Their costs will go up to meet the inevitable requirement creep, and so will the final bill.
I think you may be missing something here... as I mentioned in my comment, this is a fixed-price contract, not a cost-plus contract. The requirements (deliver a certain quantity of tonnage to orbit) are already set, and the final price is already set. SpaceX and Orbital get money as they reach contracted development milestones and make actual cargo deliveries. If their costs go up, they either eat the cost and make less of a profit, or they don't make any more money at all.
But let's not delude ourselves that the new kids will be that much better/cheaper, while retaining the same performance & safety factors.
This is an interesting belief. Do you have any support for it? Do you disagree with NASA's readiness evaluation that SpaceX and Orbital are capable of doing this? Also, why does performance inherently matter, rather than cost/kg? And how much of a factor is safety on a cargo ship?
Space ops is expensive.
Actually, current space ops is really absurdly expensive. Companies like SpaceX are trying to make the cost simply expensive.
Some pasted notes from the teleconference which were missing from the article linked in the summary:
This is a true, standard procurement contract. COTS deals with R&D.
No relationship to decision on COTS-D manned option. [this is the commercial contract many are hoping for which would involve fixed-price payments to transport astronauts to the ISS]
Dec. 2010 first SpaceX flight, Oct 2011 - first Orbital flight
Extensive set of reviews will insure that vehicles are ready to deliver cargo
Bid decision involved technical evaluation of vehicles, evaluation of readiness for 2010-2011, evaluation of the companies, etc. Our evaluation is that these systems will be ready in time.
Commercial services will carry 40%-70% per year of US cargo to the ISS (larger percentage as time goes on)
Schedule payment is based on milestones. Final payment upon delivery of cargo for a given mission.
Shuttle extension would not affect this contract. Use any excess shuttle capability for other items, e.g. experiments.
Truly committed this time to commercial cargo delivery.
Both use common berthing mechanism as with Japanese HTV
Orbital to launch from Wallops, SpaceX from the Cape
Compared to the shuttle, it's a pretty damn good deal.
Just to elaborate on that... a Space Shuttle has a payload to orbit of 24,400kg. The shuttle costs $500-$1,500 million per flight (depending on how you tabulate it). SpaceX's Falcon 9 Heavy has a payload to orbit of 27,500kg. The commercial price per flight is $90 million; under the current contract SpaceX is charging a fixed price of $133 million per flight, which presumably is higher due to the cost of the Dragon capsule and development fees.
That makes SpaceX's price for delivery to the space station 4x-11x cheaper than the Shuttle's. With this sharp cost reduction, NASA will be hopefully be able to get much more exploration and research done on their limited budget.
It doesn't sound any different than Lockheed or NGC getting $3 billion.
As I've noted in another comment, the difference is that Lockheed/NGC have cost-plus contracts, while this is a fixed-price contract. Lockheed et al get more money if they go overbudget. SpaceX has to pay the cost if they go overbudget.
The concept drawings from any of these companies are equally far from the real thing. Maybe the CEO of SpaceX is worth a little more than the Lockheed CEO.
Concept drawings? SpaceX's Falcon 9 has already been transported to Cape Canaveral, and will be fully assembled and vertical within the next week.
Boeing/Lockheed/Thiokol initially only charged 1/2 the final rate too. What will the actual bill from SpaceX be, once they can suck at the govt's teat?
One big difference is that Boeing/Lockheed/Thiokol have cost-plus contracts, where if you increase the final bill you make more money. SpaceX and Orbital have fixed-price contracts, where if SpaceX or Orbital's cost estimates are too low, the companies eat the extra cost; on the other hand, if the companies figure out ways to do things more efficiently, they get more of a profit. Doing space launches under this sort of arrangement is almost unprecedented for NASA, and hopefully something we'll see much more of in the future.
Octopus have been estimated to be about as smart as dogs with surprisingly adept skills at problems solving and recognition.
One of the things which has often amazed me about octopuses is that they're so smart despite their lack of myelinated axons. For those unfamiliar with it, myelin is an evolutionary adaptation specific to vertebrates which allows them to transmit neural signals about ~20x faster. I sometimes figure that if octopuses had myelin, the earth would be dominated by a hyper-technological race of chthulhu-like creatures by now.;)
As I mention in another comment, the member of Obama's space transition team are very much pro-space exploration, and are huge space advocates. The problem is that Griffin's rocket design has itself been "hindering NASA's progression," gutting or canceling other NASA projects to pay for the inherently-flawed Ares.
I actually had high hopes for Griffin as well, but the problem is that he came in with his own personal rocket design and essentially banked the entire space agency's future on it. He's been crushing all the voices of dissent (of which there are many) within NASA who think that it's an inherently flawed design, and has been gutting other NASA programs to pay for the cost overruns of his design.
How does that refute the Sentinel's description of Griffin stonewalling? It's pretty straightforward to stonewall without foaming at the mouth. The Sentinel makes no claim that Griffin lashed out or yelled at them.
Well, I will say that Obama has been quite vague on whether he'll keep NASA well funded. It seems like something he's not inclined to do on his own without pressure from the public. On the other hand, the transition team not only asked how much would be saved if the program was canned but also asked how much it would cost to accelerate it, so it looks like they're looking at all options.
It should be noted that the members of Obama's space transition team are very much pro-space and well-regarded in the space community. The team has ties to the National Space Society, which was created from the merger of Wernher von Braun's National Space Institute and the L5 Society (a space colonization advocacy group). The head of the transition team, Lori Garver, was a NASA associate administrator for several years and a former head of the National Space Society. Another team member is George Whitesides, current head of the NSS, co-creator of Yuri's Night (a multi-site world space party held annually to commemorate the launch of the first human in space), and a senior advisor to Virgin Galactic.
If Obama were looking to gut NASA, I doubt he would hire people like Lori Garver and George Whitesides to help him determine what to do with NASA. Rather, plenty of people both inside and outside of NASA are frustrated with how Michael Griffin has been handling things, diverting money from good science and technology projects to pour into Griffin's multi-billion dollar Ares pet project. My hope is that they'll toss out Griffin and redirect the money back to worthwhile projects, and use a commercial COTS-based approach for the next generation of manned launchers instead of cost-plus contracts and NASA-controlled development.
This isn't about canning all of NASA, it's about canning an incredibly poor-designed project which has taken away funding from several other science and technology projects at NASA.
I hope it doesn't apply to Steven Chu, but another thing to keep in mind is that as scientists and engineers we often have a tendency to have favored pet projects, which we'll often obsess over and pound away at even after it's apparent that the project is a poor use of resources. For a recent big example, there's NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who had designed the Ares rocket pet project before he became head of NASA. He's now pouring tons of NASA resources into the project, killing off the good science and technology projects which had previously had those resources. Even though it's now looking the like the Ares is an inherently bad design, instead of admitting it he's instead commanding his subordinates to do everything they can to defend his project from members of Obama's transition team who think Ares resources may be better used on other NASA projects.
Again, hopefully David Chu will turn out better than Griffin, but we'll have to be watchful.
Space shuttles, cheap orbiters, SpaceX... all these are mere clockwork toys compared to the might of the Saturn V SI-C first stage and its five F-1 engines.
Actually, SpaceX currently has under-development an engine equivalent to the Saturn's F-1 -- internally they're calling it the "BFE" (or Big "Falcon" Engine). Unlike the F-1, it'll actually be economical. They haven't made official announcements yet, but Musk has given every indication that he's working his way up to building Saturn V-class (and possibly larger) rockets.
The Prime Minister decided to try and pass a budget that would cut funding to opposition parties and make sure that civil servants couldn't go on strike.
And yet some wonder why people are opposed to campaign finance control laws...
While the 20 some year old space shuttle (that was kind of funny, I mistyped it shittle the first time) ages not so gracefully, we need a replacement to move people and objects to the ISS.
Sure, but there's plenty of already-existing or under-development rockets capable of lofting people to orbit with relatively little additional work, like Lockheed Martin's Atlas V, Boeing's Delta IV Heavy, and SpaceX's Falcon 9 Heavy. Both Lockheed and SpaceX are already pursuing plans for placing manned capsules on their rockets.
It's simply absurd for NASA to spend several billion dollars on the Ares I to try to compete against what these companies already have (or will finish before the Ares I is ready). I realize retaining jobs in Space Shuttle congressional districts is all-important, but surely there must be a more productive thing for them to work on than the Ares boondoggle. NASA should, you know, actually try to push the frontiers of research and technology instead of trying to compete against commercial solutions.
Where is the Edison of the new age? Where is the Tesla of the 21st century?
Here's some people who combine Edison and Tesla in varying degrees, either through novel technologies or (more importantly) utilizing already-existing technologies more cost-effectively to try to reduce the cost of spaceflight by orders of magnitude:
The "Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog" is updated several times each week with news stories about people successfully defending themselves and their loved ones:
and the federal government decides to reimburse a gun with no demonstrated (or even conceivable) health benefit.... Given the amount spent by the public sector on health care in the US, they could have universal health care - this is the sort of decision which leads to the health care mess that exists there.
Actually, from what I can tell from the released information, despite what the summary says the federal government has made no such decision -- people need to chill out. Someone else may know more than this, but I believe the FDA classification is required for them to market their device to patient populations.
This document has information on the "Durable Medical Equipment" classification they're applying for (and haven't received yet):
If that classification is given, in order to get a device order hypothetically covered by Medicare you'd still need to get a Certificate of Medical Necessity filled out by a doctor and approved by Medicare. That seems unlikely in general, although I guess one could imagine scenarios (e.g. living in high-crime areas) where that may be permitted.
However, the cost above minimum wage for ALL automotive workers is a tiny fraction of the shortfall being experienced by automotive companies.
The problem is that additional costs have a very nonlinear effect on profits/losses. In the case of the Big 3, the extra thousand or so dollars that unions are costing them per-car is ok when they were selling huge high-margin SUVs, but in the case of lower-margin smaller cars, the only way they could sell them at a competitive price was to sell them at a loss. As a result, back in the late 90s and early 2000s they put all of their emphasis on SUVs, since they were they only cars they could sell at a profit and still pay off the union costs.
Now, things have changed and SUVs aren't quite so popular any more. The Big 3 are doubly screwed, because they couldn't sell smaller cars at a profit in the first place, and since they had to rely on SUVs for a while they put fairly little development effort into smaller cars. A bailout is only postponing the inevitable for them.
Space travel on chemical fuels will never work much better than it does now.
This is a common misconception, and although there's a cost floor with chemical fuels, we're very far from it still. As it is, the cost of fuel, and even the cost of materials is a very small portion of the total cost of a rocket. Instead, most of your money goes to paying the people who build the rocket and operate your launch facilities -- in the case of the space shuttle, this is tens of thousands of people.
Fortunately, companies like SpaceX are designing their operations to minimize the number of people required, which is how they plan on reducing the cost of orbital spaceflight by at least an order of magnitude.
What company provides a man-rated LEO launch vehicle? Nobody.
Lockheed Martin's Atlas V will soon be man-rated, and Bigelow Aerospace is planning on signing an agreement with them to provide transportation of humans to Bigelow's private space stations.
Indeed. Instead of NASA trying to compete against already-existing launchers with their Ares I, they should, you know, actually use the billions of dollars to do research, develop new technologies, and push the frontier. As it is, many of those research and development programs have already been scrapped to pay for the Ares I boondoggle.
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Their costs will go up to meet the inevitable requirement creep, and so will the final bill.
I think you may be missing something here... as I mentioned in my comment, this is a fixed-price contract, not a cost-plus contract. The requirements (deliver a certain quantity of tonnage to orbit) are already set, and the final price is already set. SpaceX and Orbital get money as they reach contracted development milestones and make actual cargo deliveries. If their costs go up, they either eat the cost and make less of a profit, or they don't make any more money at all.
But let's not delude ourselves that the new kids will be that much better/cheaper, while retaining the same performance & safety factors.
This is an interesting belief. Do you have any support for it? Do you disagree with NASA's readiness evaluation that SpaceX and Orbital are capable of doing this? Also, why does performance inherently matter, rather than cost/kg? And how much of a factor is safety on a cargo ship?
Space ops is expensive.
Actually, current space ops is really absurdly expensive. Companies like SpaceX are trying to make the cost simply expensive.
For anyone looking for more info, here's some handy links:
* RLV News's link round-up on the announcement
* Notes from the question-and-answer teleconference after the announcement
Some pasted notes from the teleconference which were missing from the article linked in the summary:
Compared to the shuttle, it's a pretty damn good deal.
Just to elaborate on that... a Space Shuttle has a payload to orbit of 24,400kg. The shuttle costs $500-$1,500 million per flight (depending on how you tabulate it). SpaceX's Falcon 9 Heavy has a payload to orbit of 27,500kg. The commercial price per flight is $90 million; under the current contract SpaceX is charging a fixed price of $133 million per flight, which presumably is higher due to the cost of the Dragon capsule and development fees.
That makes SpaceX's price for delivery to the space station 4x-11x cheaper than the Shuttle's. With this sharp cost reduction, NASA will be hopefully be able to get much more exploration and research done on their limited budget.
It doesn't sound any different than Lockheed or NGC getting $3 billion.
As I've noted in another comment, the difference is that Lockheed/NGC have cost-plus contracts, while this is a fixed-price contract. Lockheed et al get more money if they go overbudget. SpaceX has to pay the cost if they go overbudget.
The concept drawings from any of these companies are equally far from the real thing. Maybe the CEO of SpaceX is worth a little more than the Lockheed CEO.
Concept drawings? SpaceX's Falcon 9 has already been transported to Cape Canaveral, and will be fully assembled and vertical within the next week.
Boeing/Lockheed/Thiokol initially only charged 1/2 the final rate too. What will the actual bill from SpaceX be, once they can suck at the govt's teat?
One big difference is that Boeing/Lockheed/Thiokol have cost-plus contracts, where if you increase the final bill you make more money. SpaceX and Orbital have fixed-price contracts, where if SpaceX or Orbital's cost estimates are too low, the companies eat the extra cost; on the other hand, if the companies figure out ways to do things more efficiently, they get more of a profit. Doing space launches under this sort of arrangement is almost unprecedented for NASA, and hopefully something we'll see much more of in the future.
Octopus have been estimated to be about as smart as dogs with surprisingly adept skills at problems solving and recognition.
One of the things which has often amazed me about octopuses is that they're so smart despite their lack of myelinated axons. For those unfamiliar with it, myelin is an evolutionary adaptation specific to vertebrates which allows them to transmit neural signals about ~20x faster. I sometimes figure that if octopuses had myelin, the earth would be dominated by a hyper-technological race of chthulhu-like creatures by now. ;)
As I mention in another comment, the member of Obama's space transition team are very much pro-space exploration, and are huge space advocates. The problem is that Griffin's rocket design has itself been "hindering NASA's progression," gutting or canceling other NASA projects to pay for the inherently-flawed Ares.
I actually had high hopes for Griffin as well, but the problem is that he came in with his own personal rocket design and essentially banked the entire space agency's future on it. He's been crushing all the voices of dissent (of which there are many) within NASA who think that it's an inherently flawed design, and has been gutting other NASA programs to pay for the cost overruns of his design.
How does that refute the Sentinel's description of Griffin stonewalling? It's pretty straightforward to stonewall without foaming at the mouth. The Sentinel makes no claim that Griffin lashed out or yelled at them.
Well, I will say that Obama has been quite vague on whether he'll keep NASA well funded. It seems like something he's not inclined to do on his own without pressure from the public. On the other hand, the transition team not only asked how much would be saved if the program was canned but also asked how much it would cost to accelerate it, so it looks like they're looking at all options.
It should be noted that the members of Obama's space transition team are very much pro-space and well-regarded in the space community. The team has ties to the National Space Society, which was created from the merger of Wernher von Braun's National Space Institute and the L5 Society (a space colonization advocacy group). The head of the transition team, Lori Garver, was a NASA associate administrator for several years and a former head of the National Space Society. Another team member is George Whitesides, current head of the NSS, co-creator of Yuri's Night (a multi-site world space party held annually to commemorate the launch of the first human in space), and a senior advisor to Virgin Galactic.
If Obama were looking to gut NASA, I doubt he would hire people like Lori Garver and George Whitesides to help him determine what to do with NASA. Rather, plenty of people both inside and outside of NASA are frustrated with how Michael Griffin has been handling things, diverting money from good science and technology projects to pour into Griffin's multi-billion dollar Ares pet project. My hope is that they'll toss out Griffin and redirect the money back to worthwhile projects, and use a commercial COTS-based approach for the next generation of manned launchers instead of cost-plus contracts and NASA-controlled development.
Has Griffin said anything yet about this particular quote of his?
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/12/transition_team_trouble_at_nas.html
If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar. Because it means you donâ(TM)t trust what I say is under the hood.
This isn't about canning all of NASA, it's about canning an incredibly poor-designed project which has taken away funding from several other science and technology projects at NASA.
I hope it doesn't apply to Steven Chu, but another thing to keep in mind is that as scientists and engineers we often have a tendency to have favored pet projects, which we'll often obsess over and pound away at even after it's apparent that the project is a poor use of resources. For a recent big example, there's NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who had designed the Ares rocket pet project before he became head of NASA. He's now pouring tons of NASA resources into the project, killing off the good science and technology projects which had previously had those resources. Even though it's now looking the like the Ares is an inherently bad design, instead of admitting it he's instead commanding his subordinates to do everything they can to defend his project from members of Obama's transition team who think Ares resources may be better used on other NASA projects.
Again, hopefully David Chu will turn out better than Griffin, but we'll have to be watchful.
Space shuttles, cheap orbiters, SpaceX ... all these are mere clockwork toys compared to the might of the Saturn V SI-C first stage and its five F-1 engines.
Actually, SpaceX currently has under-development an engine equivalent to the Saturn's F-1 -- internally they're calling it the "BFE" (or Big "Falcon" Engine). Unlike the F-1, it'll actually be economical. They haven't made official announcements yet, but Musk has given every indication that he's working his way up to building Saturn V-class (and possibly larger) rockets.
The Prime Minister decided to try and pass a budget that would cut funding to opposition parties and make sure that civil servants couldn't go on strike.
And yet some wonder why people are opposed to campaign finance control laws...
While the 20 some year old space shuttle (that was kind of funny, I mistyped it shittle the first time) ages not so gracefully, we need a replacement to move people and objects to the ISS.
Sure, but there's plenty of already-existing or under-development rockets capable of lofting people to orbit with relatively little additional work, like Lockheed Martin's Atlas V, Boeing's Delta IV Heavy, and SpaceX's Falcon 9 Heavy. Both Lockheed and SpaceX are already pursuing plans for placing manned capsules on their rockets.
It's simply absurd for NASA to spend several billion dollars on the Ares I to try to compete against what these companies already have (or will finish before the Ares I is ready). I realize retaining jobs in Space Shuttle congressional districts is all-important, but surely there must be a more productive thing for them to work on than the Ares boondoggle. NASA should, you know, actually try to push the frontiers of research and technology instead of trying to compete against commercial solutions.
Where is the Edison of the new age? Where is the Tesla of the 21st century?
Here's some people who combine Edison and Tesla in varying degrees, either through novel technologies or (more importantly) utilizing already-existing technologies more cost-effectively to try to reduce the cost of spaceflight by orders of magnitude:
Of course, back in the real world, there's plenty of examples of the elderly using firearms to successfully defend themselves:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:www.claytoncramer.com+self-defense+elderly
The "Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog" is updated several times each week with news stories about people successfully defending themselves and their loved ones:
http://www.claytoncramer.com/gundefenseblog/blogger.html
and the federal government decides to reimburse a gun with no demonstrated (or even conceivable) health benefit. ... Given the amount spent by the public sector on health care in the US, they could have universal health care - this is the sort of decision which leads to the health care mess that exists there.
Actually, from what I can tell from the released information, despite what the summary says the federal government has made no such decision -- people need to chill out. Someone else may know more than this, but I believe the FDA classification is required for them to market their device to patient populations.
This document has information on the "Durable Medical Equipment" classification they're applying for (and haven't received yet):
http://www.medicare.gov/Publications/Pubs/pdf/11045.pdf
If that classification is given, in order to get a device order hypothetically covered by Medicare you'd still need to get a Certificate of Medical Necessity filled out by a doctor and approved by Medicare. That seems unlikely in general, although I guess one could imagine scenarios (e.g. living in high-crime areas) where that may be permitted.
Do you americans still cling to that silly constitution?
In other words, it's "just a goddamn piece of paper"?
Are you claiming that auto workers are Japanese-owned and European-owned plants in the US aren't getting a fair wage and benefits?
However, the cost above minimum wage for ALL automotive workers is a tiny fraction of the shortfall being experienced by automotive companies.
The problem is that additional costs have a very nonlinear effect on profits/losses. In the case of the Big 3, the extra thousand or so dollars that unions are costing them per-car is ok when they were selling huge high-margin SUVs, but in the case of lower-margin smaller cars, the only way they could sell them at a competitive price was to sell them at a loss. As a result, back in the late 90s and early 2000s they put all of their emphasis on SUVs, since they were they only cars they could sell at a profit and still pay off the union costs.
Now, things have changed and SUVs aren't quite so popular any more. The Big 3 are doubly screwed, because they couldn't sell smaller cars at a profit in the first place, and since they had to rely on SUVs for a while they put fairly little development effort into smaller cars. A bailout is only postponing the inevitable for them.
Space travel on chemical fuels will never work much better than it does now.
This is a common misconception, and although there's a cost floor with chemical fuels, we're very far from it still. As it is, the cost of fuel, and even the cost of materials is a very small portion of the total cost of a rocket. Instead, most of your money goes to paying the people who build the rocket and operate your launch facilities -- in the case of the space shuttle, this is tens of thousands of people.
Fortunately, companies like SpaceX are designing their operations to minimize the number of people required, which is how they plan on reducing the cost of orbital spaceflight by at least an order of magnitude.
What company provides a man-rated LEO launch vehicle? Nobody.
Lockheed Martin's Atlas V will soon be man-rated, and Bigelow Aerospace is planning on signing an agreement with them to provide transportation of humans to Bigelow's private space stations.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13290
http://selenianboondocks.blogspot.com/2006/09/lm-atlas-v-man-rating-paper.html
Also, SpaceX's Falcon 9 is designed from the get-go to be man-rated.
Indeed. Instead of NASA trying to compete against already-existing launchers with their Ares I, they should, you know, actually use the billions of dollars to do research, develop new technologies, and push the frontier. As it is, many of those research and development programs have already been scrapped to pay for the Ares I boondoggle.