The reason is that when Augustine is done, we will see either Ares I dead, or slowed WAY up, and we will see 1, possibly 2 B allocated for private ventures.
An interesting bit of trivia: Excalibur Almaz's VP of Technical Operations is former astronaut Leroy Chiao, who was also one of the Augustine Panel members. Of course, that doesn't (or at least shouldn't) increase the odds of EA getting a COTS or CCDev contract, but it's still interesting to note.
A capsule that has not produced in 30 years as well as a new service module, and you think that in 4 years, they will have FLYING PAYING CUSTOMERS? Heck, the thing weighed 20 tonnes, not including the weapons that were on it (cannon and later missiles; Interesting about that).
I'm betting they chose the terminology of "revenue flights" rather than "manned flights" for a reason. As I mentioned in my earlier comment, I think it's likely that they'll be aiming for unmanned cargo/science flights at first, which of course don't need quite as many assurances as the manned flights do. This is the same pattern the SpaceX Dragon is following. Also, as another commenter noted, the service module likely won't be necessary for the cargo flights and initial manned flights.
I wonder, what science do they think people will be using this for? I guess it could replace some of the Shuttle-only payloads we used to fly, but for anything else the ISS is a much more capable research laboratory. I should know, keeping them doing science is my job these days.
I guess it might have better downmass? Usually, though, you only want to bring it home if you think the long term exposure effects are interesting. This won't be very long term.
My understanding is that a large part of the problem is that it takes a terribly long time to get anything launched to the ISS and you have to go through a substantial amount of red tape. Currently, you need a lead time of years to fly an experiment on the ISS, which makes it really difficult to do meaningful science in the fast-paced scientific environment. Heck, a grad student putting together an experiment would be lucky to have the experiment results back before they finished their PhD. Hopefully the more rapid access from commercial providers (SpaceX Dragon, Bigelow Aerospace's Orion Lite, and now Excalibur Almaz) will help change that picture.
Excalibur Almaz To Offer Commercial Orbital Flights" - perhaps more like Excalibur Almaz *hopes* to offer commercial orbital flights. Early days of space exploration and all that but more hype than activity right now. Wake me up when they've done their first test flights with their own technical staff.
Excalibur Almaz has apparently already raised a significant amount of money, which they've used to purchase several Almaz reentry capsules and have contracted with the Russian manufacturer to make the necessary modifications. They're well past the vaporware stage by this point, with flight-tested hardware in their possession.
Reviving a 30-year-old Russian capsule which lost out to Soyuz sounds risky.
If it's revamped and passes modern qualification testing, I don't see any reason not to reuse it. Also, unlike the Gemini, the tooling apparently still exists to construct new ones (unless I'm misreading). From what I've read, it seems that the reason the Almaz was ended didn't have anything to do with technical problems with the capsule, but more that the Soviet Union decided that having armed military space stations probably wasn't the best investment:
Is there any particular reason though why it would need to take until 2015? I imagine the development process is much simplified since the basic hardware they're using has already been developed and flight-tested, and they're just inserting in modern electronics and redesigning the service module. I'm guessing they (like SpaceX's Dragon) will probably want a few cargo flights before manned flights, of course, but I can't think of any show-stoppers.
Nice submission, although here's a few more details from my own submission:
Excalibur Almaz has come out of stealth mode and unveiled their reusable spacecraft capable of carrying a crew of three and/or cargo to orbit for up to a week. According to VP (and former NASA astronaut) Leroy Chiao, the spacecraft are designed to be launched on a variety of rockets, and are modernized versions of vehicles developed and flight-tested for the Soviet Union's military space station program (the company has also purchased some of the space stations for potential future use). EA plans to begin flight tests in 2012, with revenue flights starting in 2013. The company will likely be competing with the SpaceX Dragon and Bigelow Aerospace's recently-announced "Orion Lite" for a chunk of the emerging commercial orbital transportation market.
An interesting bit of trivia is that the original Soviet Almaz space station carried a rapid-fire cannon and performed a successful test-firing on a target satellite. I'm assuming the space stations which Excalibur Almaz bought don't have the cannons anymore.:(
If the American public will accept the safety assurances of NASA, then the Russians and the Chinese are going to raise HELL about the idea of having nuclear energy in space.
Um, the Russians have actually already launched quite a few nuclear reactors (not just RTGs, although they've launched plenty of those too):
Oh, I can't imagine it's beat the Big Dig just yet, though it may be on its way. Looks like the relative costs of the two programs are similar...but the Big Dig was a 10-fold cost overrun (from about $2B to $20B.
NASA's currently-ongoing Ares I project was on track to have that beat (costs rising from an initial few billion in 2005 to ~$45B today), but it fortunately looks likely that the White House is going to end its misery. Coincidentally, Boeing was responsible for the 2nd stage of that rocket, although the 2nd stage isn't the one that's been causing the problems -- NASA Marshall Flight Center's overall management and ATK's 1st stage have been the main problem source.
As I wrote last summer, it's been clear almost from the start that Ares I was a very marginal, optimistic design, just barely adequate if everything went right. But there are always problems, and Ares I had no margin for problems.
As one underlying assumption after another has turned out to be wrong, requiring design change after design change, NASA has nevertheless clung to the same basic approach, unwilling to admit its mistake and hoping that sheer persistence would see the project through. Perhaps it could, but the price for such bullheadedness can be very high, and the budget projections are now starting to reflect that - the Sentinel says that its estimated costs through 2015 have swelled from $28 billion in 2006 to $44 billion today.
Even as Bigelow Aerospace gears up for launching its second prototype space station into orbit, the company has set its sights on something much, much bigger: a project to assemble full-blown space villages at a work site between Earth and the moon, then drop them to the lunar surface, ready for immediate move-in.
In an exclusive interview this week, Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow confirmed that his company has been talking about the concept with NASA â" and that the first earthly tests of the techniques involved would take place later this year. The scenario he sketched out would essentially make Bigelow a general contractor for the final frontier.
That role would be a good fit for Bigelow, who made his fortune in the real estate, hotel and construction business and is now focused on developing inflatable modules (or as he prefers to call them, "expandable systems") that can serve as the building blocks for orbital living complexes.
The first big step down that path came in July, when a Russian booster put Bigelow's Genesis 1 prototype module into orbit. Bigelow has said even he was surprised by the success of that mission, and he has committed himself to spending hundreds of millions of dollars to follow up on that first launch.
Oh geeze, I knew I shouldn't have waited to submit a story on this, as the Guardian article linked is pretty crappy, which isn't a surprise considering how opposed the Guardian usually is to manned spaceflight in general. It doesn't even list the options the Committee is presenting to the White House. Here's some better sources:
Basically, the Augustine Committee concluded that you can't do too much with the $10B budget spaceflight currently has, but a number of interesting options open up if you increase that by $3B. Basically, there's two main types of scenarios which have been outlined:
Lunar focus: Similar to the current plan, focusing on lunar exploration and settlement with a mind towards future Mars exploration
Deep space: Exploration of Lagrange points, near-earth asteroids, and Phobos, with an emphasis on building the in-space infrastructure which will make it easier to explore the Moon and Mars
Some items of interest regarding both scenarios:
Most of the scenarios don't include the Ares I, which suggests that the problem-ridden program is quite likely to be cancelled
Just about all the scenarios will have a big boost to commercial spaceflight to low-earth orbit, with the goal of making commercial providers the primary way to get to LEO by 2016
Most of the scenarios place an emphasis on in-orbit refueling, which is something the previous administration avoided for some fairly dodgy reasons. Refueling is a major enabler when it comes to spaceflight, and helps you do a lot more with existing boosters. It also provides a market for promoting the growth and cost-efficiency of new rockets.
Most of the options include restoring technology development funding at NASA, which was largely scrapped to help pay for the Ares I development
Every year Clark Lindsay does an analysis of current trends in commercial spaceflight and projects what he thinks things will look like 5, 10, 15 years down the road. It's a cool read:
If only more people understood that. Everyone wants cheaper access to space, but nobody wants to ay the legwork to get it. New technologies don't just appear out of nowhere; someone has to work on them.
Indeed. It's quite unfortunate that NASA ended up cancelling most of its technology research projects to pay for the Ares I development program going grossly overbudget.
No, not on binary circuits we can't. We might simulate the brain, or even model the brain, but we won't imprint it.
In a sense, this boils down to a variant of the Church-Turing thesis -- is it possible for a Turing machine to replicate the algorithms of the human brain? I believe so personally, although it can't be proven.
The accepted submission on this story was pretty good, although here's the one I wrote up, which has a few more relevant links. In particular, the first link, to an article by Alan Boyle on MSNBC, is probably the best summary of this I've seen so far:
NASA Begins Commercial Crew Initiative
NASA is using an initial $50M to 'stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate human spaceflight capabilities.' NASA originally planned to use $150M, which was blocked by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) until it was largely redirected to the ~$35B Ares rocket program based at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. The Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO) will reward multiple competitive contracts, with the goals of promoting job growth, lowering the cost of spaceflight, and helping reduce the post-Shuttle gap in US human spaceflight capability.
In this case, it's more of an expected savings in the future. Considering that the "conventional" approach NASA uses has resulted in a rocket program expected to cost well over $45 billion, while the commercial contractors are expected to be able to produce similar capabilities for a couple of billion, I'd say that anything that promotes the commercial companies is a great investment. This should have been done a long time ago, but as it is, NASA needs to put more effort into switching from cost-plus contracts towards commercial fixed-price competitive contracts.
Also, this was originally supposed to be $150 million, but Sen. Shelby (R-AL) blocked NASA's funding until they diverted $100 million more towards the multi-billion dollar Ares project developed at NASA Marshall (coincidentally, in his state). I'm not sure how NASA will be splitting up the reduced amount of money, but when they had asked for the larger amount they were planning on spending it as follows:
According to industry insiders, about $80 million of the $150 million is specifically for a "crewed launch demo." The rest was broken down into $42 million for a docking system to the international space station, $20 million for a cargo transportation demo and $8 million for miscellaneous aspects of the COTS program, including human rating. The remaining $250 million of the stimulus money for human exploration will go to the Constellation program.
Any of you familiar with the way the contract system works in the U.S. should agree. The prime contractor (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc) will take most of the money and farm out the task to a couple of sub-contractors who will farm their tasks out.
Um, the whole point of NASA looking at commercial cargo and commercial crew transport is to do away with this contract system, or at least find an alternative. Under the traditional cost-plus contracting (where the contractor gets whatever they report cost of development/operations is, plus a percentage), what you describe happens a lot, because if farming their tasks out increases overall cost that just increases their profit.
However, with the commercial alternatives NASA is trying (COTS, this new CCDev program), they used a prenegotiated fixed-price contract, with payments based on prearranged milestones. If the contractor's costs go up due to them poorly estimating or trying to milk out more money, the contractor either ends up losing money or just stops receiving money altogether. On top of that, the contracts will be awarded to multiple competing companies, so that if one of them is trying anything funny or is incompetent, NASA can just drop them and buy from another company.
So yes, the hope is that this program will help fix the problem you describe.
Sure, but as bribes they have a very nonlinear effect on the rest of the budget. How many programs were voted into existence only because earmarks were used to bribe congressmen on the borderline?
I thought the point of going to the moon was to build a base their to launch other missions.
The Lagrange points are much better suited as a base for launching other missions, due to their position in the gravity well, and you can also assemble spacecraft which are specialized for operating in zero-G (and don't have to deal with getting out of a deep gravity well). They're particularly good if you also include the potential for making use of resources (fuel, etc.) mined from comets and near-Earth asteroids.
Sure, but the plan proposed would "take ownership" by sending men to near-Earth asteroids, comets, and the Martian moons, which I think are all wonderful destinations in and of themselves. It would also establish the infrastructure to allow for sustainable landings and exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Sure, but the delta-v required is considerably less. The following chart is quite handy to get an idea of the delta-v required to reach a number of different destinations in space:
This is a little counter-intuitive, but you actually need less fuel (starting from Earth) to perform a landing on the Martian moon Phobos than you'd need for landing on Earth's Moon.
Seriously, use it to stimulate PRIVATE innovation and investment, instead of trying to manually command-and-control the economy. The government can't do, or direct people to do, things with half the efficiency that entrepreneurs can.
Ideally, yes. Unfortunately, the problem from a political standpoint is that because the money goes to whoever does the best job instead of whoever lives in a particular congressional district, this is a really difficult thing to do -- that's why this prize is only $1.5 million, which is basically a rounding error when it comes to federal budgets. For example, recently NASA wanted to use $150 million of its stimulus funding to stimulate commercial spaceflight. Senator Richard Shelby (R-Al) put up a fuss and blocked NASA's overall stimulus funding until they diverted that money to the (diseased and broken) Ares I rocket program based in his state.
Last year was just the plane being unveiled. This is the first time that the craft flew itself to an air show (the world's biggest one, mind you), where anybody could go and see it for themselves. A number of additional details about the craft were also revealed (see my other comments).
Admittedly, the "White Knight Two Unveiled" title is a little misleading though.
* Production run for the program is set up for 12 WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft and 50 SpaceShipTwo crafts; * This is the first all-composites aircraft, something that the aviation industry needs to embrace more; * WhiteKnightTwo is not just an aircraft, it is a spacecraft delivery system that is capable of delivering cargo into space cheaply; [orbital microsatellite launch] * Scaled and Virgin are confident they can build a WhiteKnightThree that will allow they to launch even larger payloads into space; * Rutan said WhiteKnightTwo is very manueverable, and he expected to put the vehicle through aerobatic manuevers at the Oshkosh show next year; * Whitehorn didnâ(TM)t seem to like this idea very much, vigorously shaking his head and trying to dissuade the designer from such an idea.
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The reason is that when Augustine is done, we will see either Ares I dead, or slowed WAY up, and we will see 1, possibly 2 B allocated for private ventures.
An interesting bit of trivia: Excalibur Almaz's VP of Technical Operations is former astronaut Leroy Chiao, who was also one of the Augustine Panel members. Of course, that doesn't (or at least shouldn't) increase the odds of EA getting a COTS or CCDev contract, but it's still interesting to note.
A capsule that has not produced in 30 years as well as a new service module, and you think that in 4 years, they will have FLYING PAYING CUSTOMERS? Heck, the thing weighed 20 tonnes, not including the weapons that were on it (cannon and later missiles; Interesting about that).
I'm betting they chose the terminology of "revenue flights" rather than "manned flights" for a reason. As I mentioned in my earlier comment, I think it's likely that they'll be aiming for unmanned cargo/science flights at first, which of course don't need quite as many assurances as the manned flights do. This is the same pattern the SpaceX Dragon is following. Also, as another commenter noted, the service module likely won't be necessary for the cargo flights and initial manned flights.
I wonder, what science do they think people will be using this for? I guess it could replace some of the Shuttle-only payloads we used to fly, but for anything else the ISS is a much more capable research laboratory. I should know, keeping them doing science is my job these days.
I guess it might have better downmass? Usually, though, you only want to bring it home if you think the long term exposure effects are interesting. This won't be very long term.
My understanding is that a large part of the problem is that it takes a terribly long time to get anything launched to the ISS and you have to go through a substantial amount of red tape. Currently, you need a lead time of years to fly an experiment on the ISS, which makes it really difficult to do meaningful science in the fast-paced scientific environment. Heck, a grad student putting together an experiment would be lucky to have the experiment results back before they finished their PhD. Hopefully the more rapid access from commercial providers (SpaceX Dragon, Bigelow Aerospace's Orion Lite, and now Excalibur Almaz) will help change that picture.
Excalibur Almaz To Offer Commercial Orbital Flights" - perhaps more like Excalibur Almaz *hopes* to offer commercial orbital flights. Early days of space exploration and all that but more hype than activity right now. Wake me up when they've done their first test flights with their own technical staff.
Excalibur Almaz has apparently already raised a significant amount of money, which they've used to purchase several Almaz reentry capsules and have contracted with the Russian manufacturer to make the necessary modifications. They're well past the vaporware stage by this point, with flight-tested hardware in their possession.
Reviving a 30-year-old Russian capsule which lost out to Soyuz sounds risky.
If it's revamped and passes modern qualification testing, I don't see any reason not to reuse it. Also, unlike the Gemini, the tooling apparently still exists to construct new ones (unless I'm misreading). From what I've read, it seems that the reason the Almaz was ended didn't have anything to do with technical problems with the capsule, but more that the Soviet Union decided that having armed military space stations probably wasn't the best investment:
http://www.astronautix.com/project/almaz.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz
Is there any particular reason though why it would need to take until 2015? I imagine the development process is much simplified since the basic hardware they're using has already been developed and flight-tested, and they're just inserting in modern electronics and redesigning the service module. I'm guessing they (like SpaceX's Dragon) will probably want a few cargo flights before manned flights, of course, but I can't think of any show-stoppers.
Nice submission, although here's a few more details from my own submission:
Excalibur Almaz has come out of stealth mode and unveiled their reusable spacecraft capable of carrying a crew of three and/or cargo to orbit for up to a week. According to VP (and former NASA astronaut) Leroy Chiao, the spacecraft are designed to be launched on a variety of rockets, and are modernized versions of vehicles developed and flight-tested for the Soviet Union's military space station program (the company has also purchased some of the space stations for potential future use). EA plans to begin flight tests in 2012, with revenue flights starting in 2013. The company will likely be competing with the SpaceX Dragon and Bigelow Aerospace's recently-announced "Orion Lite" for a chunk of the emerging commercial orbital transportation market.
An interesting bit of trivia is that the original Soviet Almaz space station carried a rapid-fire cannon and performed a successful test-firing on a target satellite. I'm assuming the space stations which Excalibur Almaz bought don't have the cannons anymore. :(
If the American public will accept the safety assurances of NASA, then the Russians and the Chinese are going to raise HELL about the idea of having nuclear energy in space.
Um, the Russians have actually already launched quite a few nuclear reactors (not just RTGs, although they've launched plenty of those too):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPAZ_nuclear_reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nuclear_power_in_space
Heck, in the 1970s one of the Russian reactors disintegrated over Canada, and the Canadians billed Russia a few million dollars in cleanup costs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_954
Oh, I can't imagine it's beat the Big Dig just yet, though it may be on its way. Looks like the relative costs of the two programs are similar...but the Big Dig was a 10-fold cost overrun (from about $2B to $20B.
NASA's currently-ongoing Ares I project was on track to have that beat (costs rising from an initial few billion in 2005 to ~$45B today), but it fortunately looks likely that the White House is going to end its misery. Coincidentally, Boeing was responsible for the 2nd stage of that rocket, although the 2nd stage isn't the one that's been causing the problems -- NASA Marshall Flight Center's overall management and ATK's 1st stage have been the main problem source.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/05/nasa-should-abandon-its-proble.html
As I wrote last summer, it's been clear almost from the start that Ares I was a very marginal, optimistic design, just barely adequate if everything went right. But there are always problems, and Ares I had no margin for problems.
As one underlying assumption after another has turned out to be wrong, requiring design change after design change, NASA has nevertheless clung to the same basic approach, unwilling to admit its mistake and hoping that sheer persistence would see the project through. Perhaps it could, but the price for such bullheadedness can be very high, and the budget projections are now starting to reflect that - the Sentinel says that its estimated costs through 2015 have swelled from $28 billion in 2006 to $44 billion today.
You have neglected to explain why humans need to be present in space.
You could just as well ask yourself why humans need to be present on Earth to begin with.
Look around. Do you see private companies lining up to fund Moon travel?
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/02/22/65477.aspx
Even as Bigelow Aerospace gears up for launching its second prototype space station into orbit, the company has set its sights on something much, much bigger: a project to assemble full-blown space villages at a work site between Earth and the moon, then drop them to the lunar surface, ready for immediate move-in.
In an exclusive interview this week, Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow confirmed that his company has been talking about the concept with NASA â" and that the first earthly tests of the techniques involved would take place later this year. The scenario he sketched out would essentially make Bigelow a general contractor for the final frontier.
That role would be a good fit for Bigelow, who made his fortune in the real estate, hotel and construction business and is now focused on developing inflatable modules (or as he prefers to call them, "expandable systems") that can serve as the building blocks for orbital living complexes.
The first big step down that path came in July, when a Russian booster put Bigelow's Genesis 1 prototype module into orbit. Bigelow has said even he was surprised by the success of that mission, and he has committed himself to spending hundreds of millions of dollars to follow up on that first launch.
Oh geeze, I knew I shouldn't have waited to submit a story on this, as the Guardian article linked is pretty crappy, which isn't a surprise considering how opposed the Guardian usually is to manned spaceflight in general. It doesn't even list the options the Committee is presenting to the White House. Here's some better sources:
The actual presentations from the meeting: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/meetings/08_12_meeting.html
http://www.space.com/news/090812-nasa-spaceflight-options-refined.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302244.html
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/08/13/show-exploration-the-money/
Basically, the Augustine Committee concluded that you can't do too much with the $10B budget spaceflight currently has, but a number of interesting options open up if you increase that by $3B. Basically, there's two main types of scenarios which have been outlined:
Some items of interest regarding both scenarios:
Every year Clark Lindsay does an analysis of current trends in commercial spaceflight and projects what he thinks things will look like 5, 10, 15 years down the road. It's a cool read:
http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/SpecialTopics/toSpaceTimeLine.html
If only more people understood that. Everyone wants cheaper access to space, but nobody wants to ay the legwork to get it. New technologies don't just appear out of nowhere; someone has to work on them.
Indeed. It's quite unfortunate that NASA ended up cancelling most of its technology research projects to pay for the Ares I development program going grossly overbudget.
No, not on binary circuits we can't. We might simulate the brain, or even model the brain, but we won't imprint it.
In a sense, this boils down to a variant of the Church-Turing thesis -- is it possible for a Turing machine to replicate the algorithms of the human brain? I believe so personally, although it can't be proven.
The accepted submission on this story was pretty good, although here's the one I wrote up, which has a few more relevant links. In particular, the first link, to an article by Alan Boyle on MSNBC, is probably the best summary of this I've seen so far:
NASA Begins Commercial Crew Initiative
NASA is using an initial $50M to 'stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate human spaceflight capabilities.' NASA originally planned to use $150M, which was blocked by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) until it was largely redirected to the ~$35B Ares rocket program based at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. The Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO) will reward multiple competitive contracts, with the goals of promoting job growth, lowering the cost of spaceflight, and helping reduce the post-Shuttle gap in US human spaceflight capability.
In this case, it's more of an expected savings in the future. Considering that the "conventional" approach NASA uses has resulted in a rocket program expected to cost well over $45 billion, while the commercial contractors are expected to be able to produce similar capabilities for a couple of billion, I'd say that anything that promotes the commercial companies is a great investment. This should have been done a long time ago, but as it is, NASA needs to put more effort into switching from cost-plus contracts towards commercial fixed-price competitive contracts.
Also, this was originally supposed to be $150 million, but Sen. Shelby (R-AL) blocked NASA's funding until they diverted $100 million more towards the multi-billion dollar Ares project developed at NASA Marshall (coincidentally, in his state). I'm not sure how NASA will be splitting up the reduced amount of money, but when they had asked for the larger amount they were planning on spending it as follows:
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_space_thewritestuff/2009/04/cots-d-commericial-human-spaceflight-to-get-150m.html
According to industry insiders, about $80 million of the $150 million is specifically for a "crewed launch demo." The rest was broken down into $42 million for a docking system to the international space station, $20 million for a cargo transportation demo and $8 million for miscellaneous aspects of the COTS program, including human rating. The remaining $250 million of the stimulus money for human exploration will go to the Constellation program.
Any of you familiar with the way the contract system works in the U.S. should agree. The prime contractor (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc) will take most of the money and farm out the task to a couple of sub-contractors who will farm their tasks out.
Um, the whole point of NASA looking at commercial cargo and commercial crew transport is to do away with this contract system, or at least find an alternative. Under the traditional cost-plus contracting (where the contractor gets whatever they report cost of development/operations is, plus a percentage), what you describe happens a lot, because if farming their tasks out increases overall cost that just increases their profit.
However, with the commercial alternatives NASA is trying (COTS, this new CCDev program), they used a prenegotiated fixed-price contract, with payments based on prearranged milestones. If the contractor's costs go up due to them poorly estimating or trying to milk out more money, the contractor either ends up losing money or just stops receiving money altogether. On top of that, the contracts will be awarded to multiple competing companies, so that if one of them is trying anything funny or is incompetent, NASA can just drop them and buy from another company.
So yes, the hope is that this program will help fix the problem you describe.
Earmarks account for only 1% to 2% of the budget.
Sure, but as bribes they have a very nonlinear effect on the rest of the budget. How many programs were voted into existence only because earmarks were used to bribe congressmen on the borderline?
I thought the point of going to the moon was to build a base their to launch other missions.
The Lagrange points are much better suited as a base for launching other missions, due to their position in the gravity well, and you can also assemble spacecraft which are specialized for operating in zero-G (and don't have to deal with getting out of a deep gravity well). They're particularly good if you also include the potential for making use of resources (fuel, etc.) mined from comets and near-Earth asteroids.
Sure, but the plan proposed would "take ownership" by sending men to near-Earth asteroids, comets, and the Martian moons, which I think are all wonderful destinations in and of themselves. It would also establish the infrastructure to allow for sustainable landings and exploration of the Moon and Mars.
You've got to burn engines to enter and leave it.
Sure, but the delta-v required is considerably less. The following chart is quite handy to get an idea of the delta-v required to reach a number of different destinations in space:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deltavs.svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget
This is a little counter-intuitive, but you actually need less fuel (starting from Earth) to perform a landing on the Martian moon Phobos than you'd need for landing on Earth's Moon.
Seriously, use it to stimulate PRIVATE innovation and investment, instead of trying to manually command-and-control the economy. The government can't do, or direct people to do, things with half the efficiency that entrepreneurs can.
Ideally, yes. Unfortunately, the problem from a political standpoint is that because the money goes to whoever does the best job instead of whoever lives in a particular congressional district, this is a really difficult thing to do -- that's why this prize is only $1.5 million, which is basically a rounding error when it comes to federal budgets. For example, recently NASA wanted to use $150 million of its stimulus funding to stimulate commercial spaceflight. Senator Richard Shelby (R-Al) put up a fuss and blocked NASA's overall stimulus funding until they diverted that money to the (diseased and broken) Ares I rocket program based in his state.
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/07/03/shelby-wins-battle-on-stimulus-funding/
http://commercialspacegateway.com/item/21342-a-brief-history-review-for-sen
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/sen_shelby_gets.html
Last year was just the plane being unveiled. This is the first time that the craft flew itself to an air show (the world's biggest one, mind you), where anybody could go and see it for themselves. A number of additional details about the craft were also revealed (see my other comments).
Admittedly, the "White Knight Two Unveiled" title is a little misleading though.
There's some pretty cool video of White Knight Two flying at Oshkosh here:
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/hyperbola/2009/08/video-all-the-virgin-galactic.html
There's also some notes from a panel discussion on the craft. Some highlights:
* Production run for the program is set up for 12 WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft and 50 SpaceShipTwo crafts;
* This is the first all-composites aircraft, something that the aviation industry needs to embrace more;
* WhiteKnightTwo is not just an aircraft, it is a spacecraft delivery system that is capable of delivering cargo into space cheaply; [orbital microsatellite launch]
* Scaled and Virgin are confident they can build a WhiteKnightThree that will allow they to launch even larger payloads into space;
* Rutan said WhiteKnightTwo is very manueverable, and he expected to put the vehicle through aerobatic manuevers at the Oshkosh show next year;
* Whitehorn didnâ(TM)t seem to like this idea very much, vigorously shaking his head and trying to dissuade the designer from such an idea.