Commercial space companies want NASA to expand the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. SpaceX's senior vice president for global business and government affairs called for the COTS program to be extended to deep space activities:
Commercial space companies today (July 13) urged legislators to extend NASA's successful public-private partnerships for International Space Station transportation to future programs, including human missions to Mars.
NASA already is working with six firms to develop prototype habitats that would augment the agency's multibillion-dollar Orion capsule and Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket. NASA has said it intends to use the system to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.
[...] Technologies that SpaceX would be interested in developing in partnership with NASA include heavy-cargo missions to Mars, deep-space communications systems, and demonstrations of vertical takeoff and landing on the moon, Hughes said.
Getting spacecraft like the Interplanetary Spaceship to Mars will probably require SpaceX to dip into the NASA coffers yet again:
This proposal was foreshadowed last year in Guadalajara, Mexico. At the International Astronautical Congress there, Musk presented a sketch of the architecture needed to lower the cost of transit to Mars enough to make colonization feasible. His top-line cost of $10 billion, however, is likely out of reach for SpaceX in the near term—without the help of a big-pocketed government. "There's a lot of people in the private sector who are interested in helping fund a base on Mars, and perhaps there will be interest on the government sector side to do that," Musk said last fall.
Also at Ars Technica and LA Times (broader article about the economics of heavy launch capabilities).
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In recent months, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, Scott Pace, has worked assiduously behind the scenes to develop a formal space policy for the Trump administration. In a rare interview, published Monday in Scientific American, Pace elaborated on some of the policy decisions he has been helping to make.
In the interview, Pace explained why the Trump administration has chosen to focus on the Moon first for human exploration while relegating Mars to becoming a "horizon goal," effectively putting human missions to the Red Planet decades into the future. Mars was too ambitious, Pace said, and such a goal would have precluded meaningful involvement from the burgeoning US commercial sector as well as international partners. Specific plans for how NASA will return to the Moon should become more concrete within the next year, he added.
In response to a question about privately developed, heavy-lift boosters, the executive secretary also reiterated his skepticism that such "commercial" rockets developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX could compete with the government's Space Launch System rocket, which is likely to make its maiden flight in 2020. "Heavy-lift rockets are strategic national assets, like aircraft carriers," Pace said. "There are some people who have talked about buying heavy-lift as a service as opposed to owning and operating, in which case the government would, of course, have to continue to own the intellectual properties so it wasn't hostage to any one contractor. One could imagine this but, in general, building a heavy-lift rocket is no more 'commercial' than building an aircraft carrier with private contractors would be."
I thought flying non-reusable pork rockets was about the money, not strategy. SpaceX is set to launch Falcon Heavy for the first time no earlier than December 29. It will have over 90% of the low Earth orbit capacity as the initial version of the SLS (63.8 metric tons vs. 70).
Previously: Maiden Flight of the Space Launch System Delayed to 2019
First SLS Mission Will be Unmanned
Commercial Space Companies Want More Money From NASA
U.S. Air Force Will Eventually Launch Using SpaceX's Reused Rockets
Who will make it to Mars first?
It was about a year ago that Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg first began saying his company would beat SpaceX to Mars. "I'm convinced that the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding on a Boeing rocket," he said during a Boeing-sponsored tech summit in Chicago in October 2016.
On Thursday, Muilenburg repeated that claim on CNBC. Moreover, he added this tidbit about the Space Launch System rocket—for which Boeing is the prime contractor of the core stage—"We're going to take a first test flight in 2019 and we're going to do a slingshot mission around the Moon."
Unlike last year, Muilenburg drew a response from SpaceX this time. The company's founder, Elon Musk, offered a pithy response on Twitter: "Do it."
The truth is that Boeing's rocket isn't going anywhere particularly fast. Although Muilenburg says it will launch in 2019, NASA has all but admitted that will not happen. The rocket's maiden launch has already slipped from late 2017 into "no earlier than" December 2019. However, NASA officials have said a 2019 launch is a "best case" scenario, and a slip to June 2020 is more likely.
#SLS2020
Also, the next SpaceX flight is an ISS resupply mission and is scheduled for this coming Tuesday (December 12, 2017) at 1646 GMT (11:46 a.m. EST) from SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The plan is for the booster to return to landing at Landing Zone-1, also at Cape Canaveral.
Previously: Maiden Flight of the Space Launch System Delayed to 2019
Elon Musk Publishes Mars Colonization Plan
SpaceX Appears to Have Pulled the Plug on its Red Dragon Plans
SpaceX Putting Red Dragon on the Back Burner
SpaceX: Making Human Life Multiplanetary
Related: VP of Engineering at United Launch Alliance Resigns over Comments About the Space Launch Industry
ULA Exec: SpaceX could be Grounded for 9-12 Months
Commercial Space Companies Want More Money From NASA
Bigelow and ULA to Put Inflatable Module in Orbit Around the Moon by 2022
SpaceX Unlocks "Steamroller" Achievement as Company Eyes 19 Launches in 2017
Trump Space Adviser: Mars "Too Ambitious" and SLS is a Strategic National Asset
SpaceX's Reusable Rockets Could End EU's Arianespace, and Other News
NASA could use an engine developed by Blue Origin instead of the four RL-10 engines currently used by the Space Launch System (SLS):
[One] problem with legacy hardware, built by traditional contractors such as Orbital ATK and Aerojet Rocketdyne, is that it's expensive. And while NASA has not released per-flight estimates of the expendable SLS rocket's cost, conservative estimates peg it at $1.5 to $2.5 billion per launch. The cost is so high that it effectively precludes more than one to two SLS launches per year.
[...] [The RL-10] engines, manufactured by Aerojet Rocketdyne, are also costly. (Ars understands that NASA paid an average of $17 million for each RL-10 engine for the maiden Exploration Upper Stage vehicle). So in October, to power the EUS, the space agency issued a request for information to the aerospace community for "a low cost drop-in replacement engine to minimize program cost." According to the document, the initial set of four engines would be needed in mid-2023 to prepare for the third flight of the SLS rocket, known as Exploration Mission-3.
Then, after an extension of the deadline for responses beyond mid-November, NASA revised the RFI on December 1. The revised document no longer seeks a "drop-in replacement" for the RL-10 engine, rather it asks for a "low-cost replacement engine." Although this seems like a subtle change, sources within the aerospace industry indicated to Ars that it is significant. According to NASA, it was done to increase the number of responses.
[...] That would probably include Blue Origin's BE-3U engine, which the company plans to use for its upper stage on the New Glenn heavy lift rocket. This is a modified version of the BE-3 engine that powers the New Shepard rocket, which has now flown successfully seven times. Blue Origin has previously marketed the BE-3U to Orbital ATK for its Next Generation Launch System, which is looking for an upper stage engine. A single BE-3U provides about 120,000 pounds of thrust, which exceeds the 100,000 pounds of thrust provided by four RL-10 engines.
Just cancel SLS and give that money to SpaceX, Blue Origin, or anybody willing to launch competitively.
Related: Maiden Flight of the Space Launch System Delayed to 2019
First SLS Mission Will be Unmanned
Commercial Space Companies Want More Money From NASA
Trump Space Adviser: Mars "Too Ambitious" and SLS is a Strategic National Asset
Boeing CEO Says His Company Will Carry Humans to Mars Before SpaceX
President Trump Signs Space Policy Directive 1
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @01:15PM (2 children)
Private enterprise sucking on the public handout tit. Why should I pay for your fun?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday July 16 2017, @04:23PM (1 child)
Yeah, who owns the patents on discoveries made while using public funds: the public? Free use to non-profit initiatives of the public/government?
Don't tax us, SHIT! MAN!, but can we use some of the money we don't pay the government to take the risk?...oh, and any patents we file are owned by us, reeet? Reet??
We don' wanna pay no taxes,but we want the taxes to pay for our risk, so we can earn mega profits we don' wanna pay any taxes on........
"You can't have everything... where would you put it? -- Steven Wright"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @04:35PM
Man oh man, imagine how great SoylentNews could be if instead of paying any tax to any government, every Soylentik paid all that revenue into SoylentNews donations instead.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gman003 on Sunday July 16 2017, @02:41PM (2 children)
The basic idea seems to be that NASA would step out of launch vehicles, and focus wholly on payloads and operations. This makes some amount of sense, because it isn't really NASA doing launch vehicles now, anyways.
Ever since Saturn I, the pattern has been that NASA sets basic requirements, then selects private companies to work with to actually build it. The precise amount of design work done at NASA has varied, with the Shuttle probably being the most NASA-involved. Private companies build the separate stages (or sometimes large components like engines), and then NASA does the assembly and integration.
That way of working was always expensive, because NASA was helping to foot the entire operation from start to finish, including lots of R+D. It was worth it for Saturn because at the time, no single company *could* have built an entire lunar-class launch vehicle. NASA had to have each stage built by a separate company - Boeing, North American, and Douglas - just to avoid overloading any company. NASA was also able to control costs pretty effectively back then.
Nowadays, it doesn't work. Part of that is the mergers that have consolidated the "old space" companies down to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, plus a few specialists like Aerojet. With no competition, costs are dictated by how much they think they can get away with charging the government, rather than how much they think their competition can offer. But the costs of integration are higher as a fraction of total development cost, now, because there's less low-level research needed. Rocket scientists know pretty well how to make an open-cycle kerolox engine. Just look at SLS - they're strapping together existing parts from a few different rockets, and it's taking a full decade. There's not a single new engine on the initial flights, but it's still seven years in and we're just beginning to build the first one.
Moving to put the entire onus for design of the lift system onto the private industry makes sense. Lift systems don't really care what they're lifting; it could be a lead dummy model or a satellite or a crewed spacecraft. If one rocket is handling both commercial and government work, it ends up being a lot cheaper, due to economies of scale. It's not like Boeing can take SLS and use it to launch satellites - not when they don't have the facilities themselves to do full assembly.
Right now, private companies don't launch stuff beyond about 25 tons to LEO, compared to 70 tons for SLS Block I and 130 tons for SLS Block II. Musk's basically arguing that they can handle the really heavy stuff, too - Falcon Heavy, which they're planning to launch this year, is specced at 60+ tons, enough to send a 17-ton payload to Mars, which is enough to do a sample-return mission.
As for funding... have you seen the price tag for SLS? We've already spent $10B and all we have to show for it is a stack of blueprints, some stand tests, and a couple prop tanks. It'll be another $10B before it starts doing actual mission flights. If we could have spent half as much money to develop a rocket five times as powerful... you'd have to be a fool, or paid by a Boeing contract, to not think we should have done that.
PS: I'm pretty sure SpaceX is going to fund ITS even without NASA involvement. Musk is a big-picture dreamer who explicitly wants to build colonies on other planets, and started SpaceX with that goal in mind. But it'll go faster if NASA buys in, and in return, NASA would get a very powerful rocket. Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work? You pay for something, you get something of value to you.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @10:28PM (1 child)
Sorry, only SpaceX launches with "quality preowned engines" -- the SLS will most definitely use new engines for the first and all subsequent flights.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Tuesday July 18 2017, @02:01AM
The info I have says legacy, pre-flown RS-25Ds will be used on initial flights, with new RS-25Es once the supply is exhausted. I'd love to hear they'd changed that decision - I think those engines belong in a museum, not burned up on reentry for the sake of some overpriced make-work program.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @03:24PM (2 children)
The rich don't say "We want more money". They say "This increased taxation is reducing personal incentive."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @04:22PM (1 child)
Have we done a poll of how much money Soylentils earn? Chances are very good that You are The Rich.
Here's an exercise for you. Go to Wikipedia and look up the median income for the area in which you live. Do you earn more than median? I bet you do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @05:55PM
Rich != not poor