Bolden Blames Congress For Making Him Buy Soyuz Seats
Charles Bolden: Launching American Astronauts from U.S. Soil
“Three years ago, the Administration put forward a public-private partnership plan, the Commercial Crew Program (CCP), to ensure that American companies would be launching our astronauts from U.S. soil by 2015. It’s a plan that supports the U.S. human spaceflight program, boosts our economy, and helps create good-paying American jobs. If NASA had received the President’s requested funding for this plan, we would not have been forced to recently sign a new contract with Roscosmos for Soyuz transportation flights. Because the funding for the President’s plan has been significantly reduced, we now won’t be able to support American launches until 2017.”
NASA Extends Crew Flight Contract With Russian Space Agency
Never sounds good to blame someone but frankly they’re to blame for all sorts of things right now. Or perhaps we’re all to blame for letting them in. In either case, no bucks > no buck rogers still stands and I don’t see what Bolden can do about it.
It’s sad to see America’s broken political system be counter intuitive. On one hand Senator’s like Richard Shelby know that bringing government spending to their district’s will have a positive outcome to the local economy and in turn be good for their reelection’s but on the other hand be totally criminal to the country as a whole. What ever happen to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
I am no fan of Bolden, but on this issue he is absolutely correct. Congress was criminally irresponsible to extend manned flight unavailability this long.
There are 50 active US Astronauts, only 4 get to fly each year. Currently only 9 are assigned to fly. 7 more will get Soyuz seats between June, 2015 and June, 2017. The rest have to wait 4-5 years for a chance at a Commercial flight.
Honest question: how much is the lack of congressional funding slowing down “private” companies in their R&D efforts? Would companies like SpaceX grow their team of engineers or re prioritize other R&D projects like Grasshopper to shorten the time line to crewed flight?
At the moment, NASA is the only solid customer for all three CCDev companies, and as commercial entities, demand is what drives supply. There are a few potential customers, most notably Bigelow, but they’re not enough to justify spending R&D money on a manned spacecraft without NASA money. Boeing has made it fairly clear that if they don’t think they’ll secure a NASA contract, they’ll walk away from the CST-100. Sierra Nevada’s people have expressed interest in continuing Dream Chaser development with or without NASA, but the pace of that development will of course be dictated by how much they can afford to put into it. SpaceX, as a private venture driven by Elon Musk’s personal objectives, will almost certainly keep developing a crewed Dragon at whatever pace he deems reasonable. That would probably be slower if NASA doesn’t buy their services, but still faster than what Sierra Nevada could afford to finance.
So Spacex is the winner either way
Isn’t booster recovery more important than manned space craft at this point????
More important to who? And the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Man-rating the Falcon and getting DragonRider ready to fly are different tasks for teams with different skillsets.
As great as the potential cost savings are for accomplishing a reusable F9, if I had to pick between them, I’d still have to go with completing a manned spacecraft as the higher priority, since the whole world only has one option at the moment, and that’s a scary single point of failure. Redundancy in this particular area is important.
Agreed, Matt. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them both happen very close together in time, without any hints or introductory fan fare. It would have major PR impact and would be so typically Musk.
Hell of a good reason for NASA to walk away from Boeing.
Sorry Charlie, my memory is a little too long to swallow your delusional blame shifting. It was your administration that cancelled the ISS version of Orion, put Orion on life support at best, and diverted hundreds of millions in funding to the crony capitalism crew programs. To be fair, Orion wasn’t perfect and the previous administration under Griffin deserves plenty of blame share for gold-plating Orion and under emphasizing the ISS servicing role as its initial mission, but the decisions of your administration are every bit as much and more to blame for the current US crew launch capability gap as anyone else.
At best, there is no plausible scenario under which any amount of additional funding would have gotten a US crew launch alternative to Orion (or foreign providers) flying by this time or within the next few years, especially while dividing that funding up between so many different contractors, all but one of which started from scratch.
You can’t change the facts that even under the much simpler and much longer running cargo supply contract with full requested funding, only two operational missions by one contractor have been flown to date and the other contractor has still yet to fly even a full demonstration, at least a couple years behind the original schedule estimates. Only a fool would believe that the more complex crew launch contracts would not also have suffered delays regardless of funding levels.
Even the most optimistic and vague scenarios from 2011 (a year after the crew launch program started) couldn’t promise anything faster than a first crew demonstration flight by mid 2017 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… , ref. #48), let alone full replacement for Soyuz, yet the latest Soyuz contract signed this week that everyone is rightly upset about only covers extension of launch services UP TO mid 2016 ( http://www.spaceflightnow.c… ). Not even the initial vague plan under the most optimistic scenario and assuming full requested funding ever promised to deliver a capability that would have obviated the need for the latest Soyuz contract! Blame shifting to Congress is only plausible if we ignore the facts. (In no way am I defending Congress as not being at fault for the gap as well, only that the whiny defense in the above blog post is nonsensical.)
Compare the costs and the delays of the SSA programs to the much larger ones of Orion and your entire comment falls apart. Also consider that Orion will pretty much need SLS before it has any value at all. And, of course, Orion has no programs/missions to fly.
You like Orion, you don’t like Bolden, that’s the message that comes through from your post. I’d have to say that there was nothing different that Bolden could have done to change the current state of affairs in US non-military LVs.
For me, reason for this insanity is simple. Congress don’t want NewSpace flying people earlier than newest OldSpace (and favoured) white elephant.
How much quicker would be we get Commercial Crew if that money had been spent with SpaceX?
Open Letter…. Open sentence to the powers that be:
Bring back the Great Generation.
Sincerely,
An 80’s Child.
SpaceX still says 2015 for the first crewed flight. So, they will be ready and waiting for NASA to hire them. The next CRS flight they get to test their capsule. A free crew milestone for both. More money would not speed things up. It is technical. It just takes so long. The amount of money needed in 2017 might go down since only a flight every 6 months. If Boeing and SNC are hired also, it will be a long time between flights for each company. Can they stay idle, then go safely ? If a Dragon cargo flight is 130 million, how much more for crew? Bolden said if only one, it would be Like Shuttle. Could they alternate or one put in storage?
I think that one of the major problems NASA has with Congress at the moment is your average career politician believes that reality is shaped by their rhetoric. So, if they tell NASA to make SLS/Orion cheap, soon and plentiful without a penny extra of cash, there is no good reason for it not to happen and anyone who says anything else is some kind of treacherous defeatist who needs to be publicly shamed.
On the flip side, I don’t think that any amount of money could have brought Commercial Crew any quicker. In the event of shuttle retirement, a HSF gap to 2016 or thereabouts was always considered inevitable as far back as the Constellation days.
Its laughable that the US is still relying on Russia and its cold war technology and my hat goes off to Bolden for finally standing his ground.
We’ll spend a few $million, but might save a few $billion. NASA was becoming a money pit.
As I recall, according to doctor Griffin, Orion would be flying by 2011, maybe 2010 if we could speed it up a bit. And even that master of program management, Mark Geyer, was telling Sally Ride that Orion would definitely be flying with crewmen in orbit in five years, in 2014, when Ride said that 2017 was possible but 2019 was more like it-that was in 2009. What is the date today? 2021? Yes, NASA is forced to rely on the Russians but it is largely of their own doing. Not quite safe, simple or soon enough but all due simply to poor management. At one point we were only slipping year for year but now we slip two years for every year of progress. They should have made design choices in which speed in placing the vehicle into operation was a primary requirement.
We should absolutely buy commercially. Let us look at the numbers. Buying the commercial service from the Russians with launches through 2016 is $424B. The budget request for commercial crew through 2016 is $2,464B. This appears 5 times as much to develop commercial crew as to just use the Russians. In a truly commercial world, the right decision was made.
With regards to Bolden’s comments about budget cuts result in not having service until 2017, that was the expected date out of the headquarters commercial crew managers for a long time.
We should certainly use US carriers when they can match the commercial market price point as set by the Russians. I do not believe any of them claim that they will do that. So, we spend $2,465B to develop then still have to pay more than the going commercial rate.
How do you call this a commercial program? It is just another government program for something no one else is willing to pay and for which there are no other customers. We have only moved around the chairs. Even though we have procurement managed briefs to industry, we know who the winners are to be. The only thing we do not know is how much money we will have for each. The sooner we stop pretending that this is commercial and thusly stop spending the resulting time and money on the trappings of commercial, the better off we will be. Perhaps this would let us pick the best parts of Orion, Dream Chaser, CT-100, and Dragon to develop what we need for ISS and deep space more quickly and at lower total cost. Right now our pretend competition is preventing this from happening.
The risk with that is that the politicos really do not see the value in a US based human spaceflight program but are willing to give the minimal support they are to the term “commercial”. Take out that word and the small vestiges left of our human space program may disappear.
I’m afraid your timing is wrong. Buying launches from the Russians is a commercial purchase, certainly. It is currently a single-sourced item, so thinking in terms of a commercial market and competition is meaningless.
What NASA is doing with these SSA “commercial” contracts (at whatever price) is not a commercial purchase. It is an investment in the development of a domestic commercial launch industry, the end purpose of which is to make possible the commercial competition that currently does not exist.
And, of course, there are much greater returns from using a domestic launch supplier than just the launch costs to be considered.
Apples and oranges; no comparison.
I agree 100% with Bolden. It’s nice to see him more persistent about commercial crew. Congress has run out of excuses not to fully fund commercial crew.
Yes and no. The bureaucracy typically asks for much more than needed to do the job. Congress often cuts them back saying they should do it a different or cheaper way. The only way to determine who is right is to look at the plan and the budget.