Taking Sides on Commercial Crew Downselect
Apollo Commanders Back Call For Quick Commercial Crew Selection, Aviation Week
“It seems unlikely that NASA will receive significant budgetary relief in the foreseeable future,” the three retired astronauts wrote in a May 4 letter to Wolf. “Consequently, it is mandatory to maximize return on the limited funds available to access low Earth orbit. An early downselect would seem to be prudent in order to maximize the possibility of developing a crew-carrying spacecraft in time to be operationally useful.”
NASA: Competition at core of commercial crew program, Spaceflight Now
“Ed Mango, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said Tuesday a “downselect” to a sole company could double the cost of fielding a privately-built human transportation system. “We need competition as long as possible. The price to go with one [provider] starting today, and then all the way through certification and into services, is at least twice what it would be if you had competition at least as long as possible,” Mango said.”
Its a tit for tat game. They think SLS has been compromised … and will be whacked for budget.
So they are compromising “commercial” … by coming up with a “put all the money on one” … thus leading to no need for as much budget … so it gets whacked as well. Disingenuous about American HSF. I’d not expect that from these guys.
So if we follow their lead, we might get … neither.
Sadly, it looks as if Armstrong is willing to tell lies (real lies, that is deliberate falsehoods) in defence of what he thinks is the right approach to exploration. I’m willing to accept he really believes it is the right approach.
Folks:
It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic that these same three old, worn out Apollonauts seem to get hauled out of storage at ‘times like these’ to tow the party line. Instead of giving a boost to ‘the plan’, their credibility goes down the tubes. Don’t they realize this… or care?
All I can think of is the slogan on that little picture I saw in a previous NASAWatch post:
‘ABANDON IN PLACE‘
tinker
I don’t think they are toting anyone’s particular party line. I am not sure anyone knows any longer what the party line is. I think the old astronauts believe that we have got to get a US manned vehicle flying NOW!!! We should never have been put into a position of being without manned capability. The longer it goes on the more likely budgets will be slashed and we will wind up with nothing.
I, for one, believe the salvation comes in the form of the commercial vehicles-more than one of them.
I am hopeful that Dragon and Falcon will work out because it is a game changer. If it works, it will reduce the costs to where spaceflight will be much more affordable. But as we are seeing, its not as easy to step up to a production environment in which vehicles have to be turned out every few weeks. I have more confidence in Boeing but its costs will be up there. We really need Dream Chaser because we should never have given up the fly-back approach. The others, I wish them well, and the more competition there is, hopefully the more successful capabilities get developed and that will drive costs lower. I have confidence in the commercial spacecraft and launchers. SLS would have been a good idea if it had been started five years or more earlier. As it is I do not think the nation will think in a couple years that we can afford it. Orion costs will also be up there and is so far off that if any of these others are successful at least a couple of which are redundant with Orion, then it will become a third (and unnecessary) wheel. If NASA is supposed to be doing R&D, then it needs to be looking at R&D projects.
NASA and US manned space flight is in a really bad situation here, the result of a botched management process that started in 2005. I hope we don’t lose it all.
Seems to me that having more than one competitor in the chase for commercial crew would achieve success at least risk. The cost will be higher that is for sure. I am not sure I follow the logic from NASA on the fact it will cost more and take longer to down select to 1 than it would be to carry multiple potetnial solutions. That logic donot seem to close the businees case test very well. They claim that innovation is key to success in the long run. When you look at the CST-100 it is not innovative it only an integration challenge using old technology. Dragon is not a technological step forward in fact quite the opposite. The only sysytem that has new technology and include innovation is the SNC Dreamchaser system. So I am not sure I get the NASA teams logic on that front. I worry that only having 1 system will ultimately result in significant risk and the day that designer and builder has a bad day and it results in an accident the system will grind to a halt and NASA will help find the problem and try to fix it. We can see how efficient that will be we witnessed it 2 times during Shuttle.
Seems like NASA’s whole strategy is based on strecthing out the Commercial Crew program long enough that is not meaningful to support ISS transportation and it will cancelled. Then all we are left with is the Orion capsule launching on an ELV. Does anyone else think that is the ultimate strategy comming from NASA??
using that logic a car from 1900 is the same as 2000 .. they both have a steering wheels, brakes, four wheels.
SpaceX is using new processes to try and bring economies of scale, in house parts and assembly line to bring costs down lower than NASA could ever achieve.
They are doing this also to try and develop secondary markets besides just serving the NASA monopoly.
I wouldn’t blame NASA for the commercial crew stretch-out; it isn’t NASA who has repeatedly cut hundreds of millions of dollars out of the CCDEV budget line, it’s the House. This has already cost about a year, and Obama has threatened a veto if the House does it again. I think NASA would like to have a domestic commercial LEO capability ASAP.
“Dragon is not a technological step forward in fact quite the
opposite. The only sysytem that has new technology and include
innovation is the SNC Dreamchaser system.”
Superficially, it may look like Dreamchaser is new technology and Dragon is not, but there’s a lot more to technology than hull shape.
Figuring out how to make something efficiently (i.e. at lower cost) and reliably is often much harder and more important than figuring out how to make the original thing.
Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile. Cars had been around for years in small quantities and at high cost. But by figuring out how to make them cheaply and reliably Henry Ford changed the world.
The obvious down-select is to kill SLS. Then triple the budgets of the other four programs and you still have money to spare to start working on the in-space components of an exploration system.
… and we are stuck in LEO, been there, done that. Nothing that Soyouz can do and even cheaper when you take into account all the development costs and proven reliability.
SLS is what will keep us in LEO: it isn’t needed to go beyond LEO, while the money spent on it would be better spent on spacecraft which are required.
The classic putting your eggs in one basket. Why don’t we wait before COTS actually does something besides tests before betting all of our chips on them?
No, I wasn’t even talking about COTS, but about the spacecraft needed for exploration beyond LEO. Some of the COTS spacecraft could be very useful for that, say Dragon or CST-100 with a service module. The SM could even be based on the Orion SM for all I care.
As for putting everything into one basket: CRS is putting their eggs into *several* baskets, it’s their enemies who want to downselect.
And more importantly, it’s SLS and Orion that are putting everything into one basket (not even two, since they are not mutually redundant)!
Your post is typical pro SDLV nonsense, blatantly accusing your opponents of your own glaring flaws.
If we build SLS, we won’t have the money to go beyond LEO. We could already use EELV-class boosters to launch large, modular spacecraft, suitable for almost any purpose. SLS probably won’t survive development, and if it did, it would become a white elephant, having soaked up almost all other funding.
If you really want commercial crew to work, NASA should spend their money on establishing the acceptance criteria to fly NASA astronauts. That would include performance validation and testing. They obviously have this for the COTS program because Space X has slipped a couple of months just to get through the NASA required testing. A liaison office that works with the commercial suppliers just as the FAA does with aircraft suppliers is a better model.
NASA could then buy rides to and from LEO on a per mission basis. The worry that I have with the current system is that a viable commercial crew system would be ineligible if its development wasn’t funded by NASA CCDev. If I build system and it meets all of the performance and safety criteria, than I should be able to compete for NASA business.
Consider regular old aircraft. Supposed NASA employees were only allowed to fly on aircraft that not only meet NASA’s own safety specs but that NASA had spent development money on. They’d have to run their own airline of custom built planes.
Well, if I were the Art Director at Aviation Week Magazine, I would’ve been a little more ecumenical in the selection of the illustration for this article. The image shows a Boeing CST-100 approaching ISS. I would have P’shopped in a Dragon capsule and put a question mark in between the two . Maybe with a Dreamchaser spaceplane coming up from far behind.
As is, subliminally , it looks as if AW&ST has sorta endorsed Boeing as the downselected provider. No surprise there. Look at who advertises big time in the magazine and has some top deck lobbyists …
Elon Musk may not have an Ace up his sleeve, but he does have a Jack of Diamonds : his Falcon 9 booster was man-rated by design. Let’s hope the big 9-engine bird flies well , and frequently.
Any component that berths or docks to the ISS is required to be “man-rated”. It just means that once attached to the ISS, opening the hatch and entering it won’t kill the astronauts. However, that does not mean it is “man-rated” for the purpose of launching astronauts.
As such, the Dragon is not “man-rated” for purpose of launching astronauts. It may be designed not to pre-clude man-rating for launch but that is truly different than being “man-rate”. If it were, Elon would have already been talking to us from orbit.
Disagree.
Please read the Dragon specs at SpaceX website, or article linked below at WIRED. . Dragon was designed from the get-go to be dual use, cargo and crewed. It passed its preliminary design review for crew flight just this week.
http://www.wired.com/autopi…
It seems as though everything is on hold until Dragon is launched and recovered, when that finally occurs then more actions will take place. As far as the SLS is concerned, private investors should develop it, since the government has a nasty habit of delays,cost-overruns.
Human space flight is in peril!!!!
Panic!!!!!!!!
Who can save us now!!!!!!!!!
I know write Boeing a fat cost plus contract for their little capsule now!!!!!!!!
Before Spacex flies that unproven model rocket again!!!
Kill that baby dragon in the womb.
Falcon9/Dragon rider is a threat to our national Space program!!
That dam cheap kerosene burner!
Don’t they know today’s rockets are only fueled with fine grade cooking oil!!!!!!!
Mmm need a little more boeing kickbacks/ahhh legal campaign contributions. shhh be quiet about it.
Need a little more Boeing grease in the wheels of the political machine to make sure we make only the wisest choices that determine our Space future.