Blue Origin releases details of its monster orbital rocket
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Welcome to alt-space point of view of a few decades. Looking at NASA contracts - and Congress mandates for them - you can easily guess that the goal of them isn't space related, but something else - maybe politics related, when you have a fell-good agency, lots of work contracts distributed across many states and producing jobs for same old ways of doing things. If one would care about space exploration, one should definitely use modern opportunities for faster, better and cheaper technology. And even if, as in case of SpaceX, you have more mission failures for unmanned missions, you still have net savings and tremendous advantage in the speed of development.
Development of Falcon 1 started more than a decade ago, SpaceX went through multiple design iterations, test vehicles (Grasshopper) and expensive failures and FH is still maybe a year away, despite being essentially a bundle of Falcons 9 (itself, a very smart strategy to move forward by leveraging their proven capabilities and minimize risk).
A large innovative rocket like Glenn might cost a billion dollars to design, build and launch. A billion dollars for an experiment that might fail on the first go. I want to believe Glenn will fly before 2030, but what I would like to see from Bezos is less ego and more roadmap details, a firm monetary commitment from himself or other financiers, etc.
The US needs to create a heavy lift variant of the commercial orbital transportation services contract (COTS) [1] and/or the Commercial Crew Development program (CCDev) [2] and scrap the SLS program or at least release it from it's stupid congressional requirement to use grandfathered space shuttle contractors.
Estimates for the true cost of each space shuttle launch, which NASA and Congress were always cagey about, range from 700 million to over one billion dollars ( $196B/133 flights [3] ). The cost of the entire COTS program that created "two new U.S. medium-class launch vehicles and two automated cargo spacecraft"[4] as a replacement for the shuttle's cargo services was $800 million, less than or equal to the cost of a single shuttle flight.
In light of that it's always frustrating that I see the US dinking around with the $10+ billion dollar Orion program [5] or talk about throwing good money after bad by adding astronauts to the EM-1 mission. I mean, come on! How tied to corporate kickback interests and tiny amounts of local jobs can you get? Can Congress really not see the big picture here and the idea that we could have more people and mass in space (and probably job on the ground too) for a fraction of the current program costs?
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-orbital-transportation-servi...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/content/commercial-crew-program-the-ess...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program
[4] https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-releases-cots-final-report
Of course, for the world as a whole, efficiency will not mean more jobs; excavating subway tunnels with spoons is a great way to create jobs, but not a good idea.
For example, reduced launch costs lower the barrier for smaller customers, who in turn need cheaper satellites that do smaller tasks, thus the recent growth of the nanosat sector of the space industry and companies like Planet [1].
Or, the recently planned satellite constellations by OneWeb and SpaceX. Both of these constellations are planned to involve 1000's of individual satellites, the launch of which would of been prohibitive with higher launch prices. I would definitely say more jobs would be created in the US by cheap, global internet than the 1000 or so that might be lost by the transformation of the US launch industry.