It looks like Amazon managed to get their storage product out before the rumored Google Drive (TechCrunch article, Slashdot article). I wonder how Amazon's product will compare to Google's, whenever Google's is released. I'm particularly interested in seeing how Amazon and Google will end up competing with each other in terms of price and transfer speeds.
there was a lot of stuff that went up in the cargo bay and came back in the cargo bay that would have had a really tough time on a parachute landing.
Do you have examples? I'm under the impression that the cargo retrieval capability was only used once or twice in the Space Shuttle's history, although the Air Force fantasized that they would use it to do things like snatch Soviet satellites out of the sky.
It takes a lot of energy to get into space, unfortunatly the engery that gets the shuttle into space is running out so governments are spending much more money on fighting over the last scraps of it.
Cute, but not quite. By far the biggest cost for the Space Shuttle is the standing army of around 10,000 people that's paid to work on the Shuttle, regardless of how often it's actually flying. The cost of the rocket fuel itself is less than one percent of the total launch cost.
If the commercial space travel agencies don't take the same cautions that NASA is in delaying these launches, we could have a very serious number of fatal accidents.
And it'll be up to the people paying for rides on those rockets whether or not that's a risk they want to take, much like they decide if getting in an automobile is worth the risk. Regrettably, it's also possible that a well-publicized accident early on might result in congressmen pushing for legislation to protect people from their own decisions.
In any case, I'd be quite surprised if in the long-term commercial space firms aren't able to do better than the 2% fatality rate for the Space Shuttle.
Without proper funding, the space program can't do a heck of a lot.
The shuttle program has many problems, but a lack of funding isn't one of them. From a recent post by Clark Lindsay's RLV News:... For example, the paper notes that "conventional wisdom" holds that if NASA had gotten all the funding it wanted and allowed to build one of the original Shuttle designs, which included a fully reusable fly-back first stage, it could have achieved the original Shuttle mission goals of frequent flights (~50 per year) and greatly lower launch costs. Instead, the design was chopped down to fit within the funding limitations set by Nixon and Congress.
The paper notes that it is in fact arguable that a lavishly funded NASA system would have done so well and, regardless, once NASA lowered the system performance it should have lowered expectations. "Instead, in the effort to promote the programme, NASA held policy goals constant to inflate the programme's apparent benefits while the design was compromised.:
Another common belief is that Congress starved NASA of funding during the Shuttle development. Figure 1, however, shows that Congress typically gave NASA more funding that it asked for during the 1971-81 period.
Griffin talks about how he cannot rely on the commercial sector to achieve the goals of the VSE. So Plan A must be a system specified in detail and implemented wholly by NASA as the agency did with the Shuttle and ISS. However, he should look at Table 1, which compares the promise of the Shuttle program and the actual performance. It does not exactly support his great confidence in the agency's ability to fulfill program goals.
In the summary section, the paper suggests that "quick, smaller, and independent" programs are better than a single huge, centralized, long term program like the shuttle. I think this is exactly right, especially if the smaller programs heavily involve or sponsor commercial firms.
The practicality of sending a probe to the surface of a far-flung moon for remote experimentation or return payload for terrestrial experimentation aside, the worry with such a procedure would be contamination.
Actually, part of the beauty of this discovery is that we wouldn't necessarily have to do that, because it seems that the geyser system on Enceladus is shooting liquid water (and whatever it contains) all around the Saturn system. From a piece of commentary by James Oberg on Why the Enceladus discovery matters:
Enceladus has now offered, on a space platter, the easiest-so-far way to examine directly the composition of such oceans. We don't have to drill or melt our way through a hundred miles of an outer ice shell, as on Jupiter's moon Europa, or fight our way down through and back up through a thick atmosphere such as found on Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
We can go out there to Enceladus and pick up the samples in deep space, delivered conveniently by the geyser system that appears to be driven by the same heating process -- gravitational flexing -- that created the Enceladus liquid water pools in the first place....
An aerogel-equipped spacecraft could be dispatched to the Saturn system to make repeated passes over Enceladus (the geysers don't seem to be permanent features) while opening Stardust-like collection grids. Bonus passes through the upper atmosphere of Titan and the outer rings of Saturn might also be possible. And we may get even more potential targets as the Cassini probe that discovered these wonders continues to explore.
Ignoring the various "all surveillance == big brother" comments for a moment, here's an article on CNET News.com which goes into more detail about the reasoning behind Cisco's acquisition. From the article:
"If you can digitize all video, you can record it, timestamp it and instantaneously get access to video across the IP network much more efficiently than having to send an actual tape," said Marthin De Beer, a vice president in Cisco's Emerging Market Technologies Group. "It also lets people coordinating a disaster halfway across the country to get live video feeds from cameras connected to an IP network, so they can see what's happening."...
In addition, it makes sense for businesses that have already embarked on consolidating their networks to decide to carry all of their corporate data and voice traffic over an IP network. Cisco also provides storage area networking gear, which is essential for customers who must store all the video.
Personally, I'd like to see more development of sousveillance. IMHO, the solution to the problem of "Who watches the watchers?" isn't to ban watching, but to make everybody a watcher. It'd be great to have a publically-uploadable website designed to facilitate the coordination of images and video for events and places of concern.
Pulsed power driven metallic wire-array Z pinches are the most powerful and efficient laboratory x-ray sources. Furthermore, under certain conditions the soft x-ray energy radiated in a 5 ns pulse at stagnation can exceed the estimated kinetic energy of the radial implosion phase by a factor of 3 to 4. A theoretical model is developed here to explain this, allowing the rapid conversion of magnetic energy to a very high ion temperature plasma through the generation of fine scale, fast-growing m=0 interchange MHD instabilities at stagnation. These saturate nonlinearly and provide associated ion viscous heating. Next the ion energy is transferred by equipartition to the electrons and thus to soft x-ray radiation. Recent time-resolved iron spectra at Sandia confirm an ion temperature Ti of over 200 keV (2×109 degrees), as predicted by theory. These are believed to be record temperatures for a magnetically confined plasma.
Also, there's a press release from Sandia National Labs.
Whatever the differences in approaches, there is no contest between them. One of Boeing and Lockheed will get the $* billion CEV contract. SpaceX is working on a vehicle for ISS resupply, which is a separate, much less expensive ($500m), and better structured program.
Not to nitpick, but Boeing and Lockheed are actually both on the list of vendors expressing interest for the COTS program. I have no idea if they ended up submitting a proposal, though.
I can tell you that something VERY much cheaper than the complex hunk of junk known as the Space Shutle could have fulfilled all the requirements.
I doubt a much cheaper system would have been able to perform the Space Shuttle's most important requirement, delivering a sufficient number of jobs to key constituent districts.
Instead, I found that someone had already added a section about the capsule this morning to the SpaceX entry. Crazy nerds!
Indeed! I noticed that too. I wonder if anyone's looked at the statistics of the time between when a news item is released and when it appears in a Wikipedia entry...
So the question is, are the engineers at SpaceX role-playing nerds or stoners?
Since they tend to internally refer to their new test stand and unannounced rocket as BFTS ("Big F*****g Test Stand") and BFR("Big F*****g Rocket"), I suspect a number of them are also video game nerds.
Musk supposedly has never said how much of his own cash he's invested in SpaceX, but the article, as well as other estimates, place it at around $100 million so far. No mention of other contributions.
SpaceX is almost entirely self-funded by Elon Musk, with a few small investments by "friends and family." He has mentioned though that after the first Falcon I flight he'll be pursuing some outside funding to raise another $50 - $100 million for the development of things like the next-generation Merlin 2 engine (which would be the largest rocket engine in the world). If the company's launch products are successful, he plans on an eventual IPO in "three to four years."
Look, I love SpaceX. Elon Musk is trying to dig a big hole in the middle of the overweight aerospace industry and so far he's doing a good job of it. But this is nothing but vapourware. I hope NASA gives them a big chunk of that funding but frankly, it's a high risk proposition right now.
Could you remind me what Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have produced so far with their contracts to build NASA's CEV? If I recall correctly, all they have so far are design documents and powerpoint slides.
It seems to me SpaceX (which has a full-sized prototype with tested life support) is a good bit ahead of them, using just Elon Musk's out-of-pocket funding instead of NASA's.
Also, until we see figures on how much they've spent on development themselves, I bet it pales in comparison to what they ask for from NASA.
From the article:
Musk declined to say how much he has spent on Dragon so far, but said it was only a small part of the $100 million he has invested in SpaceX to-date building the Falcon 1 and getting started on the larger and more powerful Falcon 9.
Also, from what I understand, SpaceX isn't asking for one of the typical cost-plus contracts, but this is part of a competitive bid for a delivery contract from the COTS program. If another company has a solution which can deliver to the ISS at a better price, NASA will buy from them instead.
Dang... I just saw this on slashdot a few minutes after I submitted it myself. For the curious, here's my version of the submission, which includes some different info and a link to a SpaceRef story which has more pictures of the capsule:
SpaceX has revealed that for the past few years they've been secretly developing the Dragon space capsule, which will be the first privately-built manned orbital spacecraft. The company has already built a full-scale working prototype and thoroughly tested its life support system, with the capsule development using 'only a small part of the $100 million [CEO/founder Elon Musk] has invested in SpaceX to-date building the Falcon 1 [orbital rocket] and getting started on the larger and more powerful Falcon 9.' According to Musk, 'I feel very confident about being able to offer NASA an ISS-servicing capability by 2009 and am prepared to back that up with my own funding.' It's believed that Musk will also compete for crew/cargo delivery contracts to private space station modules built by Bigelow Aerospace.
All in all, I'm very excited about this announcement. I'm sure SpaceX wishes that they could have gotten their Falcon I rocket off the ground before announcing the capsule, but the deadline for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems (COTS) program was a few days ago. The COTS program is the means by which NASA hopes to award competitive contracts to delivery crew and cargo to the International Space Station, in order to reduce reliance on the Russians and promote the development of private spaceflight. Since the capsule is a critical part of their COTS proposal, SpaceX pretty much had to let the secret out.
I'm an adult, physically capable of bearing arms. I am not now, nor will I ever be, a member of a militia- I do not own a gun, I have never fired a gun (outside of a water gun), and I have no wish to train to be a professional killer. I find the very idea insulting and abhorrent. So no, try again.
Actually, I think it just means that you aren't a particularly useful member of the militia. It's sort of like being a member of the citizenry -- just because somebody doesn't vote or participate politically doesn't mean they suddenly stop being a citizen.
Coincidentally, this news about the USAF's secret vehicle comes out on the same day as news that SpaceX has spent some of their money during the past few years secretly developing the first private manned orbital spacecraft. There's coverage on both SpaceRef and Space.com. The capsule will be reusable and is targetted at NASA's recently-announced COTS program for commercial deliveries of crew and cargo to the International Space Station. It's also likely that they'll be using the capsule to compete for Bigelow Aerospace's prize for a privately-built manned vehicle capable of docking with their private space station modules.
A quote from the Space.com article:
Musk said he thinks Dragon can be ready to enter service in 2009 - a full year before the shuttle is expected to conduct its last flight.
"I feel very confident about being able to offer NASA an ISS-servicing capability by 2009 and am prepared to back that up with my own funding," Musk said.
Dragon's initial test flights would be conducted from SpaceX's island launch facility in the Kwajalein Atoll, Musk said, with operational flights to be conducted from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Musk said SpaceX proposed several different configurations of Dragon in order to meet NASA's needs to deliver both pressurized and unpressurized cargo loads to the station and bring some materials back. He also proposed a crewed version capable of carrying up to seven astronauts to and from the station.
From the SpaceRef article:
Visitors to SpaceX's El Segundo facility over the past several years have noticed an area which is roped off - one they cannot get close to - with some large hardware covered up. Underneath those covers are a variety of Dragon protoypes and developmental items produced over the past several years.
Initial designs for Dragon were somewhat similar to a blunt nose version of the DC-X - complete with landing legs. Driven by additional thinking - and the emerging demands of a cargo and human transport business for the ISS - the design of Dragon has been modified and the crew capsule portion of the spacecraft now sports a more conventional blunt conical, capsule-like design with a 15-degree slope angle.
There's some pretty good coverage of the supposed Blackstar spaceplane over on Clark Lindsey's RLV News. According to the latest post, the existence of the project as previously described is looking rather dubious. Here's what Lindsey wrote:
Despite the many details provided by AvWeek about the purported Blackstar program, the existence of an "operational" TSTO reusable system seems wildly inconsistent with what has been happening with all the rest of the government space programs since the early 1990s and with what they have planned for the next couple of decades.
- As a reader already commented, NASA's whole approach to space transport is based on the claim that fully reusable space vehicles are not feasible with current technologies. - DARPA has had programs like Falcon and RASCAL (canceled due to cost overruns) that are intended to provide "responsive space" capability. For the next 5-10 years, this simply means launching microsats on short notice. Why not just use Blackstar or build on its capabilities? - Why would a system like the Blackstar be "shelved" when it is so far beyond what anyone else is flying and beyond what the rest of the government claims is even feasible? - The magazine article speculates that the program was run directly or indirectly by an intelligence agency and they managed to kept it secret from even "top military space commanders". So how did they manage to fly this thing to orbit and not have it show up on the military's space tracking system? - In a government where secrets seem to stay secret only until more than one person knows about them, I find it extremely hard to believe a huge program like this could be kept under wraps for over 10 years. And not just from the public but from most of the military and NASA.
If it was the beginning of April, I would take this whole thing to be a big leg-puller.
If we were still in the 1980s, I would assume AvWeek had been led astray by a disinformation campaign aimed at the Soviets. But the Soviets are gone so I'm not sure why anyone in the Pentagon or the Intelligence agencies would bother to run an elaborate spaceplane ruse other than perhaps to get back at AvWeek for breaking so many stories about secret programs over the past several decades...
A design study program and some prototype tests, maybe, but a secret operational orbital system borders on sci-fi. I like sci-fi and I hope this story is true but I'll wait for independent confirmation before I'll buy it.
* Complete the International Space Station (by 2010)
* Retire the Space Shuttle (by 2010)
* Develop the Crew Exploration Vehicle (by 2008) and conduct its first manned mission (by 2012)
* Develop the Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicles
* Explore the moon with unmanned missions (by 2008) and manned missions (by 2020)
* Explore Mars and other destinations with unmanned and manned missions
I might be misreading it, but I'm under the impression that while its still uncertain whether or not there's liquid hydrocarbons on the surface, there's almost certainly hydrocarbons in Titan's thick atmosphere.
A number of private spaceflight firms mentioned in the article are looking for people to hire. These companies are looking for folks with expertise in a variety of areas, from web design, to aerospace/mechanical engineering, to programming. Here's a few links (courtesy of RLV News, listed roughly in order of available resources), with descriptions of what the company does:
* Bigelow Aerospace: Inflatable space station modules for orbital research and tourism. Despite being inflatable, their modules are better at withstanding space debris than the ISS, as they're made of a material twice as strong as kevlar. Out of all the private spaceflight firms, they probably have the most resources. * SpaceX: Orbital rockets which are drastically cheaper than the competition, with plans for building manned orbital rockets. They should be launching their first rocket next month. * Scaled Composites: Burt Rutan's company and winner of the X Prize. They're currently working on building SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic. * SpaceDev: They build microsatellites and propulsion systems. * Blue Origin: Suborbital vehicle company started by Amazon.com's CEO, Jeff Bezos. Author Neal Stephenson also works for them, hoping for the "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel." * Rocketplane Limited: Suborbital spaceplanes * Masten Space Systems: Suborbital launch vehicles. * TGV Rockets: Suborbital launch
The government will front the money, and we'll have privatization of risk, but when the money starts to get made, we'll hear about how we need to keep government out.
Isn't that pretty much the point? Government helps set up the infrastructure and foundation for private enterprise to prosper. Once private enterprise has got self-sustaining economic activity in a particular field, government can then focus its resources on the next budding field.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like Amazon managed to get their storage product out before the rumored Google Drive (TechCrunch article, Slashdot article). I wonder how Amazon's product will compare to Google's, whenever Google's is released. I'm particularly interested in seeing how Amazon and Google will end up competing with each other in terms of price and transfer speeds.
there was a lot of stuff that went up in the cargo bay and came back in the cargo bay that would have had a really tough time on a parachute landing.
Do you have examples? I'm under the impression that the cargo retrieval capability was only used once or twice in the Space Shuttle's history, although the Air Force fantasized that they would use it to do things like snatch Soviet satellites out of the sky.
It takes a lot of energy to get into space, unfortunatly the engery that gets the shuttle into space is running out so governments are spending much more money on fighting over the last scraps of it.
Cute, but not quite. By far the biggest cost for the Space Shuttle is the standing army of around 10,000 people that's paid to work on the Shuttle, regardless of how often it's actually flying. The cost of the rocket fuel itself is less than one percent of the total launch cost.
If the commercial space travel agencies don't take the same cautions that NASA is in delaying these launches, we could have a very serious number of fatal accidents.
And it'll be up to the people paying for rides on those rockets whether or not that's a risk they want to take, much like they decide if getting in an automobile is worth the risk. Regrettably, it's also possible that a well-publicized accident early on might result in congressmen pushing for legislation to protect people from their own decisions.
In any case, I'd be quite surprised if in the long-term commercial space firms aren't able to do better than the 2% fatality rate for the Space Shuttle.
Without proper funding, the space program can't do a heck of a lot.
... For example, the paper notes that "conventional wisdom" holds that if NASA had gotten all the funding it wanted and allowed to build one of the original Shuttle designs, which included a fully reusable fly-back first stage, it could have achieved the original Shuttle mission goals of frequent flights (~50 per year) and greatly lower launch costs. Instead, the design was chopped down to fit within the funding limitations set by Nixon and Congress.
The shuttle program has many problems, but a lack of funding isn't one of them. From a recent post by Clark Lindsay's RLV News:
The paper notes that it is in fact arguable that a lavishly funded NASA system would have done so well and, regardless, once NASA lowered the system performance it should have lowered expectations. "Instead, in the effort to promote the programme, NASA held policy goals constant to inflate the programme's apparent benefits while the design was compromised.:
Another common belief is that Congress starved NASA of funding during the Shuttle development. Figure 1, however, shows that Congress typically gave NASA more funding that it asked for during the 1971-81 period.
Griffin talks about how he cannot rely on the commercial sector to achieve the goals of the VSE. So Plan A must be a system specified in detail and implemented wholly by NASA as the agency did with the Shuttle and ISS. However, he should look at Table 1, which compares the promise of the Shuttle program and the actual performance. It does not exactly support his great confidence in the agency's ability to fulfill program goals.
In the summary section, the paper suggests that "quick, smaller, and independent" programs are better than a single huge, centralized, long term program like the shuttle. I think this is exactly right, especially if the smaller programs heavily involve or sponsor commercial firms.
The practicality of sending a probe to the surface of a far-flung moon for remote experimentation or return payload for terrestrial experimentation aside, the worry with such a procedure would be contamination.
...
Actually, part of the beauty of this discovery is that we wouldn't necessarily have to do that, because it seems that the geyser system on Enceladus is shooting liquid water (and whatever it contains) all around the Saturn system. From a piece of commentary by James Oberg on Why the Enceladus discovery matters:
Enceladus has now offered, on a space platter, the easiest-so-far way to examine directly the composition of such oceans. We don't have to drill or melt our way through a hundred miles of an outer ice shell, as on Jupiter's moon Europa, or fight our way down through and back up through a thick atmosphere such as found on Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
We can go out there to Enceladus and pick up the samples in deep space, delivered conveniently by the geyser system that appears to be driven by the same heating process -- gravitational flexing -- that created the Enceladus liquid water pools in the first place.
An aerogel-equipped spacecraft could be dispatched to the Saturn system to make repeated passes over Enceladus (the geysers don't seem to be permanent features) while opening Stardust-like collection grids. Bonus passes through the upper atmosphere of Titan and the outer rings of Saturn might also be possible. And we may get even more potential targets as the Cassini probe that discovered these wonders continues to explore.
Ignoring the various "all surveillance == big brother" comments for a moment, here's an article on CNET News.com which goes into more detail about the reasoning behind Cisco's acquisition. From the article:
...
"If you can digitize all video, you can record it, timestamp it and instantaneously get access to video across the IP network much more efficiently than having to send an actual tape," said Marthin De Beer, a vice president in Cisco's Emerging Market Technologies Group. "It also lets people coordinating a disaster halfway across the country to get live video feeds from cameras connected to an IP network, so they can see what's happening."
In addition, it makes sense for businesses that have already embarked on consolidating their networks to decide to carry all of their corporate data and voice traffic over an IP network. Cisco also provides storage area networking gear, which is essential for customers who must store all the video.
Personally, I'd like to see more development of sousveillance. IMHO, the solution to the problem of "Who watches the watchers?" isn't to ban watching, but to make everybody a watcher. It'd be great to have a publically-uploadable website designed to facilitate the coordination of images and video for events and places of concern.
For the curious, here's the actual abstract from the research paper, as published in Physical Review Letters:
Ion Viscous Heating in a Magnetohydrodynamically Unstable Z Pinch at Over 2×109 Kelvin
Pulsed power driven metallic wire-array Z pinches are the most powerful and efficient laboratory x-ray sources. Furthermore, under certain conditions the soft x-ray energy radiated in a 5 ns pulse at stagnation can exceed the estimated kinetic energy of the radial implosion phase by a factor of 3 to 4. A theoretical model is developed here to explain this, allowing the rapid conversion of magnetic energy to a very high ion temperature plasma through the generation of fine scale, fast-growing m=0 interchange MHD instabilities at stagnation. These saturate nonlinearly and provide associated ion viscous heating. Next the ion energy is transferred by equipartition to the electrons and thus to soft x-ray radiation. Recent time-resolved iron spectra at Sandia confirm an ion temperature Ti of over 200 keV (2×109 degrees), as predicted by theory. These are believed to be record temperatures for a magnetically confined plasma.
Also, there's a press release from Sandia National Labs.
Whatever the differences in approaches, there is no contest between them. One of Boeing and Lockheed will get the $* billion CEV contract. SpaceX is working on a vehicle for ISS resupply, which is a separate, much less expensive ($500m), and better structured program.
Not to nitpick, but Boeing and Lockheed are actually both on the list of vendors expressing interest for the COTS program. I have no idea if they ended up submitting a proposal, though.
I can tell you that something VERY much cheaper than the complex hunk of junk known as the Space Shutle could have fulfilled all the requirements.
I doubt a much cheaper system would have been able to perform the Space Shuttle's most important requirement, delivering a sufficient number of jobs to key constituent districts.
Sorry, I beat you to it.
;)
No worries.
Instead, I found that someone had already added a section about the capsule this morning to the SpaceX entry. Crazy nerds!
Indeed! I noticed that too. I wonder if anyone's looked at the statistics of the time between when a news item is released and when it appears in a Wikipedia entry...
So the question is, are the engineers at SpaceX role-playing nerds or stoners?
Since they tend to internally refer to their new test stand and unannounced rocket as BFTS ("Big F*****g Test Stand") and BFR("Big F*****g Rocket"), I suspect a number of them are also video game nerds.
Musk supposedly has never said how much of his own cash he's invested in SpaceX, but the article, as well as other estimates, place it at around $100 million so far. No mention of other contributions.
SpaceX is almost entirely self-funded by Elon Musk, with a few small investments by "friends and family." He has mentioned though that after the first Falcon I flight he'll be pursuing some outside funding to raise another $50 - $100 million for the development of things like the next-generation Merlin 2 engine (which would be the largest rocket engine in the world). If the company's launch products are successful, he plans on an eventual IPO in "three to four years."
Look, I love SpaceX. Elon Musk is trying to dig a big hole in the middle of the overweight aerospace industry and so far he's doing a good job of it. But this is nothing but vapourware. I hope NASA gives them a big chunk of that funding but frankly, it's a high risk proposition right now.
Could you remind me what Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have produced so far with their contracts to build NASA's CEV? If I recall correctly, all they have so far are design documents and powerpoint slides.
It seems to me SpaceX (which has a full-sized prototype with tested life support) is a good bit ahead of them, using just Elon Musk's out-of-pocket funding instead of NASA's.
Also, until we see figures on how much they've spent on development themselves, I bet it pales in comparison to what they ask for from NASA.
From the article:
Musk declined to say how much he has spent on Dragon so far, but said it was only a small part of the $100 million he has invested in SpaceX to-date building the Falcon 1 and getting started on the larger and more powerful Falcon 9.
Also, from what I understand, SpaceX isn't asking for one of the typical cost-plus contracts, but this is part of a competitive bid for a delivery contract from the COTS program. If another company has a solution which can deliver to the ISS at a better price, NASA will buy from them instead.
Dang... I just saw this on slashdot a few minutes after I submitted it myself. For the curious, here's my version of the submission, which includes some different info and a link to a SpaceRef story which has more pictures of the capsule:
SpaceX has revealed that for the past few years they've been secretly developing the Dragon space capsule, which will be the first privately-built manned orbital spacecraft. The company has already built a full-scale working prototype and thoroughly tested its life support system, with the capsule development using 'only a small part of the $100 million [CEO/founder Elon Musk] has invested in SpaceX to-date building the Falcon 1 [orbital rocket] and getting started on the larger and more powerful Falcon 9.' According to Musk, 'I feel very confident about being able to offer NASA an ISS-servicing capability by 2009 and am prepared to back that up with my own funding.' It's believed that Musk will also compete for crew/cargo delivery contracts to private space station modules built by Bigelow Aerospace.
All in all, I'm very excited about this announcement. I'm sure SpaceX wishes that they could have gotten their Falcon I rocket off the ground before announcing the capsule, but the deadline for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems (COTS) program was a few days ago. The COTS program is the means by which NASA hopes to award competitive contracts to delivery crew and cargo to the International Space Station, in order to reduce reliance on the Russians and promote the development of private spaceflight. Since the capsule is a critical part of their COTS proposal, SpaceX pretty much had to let the secret out.
I'm an adult, physically capable of bearing arms. I am not now, nor will I ever be, a member of a militia- I do not own a gun, I have never fired a gun (outside of a water gun), and I have no wish to train to be a professional killer. I find the very idea insulting and abhorrent. So no, try again.
Actually, I think it just means that you aren't a particularly useful member of the militia. It's sort of like being a member of the citizenry -- just because somebody doesn't vote or participate politically doesn't mean they suddenly stop being a citizen.
Coincidentally, this news about the USAF's secret vehicle comes out on the same day as news that SpaceX has spent some of their money during the past few years secretly developing the first private manned orbital spacecraft. There's coverage on both SpaceRef and Space.com. The capsule will be reusable and is targetted at NASA's recently-announced COTS program for commercial deliveries of crew and cargo to the International Space Station. It's also likely that they'll be using the capsule to compete for Bigelow Aerospace's prize for a privately-built manned vehicle capable of docking with their private space station modules.
A quote from the Space.com article:
Musk said he thinks Dragon can be ready to enter service in 2009 - a full year before the shuttle is expected to conduct its last flight.
"I feel very confident about being able to offer NASA an ISS-servicing capability by 2009 and am prepared to back that up with my own funding," Musk said.
Dragon's initial test flights would be conducted from SpaceX's island launch facility in the Kwajalein Atoll, Musk said, with operational flights to be conducted from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Musk said SpaceX proposed several different configurations of Dragon in order to meet NASA's needs to deliver both pressurized and unpressurized cargo loads to the station and bring some materials back. He also proposed a crewed version capable of carrying up to seven astronauts to and from the station.
From the SpaceRef article:
Visitors to SpaceX's El Segundo facility over the past several years have noticed an area which is roped off - one they cannot get close to - with some large hardware covered up. Underneath those covers are a variety of Dragon protoypes and developmental items produced over the past several years.
Initial designs for Dragon were somewhat similar to a blunt nose version of the DC-X - complete with landing legs. Driven by additional thinking - and the emerging demands of a cargo and human transport business for the ISS - the design of Dragon has been modified and the crew capsule portion of the spacecraft now sports a more conventional blunt conical, capsule-like design with a 15-degree slope angle.
There's some pretty good coverage of the supposed Blackstar spaceplane over on Clark Lindsey's RLV News. According to the latest post, the existence of the project as previously described is looking rather dubious. Here's what Lindsey wrote:
Despite the many details provided by AvWeek about the purported Blackstar program, the existence of an "operational" TSTO reusable system seems wildly inconsistent with what has been happening with all the rest of the government space programs since the early 1990s and with what they have planned for the next couple of decades.
- As a reader already commented, NASA's whole approach to space transport is based on the claim that fully reusable space vehicles are not feasible with current technologies.
- DARPA has had programs like Falcon and RASCAL (canceled due to cost overruns) that are intended to provide "responsive space" capability. For the next 5-10 years, this simply means launching microsats on short notice. Why not just use Blackstar or build on its capabilities?
- Why would a system like the Blackstar be "shelved" when it is so far beyond what anyone else is flying and beyond what the rest of the government claims is even feasible?
- The magazine article speculates that the program was run directly or indirectly by an intelligence agency and they managed to kept it secret from even "top military space commanders". So how did they manage to fly this thing to orbit and not have it show up on the military's space tracking system?
- In a government where secrets seem to stay secret only until more than one person knows about them, I find it extremely hard to believe a huge program like this could be kept under wraps for over 10 years. And not just from the public but from most of the military and NASA.
If it was the beginning of April, I would take this whole thing to be a big leg-puller.
If we were still in the 1980s, I would assume AvWeek had been led astray by a disinformation campaign aimed at the Soviets. But the Soviets are gone so I'm not sure why anyone in the Pentagon or the Intelligence agencies would bother to run an elaborate spaceplane ruse other than perhaps to get back at AvWeek for breaking so many stories about secret programs over the past several decades...
A design study program and some prototype tests, maybe, but a secret operational orbital system borders on sci-fi. I like sci-fi and I hope this story is true but I'll wait for independent confirmation before I'll buy it.
It would be nice if there were a clear vision with set objectives for the space program.
l oration
In case you missed it, such a vision was announced a couple of years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_for_Space_Exp
The Vision calls for the space program to:
* Complete the International Space Station (by 2010)
* Retire the Space Shuttle (by 2010)
* Develop the Crew Exploration Vehicle (by 2008) and conduct its first manned mission (by 2012)
* Develop the Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicles
* Explore the moon with unmanned missions (by 2008) and manned missions (by 2020)
* Explore Mars and other destinations with unmanned and manned missions
The one reason that government's can sometimes do things better or first is because they don't have to make a profit.
I heard that there's these things called non-profit organizations.
your own link contradicts you:
I might be misreading it, but I'm under the impression that while its still uncertain whether or not there's liquid hydrocarbons on the surface, there's almost certainly hydrocarbons in Titan's thick atmosphere.
The day astronomers discover an asteroid with oil reserves is the day the US diverts half its military budget to the 'peaceful exploration of space'.
FYI, the moon Titan is pretty much covered in "oil reserves."
A number of private spaceflight firms mentioned in the article are looking for people to hire. These companies are looking for folks with expertise in a variety of areas, from web design, to aerospace/mechanical engineering, to programming. Here's a few links (courtesy of RLV News, listed roughly in order of available resources), with descriptions of what the company does:
* Bigelow Aerospace: Inflatable space station modules for orbital research and tourism. Despite being inflatable, their modules are better at withstanding space debris than the ISS, as they're made of a material twice as strong as kevlar. Out of all the private spaceflight firms, they probably have the most resources.
* SpaceX: Orbital rockets which are drastically cheaper than the competition, with plans for building manned orbital rockets. They should be launching their first rocket next month.
* Scaled Composites: Burt Rutan's company and winner of the X Prize. They're currently working on building SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic.
* SpaceDev: They build microsatellites and propulsion systems.
* Blue Origin: Suborbital vehicle company started by Amazon.com's CEO, Jeff Bezos. Author Neal Stephenson also works for them, hoping for the "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel."
* Rocketplane Limited: Suborbital spaceplanes
* Masten Space Systems: Suborbital launch vehicles.
* TGV Rockets: Suborbital launch
The government will front the money, and we'll have privatization of risk, but when the money starts to get made, we'll hear about how we need to keep government out.
Isn't that pretty much the point? Government helps set up the infrastructure and foundation for private enterprise to prosper. Once private enterprise has got self-sustaining economic activity in a particular field, government can then focus its resources on the next budding field.