mars or anything else that company is doing.
I certainly think it is myopic to say that Blue Origin isn't working on an engine when there is no way to prove that, where if they were working on new engine technology it wouldn't be public knowledge. Perhaps you have a drinking buddy who has let slip out some information about Blue Origin who is also an employee there that knows some of the inside information. I'm not ruling it out completely but such an information leak would also likely get such an employee spilling inside information about the company fired as well. That is how Jeff Bezos is running Blue Origin.
There are some very skilled people with advanced knowledge of aerospace engineering working for Blue Origin, so I wouldn't put anything past them. What I do know is that the NASA people looking at the proposal from Blue Origin for CCDev was impressed enough to push them ahead of other similar proposals from other companies like ATK, which was soundly rejected in the screening process. And frankly the ATK proposal was pretty good as were several other CCDev proposals that didn't make the cut.
Of course this is why it should be abundantly clear that the U.S. State Department works against the interests of the American people and in some ways acts strictly on its own interests and goals rather than actually trying to follow "the advise and consent of the United States Senate"... which is how treaties are supposed to be negotiated.
Such treaties should never have been negotiated in secret in the first place, which is the problem. In this regard, the U.S. State Department is a rogue organization that has exceeded its authority and constitutional boundaries. The question is then, will the U.S. Congress have the balls necessary to slap the State Department back down to the Earth and throw out such sausage making?
Blue Origin doesn't seem to have a credible roadmap for what they are doing in strategic terms. That is the problem.
Blue Origin doesn't discuss much of anything to anybody. As to if they have a roadmap or a strategic plan, I have no idea if they do or don't. If you know something I don't, I'd love to know how you found out about their lack of a plan.
Jeff Bezos runs the company like a skunkworks and the employees of the company are famously tight lipped about almost anything the company is doing. Far more is known about more esoteric things the company is doing like retrieving the original F1 engines used for the Apollo 11 Saturn V and the 10k year clock being built at their launch/test facility in Texas than is typically known about what they even do for building spacecraft.
About the only time you even know they are doing a flight is when they are issued a flight permit and a NOTAM is issued by the FAA just prior to the flight.
In short, I don't think there is any way to tell what plan they may of may not have in the future as Jeff Bezos isn't really saying much at all. The only reason anything is known about this particular project under CCDev is because Blue Origin is required by law to disclose certain pieces of information and make them available to the public. That is by far and away very different from SpaceX, where Elon Musk has a personal blog, sends tweets about the company, and routinely brings members of the press core on tours of the plant... the "press corps" being loosely defined as anybody with a blog that has more than a couple hundred people reading it.
Blue Origin gets most of its money from Jeff Bezos as more of a hobby than anything else. I'll let you look up his name elsewhere to see if he can afford a personal space program or not.
The commercial crew program is the first time that Blue Origin has even tried to go after a government funded project of any kind, and in the reviews I saw where they were selected, the NASA review committee seemed to have been quite impressed with not just the proposal but the kinds of things that Blue Origin has done already including an on-site visit of the Blue Origin facilities by NASA officials. You might just be surprised.
Yes, I'm suggesting that if ATK somehow is excluded from the process of being involved with flying crews to the ISS, that they will change the inclusion parameters so they will become included even if it opens the process up to other competitors. They have some very powerful friends in Congress (both in the House and the Senate) including some very long time supporters who will go to bat for them. The language of the SLS, to give an example, was written explicitly to include ATK components in the legal description for what NASA was permitted to build (hence in part why it is called the "Senate Launch System").
There is an outside possibility that they could be excluded from consideration, but ATK is pushing simultaneously for making a much better technical presentation (they do have some real rocket scientists on their payroll who know more than just the rocket equation and some real-world flying experience of rocket hardware) as well as the political connections to make things stick.
I have my own reservations about the Liberty rocket necessarily being competitive on a commercial basis, but I have to assume they got some people crunching the numbers and are presuming they are going to sell some of their rockets to somebody. The relatively recent announcement of the Liberty rocket + capsule system capable of flying people into space (with Astrium providing the 2nd stage and a derivative of the Orion capsule being used for the crew) seems to be almost perfect timing for this selection process.
That is where you get things like the NAUTLUS-X proposal.
It was sort of sad though, at a recent "press day" at KSC prior to the launch of the Falcon 9 there were several NASA public relations guys that were hyping up the Orion capsule and the SLS as the "deep space" alternative to the Dragon capsule, and waxing on and on about how Orion was the "solution" to deep space travel and that the Dragon would only be used for trips to places like the ISS.
One of the participants at the gathering asked the NASA official about the NAUTLUS-X program, and it totally stumped the guy to the point he sort of suggested that it was a private program, or something made up out of whole cloth by some troll on Wikipedia.
I sure hope somebody talked to the guy. A video of this can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjutZLmKchs
The statement was made about an hour and a half into the video. The beginning of this video is worth watching just to see Gwynne Shotwell talk candidly about SpaceX and discuss some upcoming project they are working on, but the later half sort of shows the political climate all of this commercial crew program is working in and how even major players like NASA PR guys who should know this stuff are misinformed about even their own agency.
The largest current problem the HTP is simply getting permission from the Department of Homeland Security to even let you ship it at all, where refineries which make the stuff generally won't ship to you unless you are already using it in large industrial scale quantities. That really stinks if you are using for R&D purposes or something like a small start-up company.
Armadillo Aerospace spent a whole bunch of effort on the stuff, and John Carmack even sent out a general request on several mailing lists and news groups begging for people to help him out in the acquisition of the stuff. There was essentially nobody who was willing to sell it to him at any price. I don't know if Jeff Bezos has had the same problems (who has a fair bit more money than John Carmack), but this does seem to be the current issue where there is a huge niche that nobody wants to fill in terms of providing the material. Making your own production facilities to make HTP is an option.... but it is sort of a chicken or egg problem as well and is something that is best done on a large industrial scale as well in terms of costs.
It may very well be that HTP is a more cost effective approach to spaceflight, but getting over that hump of costs when other options that are "good enough" are available can make it much harder to go down that path. It is sort of like the problem of introducing alternatives to gasoline for automobiles, as the infrastructure is already in place for gasoline distribution but not nearly so much for compressed natural gas, or more exotic fuels like Hydrogen gas or quick recharging stations for electric cars.
LOX is already being used for rocketry and the infrastructure is also set up to be able to deliver the material in quantities needed for orbital spaceflight, not to mention that it has other applications besides rocketry. I don't know precisely if the LOX/Propane issue you are suggesting here is any better or not than LOX/RP1, although I will take your word at face value on this issue. Getting permits to transport Propane in bulk is much easier to get and it is readily available from many companies who are willing to go through the necessary steps of dealing with companies and experimenters who work with rocketry.
What that has to do with the New Shepard as it applies to commercial crew development, I don't know. That Jeff Bezos sees some potential in the technologies developed for the DC-X and is trying to run a private research group experimenting with those concepts and pushing them in a different direction that may hold some promise is interesting and worth watching. Sometimes it is useful to find out what was going on with some of the older programs and what might be rescued from them.... particularly when the program is shut down for political reasons and not engineering reasons as happened with the DC-X. If anything, I'd put the DC-X program as one of the most successful alternatives to the Shuttle that ever happened, and certainly got further along on its development than other projects like the Dynasoar or even Constellation and soon to add the SLS program to that list of failed NASA spaceflight efforts.
One area where HTP+RP1 might be useful is with in-orbit refueling depots. LOX+Liquid Hydrogen are currently being proposed in that situation, but the boil off from long term storage is a huge issue where HTP and RP1 wouldn't be nearly so big of a deal in that situation. The only other alternative is to use something like Hydrazine, which makes all of the technical problems of HTP look like child's play.
Robert Bigelow seems to have the money and the will to go into space on his own dime, and apparently even has the customers needed to make his space enterprises profitable. Enough that he even went through a significant planet expansion, even if he had to lay off a bunch of his employees temporarily.
The main problem that Robert Bigelow has been facing is trying to get people into space, and he has been insisting that he must have at least two different launch providers using completely different sets of engineering history in order to be able to get started and launching his stations on a regular basis. If he could get more launch providers, he would be happier. The idea here is that once he starts to launch his stations, he doesn't want to shut down operations because of a launch failure or some other serious problem which shows up forcing that particular vehicle to cease operations.
NASA has been operating with a single vehicle with a single engineering history, which is why they had to crash Skylab without follow up visits, and why the space program had to halt after the Challenger and Columbia disasters. If Bigelow Aerospace had to shut down for a couple of years after ramping up to full production, testing, and hiring... they would simply go bankrupt. NASA didn't go bankrupt only because Congress kept funding them... but NASA still had to end up paying the army of workers at KSC and all of their sub-contractors or they wouldn't have been able to fly the Shuttles afterward. Robert Bigelow simply doesn't have that kind of luxury.
I'd like to add that Bigelow Aerospace is hardly the only company needing this redundant service into space from multiple companies, which is precisely why this down select is foolish and clueless on the part of Representative Frank Wolf. Rep. Wolf thinks that somehow he is going to save some tax dollars, and over the short term he might be correct. But the future of American spaceflight is on the line here, which needs competition and some seed money to get it going.
The seed money is mainly needed to accelerate the commercial crew development so NASA doesn't need to depend upon the Russian Soyuz spacecraft for transportation to and from the modules on the ISS that were put up there by American taxpayers.... but which NASA can't reach now on their own because of ineptitude and mismanagement. There should be other alternatives, but the old way of doing things just isn't working any more nor really worked very well in the first place even when it was sort of working.
Gwynne Shotwell certainly is selling vehicles. They just sold some to Bigelow Aerospace. If you send an email to gwynne at spacex dot com, I'm sure she will even quote a price for you if you are being serious about buying those vehicles. They will also provide launch services, but if you want to buy the vehicle and fly it yourself, that won't really be too much of a problem for them.
BTW, SpaceX doesn't sell launch services even on a cost-plus basis, and the Liberty vehicle is also being developed independent of a government contract. If there is a cost overrun, those respective companies eat those costs... and reap the profits if they can make those vehicles cheaper. I can't speak about the EELVs though, as those vehicles were built in a sort of hybrid environment, but you are comparing several different contracting models here and mixing up all sorts of pricing schemes simultaneously that I can't even respond to your issue about cost overruns and contracts.
What you are forgetting here is that this particular program, the commercial crew development program (commonly called simply CCDev) is not being operated like a traditional government contract in the fashion that the Manhattan Project of the 1940's was run (and how most major engineering projects have been paid for since).
When the Manhattan project was under development, the bureaucrats realized that they were asking companies to literally come up with stuff that nobody knew if it could be done at all much less be able to reasonably estimate the costs of building those things. The same expectation was true for the Apollo project, as well as many of the aircraft and ships being built for the U.S. military over the years (like nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers). A rough guess was made over the costs involved, but no company was willing to gamble billions of dollars on the off chance their estimates for the cost of these projects was wrong. Instead, the government took the financial risk in something called a "cost-plus" contract. In other words, the contractor was expected to accurately report what the actual costs of the project were, and when the whole thing was finished there was a reasonable expectation of a profit for the company... in other words the "plus" was a guaranteed financial bonus given to the company regardless of how much the contract cost.
This is also where you hear loud screaming with cost overruns, because a project that runs into some technical challenges or has the requirements change over the years of its development will end up driving up those "costs" that simply must be paid for by tax payers and not the companies involved.
For spacecraft being built by companies for NASA, this is the only way those spacecraft have been paid for. Some of this is understandable, as nobody before Werner Von Braun had ever built a spacecraft that took people to the Moon and brought them back to the Earth. To say that anybody in 1960 had a clue as to how much it really was going to cost to build a Saturn V is somebody somebody smoking some hemp or having a few too many beers. For crash programs where there is an issue of national security on the line, a cost-plus contract model even makes sense. There were slogans posted on walls of NASA contractors that openly bragged "waste anything but time".
What is happening with CCDev (the commercial crew development program) and COTS (commercial orbital transportation services) is something very different. There are also several very different things that are happening here too.
One of the things going on is that NASA is providing technical support for companies who want to provide commercial services that NASA could use, such as delivering supplies to the International Space Station (aka COTS) or providing a service to bring astronauts to Low-Earth orbit at various places, including the ISS as well. By technical support, NASA is providing consultants to explain some of the history and technical details for how their earlier spacecraft worked, what problems they had with historical spacecraft like the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, and other vehicles that NASA has worked with over the years. NASA also has huge libraries of technical studies and documentation about these spacecraft including performance data and details about all kinds of engine designs and all kinds of other engineering data that is very useful for anybody building rockets or trying to go into space. Providing these consultants or having people help in digging up that documentation does cost some money, so part of the program is simply paying for all of those people doing that running around, scanning documents if they need to be digitized (keep in mind that some of that data is from the 1950's and 1960's) and perhaps flying consultants to the factories where these commercial companies are building the rockets. Useful stuff and it doesn't go direct to these private companies, but is an ongoing expense.
Another thing NASA is doing is helping pro
Nah, the troughers have to kick SpaceX out because they're the only company who have proven that they can do the job and do it cheaper than the competition. That cannot be allowed.
The purpose of this down select is explicitly to hurt SpaceX and to drive them out of the market place through political maneuvering. If you claim it cannot be allowed, you really need to contact your member of congress and complain about this whole notion of a down select.
That Representative Frank Wolf, the guy behind this move to force the "down select", may have major egg on his face when these other commercial spaceflight developers have much cheaper vehicles than the things being built by Boeing and ATK is immaterial.
ATK is currently a part of the CCDev program.... they are just "unfunded". Tweaking the language of the appropriations bill to get them included in the selection criteria would be trivial and would only take a couple steak dinners at a posh DC restaurant with the right congressional staff members... and I don't think the guys at NASA who are running the program would complain.
ATK having a chance? I would put them as one of the top contender not necessarily for their technical expertise (although they have cleaned up their proposal considerably) but because of their political connections.
Indeed, if ATK looks like it is in danger of getting cut out of the loop, I would even go so far as to suggest that this whole down select process is going to be jettisoned as a bad political idea that it really is anyway.
The commercial crew program wasn't even a part of the planning under Constellation. To suggest it was a "stop gap" is completely misrepresenting how it was sold to Congress. Commercial crew has been perceived as the "stop gap" until Constellation could be built, as a sort of "insurance program" if there might have been problems. In fact, in congressional testimony and other public discussion about the future of manned spaceflight, it was almost as if the commercial crew didn't even exist as a program with many members of congress trying to go out of their way to kill the program... just as is being done again by Frank Wolf. They simply can't conceive a situation where a private company on their own dime could develop a spacecraft.
I agree with you that as a practical matter there were numerous problems with the Orion. One of the largest problems with the vehicle is that it was explicitly engineered in such a way that it couldn't fly on either the Atlas V or Delta IV rockets, so it simply had to fly on something like the Ares I or Ares V. That wasn't an engineering decision but rather a political decision made explicitly so EELVs couldn't be considered in the process and that so much money would be dumped down the rathole of Orion development that it became "too big to fail". That is also why Orion development has continued, and why the SLS program was developed.... to build a rocket large enough to carry the Orion capsule since obvious none of the existing launchers could possibly be able to carry a spacecraft capable of putting people into space.
Then again it sort of stings when you point out that Atlas rockets have been used in the past to put people into space. John Glenn didn't mind the ride... 50 years ago. If it could be done then, why not today?
Richard Branson's involvement is to use the Dream Chaser as the orbital spaceflight vehicle for Virgin Galactic. He is investing "seed money" and essentially offering a hard purchasing contract for the vehicles once they are built. That may not translate into actual stock ownership of the company, but it does make him an investor after a fashion and somebody important to consider in terms of company finances.
There are other people involved, and what is now known as the Dream Chaser has a fairly interesting development history that is worth looking at as well.
The current four companies are:
Of these four companies, the only one I could possibly see being "bought out" is Sierra Nevada. They have other projects going right now and while the Commercial Crew is a wonderful bonus and useful for the development of their company, they aren't necessarily dependent upon just this one contract in order to continue to exist as a company.
There is no bloody way upon this green Earth that either Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is going to sell out to Boeing, although I could see those two possibly proposing a merger or joint venture to buy out Boeing. Of course that would be like a guppy eating a whale in terms of the relative size of those companies.
The only real down select that is going to halt further development of space vehicles would be if Boeing is cut out, as they are oriented towards meeting government contracts. Even that seems dubious in terms of commercial ventures with the CST-100.
Of course I think this whole down select is pointless as well. None of the CCDev contracts are really anything more than some minor seed money to help encourage what these companies are already doing and hoping it will translate into proven vehicles that will go to the International Space Station once they are built. ATK with their Liberty rocket is technically in the program as well, even though they aren't receiving any money (but ATK is getting technical assistance from NASA under this program). Down selecting as worded with this particular congressional amendment would cut out even this "technical consulting" similar to what ATK is getting at the moment.
Blue Origin and their SSTO nonsense should have never received a dime of public money to begin with.
So you think the DC-X program was a terrible waste of tax dollars? Why are you upset that a private company without tax dollars is furthering the research into that flight concept and propulsion system?
Furthermore, do you even have a clue what part of the CCDev program that Blue Origin is even doing, what their spacecraft actually is supposed to look like, or how it is going to get into orbit much less return to the Earth? If you did, you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement presuming something that wasn't even true.
*Hint* -- Blue Origin proposed to use the Lockheed-Martin Atlas V for the launch of its spacecraft under CCDev. They aren't even planning on flying their own hardware for the first stage or two.
ATK has their fairy god-senators looking out for them and a very effective public relations team which knows how to do some serious lobbying.
I'm sure the hope is more for ATK and Boeing to get this contract and cut SpaceX out completely. Then again ATK was betting that last week's Dragon flight would blow up on the launch pad or otherwise go dead. SpaceX is hard to ignore at the moment, but that is sort of the point why this whole down select is real stupid.
They will be a major contestant for the down select, regardless of what else you think about them.
Orion is not meant for ISS operations. Orion is meant for Beyond Earth Orbit: asteroid and lunar exploration, that sort of thing.
That isn't what NASA was saying back when the Ares I was still under active development. The Ares I was being designed specifically so the Orion capsule could get to the ISS (complete with an ISS mating adapter) that really makes it a direct competitor to the SpaceX Dragon, at least for manned spacecraft.
Orion really does a lousy job for areas beyond LEO though. While it has just under 2x the usable internal volume that the Apollo spacecraft used, that won't exactly be something to brag about. Perhaps reasonable for a trip to the Moon, but I don't see how it will possibly be used on a trip to an asteroid much less Mars. The "habitable volume" of the Orion is very much comparable to the internal volume of the Dragon. I just don't see how astronauts are going to be expected to hang out in that kind of volume for weeks and months.
What makes the Orion useful for beyond LEO is mainly that it has its own solar energy generator array, and that the heat shield is being designed to perform re-entry of a free-return trajectory from the Moon and a similar return flight coming from Mars. Then again the Dragon capsule is being designed with those same parameters as well.
Orion might be a piece of the puzzle in terms of getting to Mars or somewhere else in the Solar System, but by itself it won't get the job done.
The sad thing is that Sierra Nevada is in some ways doing more to help drop the cost of going into orbit than almost anybody else around. The Dream Chaser spacecraft is really an amazing vehicle that is just beginning to reach a point of getting a payoff, which the early flight trials going on.
If they get cut, I hope that the investors in Sierra Nevada (and apparently Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic fame is one of them) continue to press forward without NASA funding.
They really don't deserve to be cut, at least so far as the investment being made by NASA into this company will likely produce some impressive long-term results. It is mainly sad that a jerk of a congressman who doesn't like these programs (COTS and CCDev) instead wants to dump 10x the amount of money on a fiscal black hole that will never fly (namely the SLS... aka the "Senate Launch System").
This move to reduce the options for CCDev is not going to save much money, and in fact it will set back commercial spaceflight by several years if not a full decade.
The other "selectee" will be Alliant Techsystems with the Liberty rocket. Yes, I realize they didn't even make the cut from eight or so to four, but they are going to drive everybody else out simply through a massive lobbying effort that will change the outcomes of several districts.
How about a 3D model of the Pentagon or nuclear power plant? The White House (where you can get blueprints from public sources)?
What happens when DHS sees a bunch of pyros make these models out of TNT in Minecraft?
The Enterprise was intended to go into space, and wasn't designed as merely a testbed. The main differences that you might have seen is because of two big factors:
The main problem was the internal airframe of the Enterprise was made a little too sturdy and as a result was a little too massive for actual spaceflight, or rather the payload they could take into space was a fair bit less than for subsequent shuttles that were able to learn from the experience of building the Enterprise in the first place. An even earlier prototype built before the Enterprise was instead retrofitted and turned into the Challenger (which is why the Challenger has the serial number OV-99 and the Enterprise has a later serial number OV-101). The same process used to build the Challenger could have been applied to the Enterprise, but it would have involved taking the whole thing apart and reassembling it as essentially a whole new vehicle... so it was left in tact as a base line engineering reference for future Shuttle upgrades.
There was nothing stopping the Enterprise from actually flying though, as attaching an external tank and running it through the normal launch prep work could have put it into space. There were just legitimate reasons for not doing that. Regardless, the Enterprise did "fly" on its own as an independent vehicle in the Approach and Landing Tests and deserves to be recognized with the rest of the Shuttle fleet. When you look at the Enterprise, you are looking at roughly what the Columbia looked like when it was launched with STS-1. As such, it really is a unique museum piece
Why not simply filter content based upon categorization, where you can filter or not filter content based upon pre-selected categories (of your own choosing)? If that happens to include in the "filter out" list of categories those items which fit in "Category: Porn Stars" and "Category: Adult Themes", how is that different from what is being proposed?
If you want, you can filter out "Category: Star Trek" or "Category: Republican Party" from your own personal search filters. That isn't really a POV... or is it?