Maybe, Boeing forgot that their bid was addressed to NASA not Congress, they put stuff in there like launching on SLS which certain people in Congress would like, and thought that would be enough to overcome the fact they'd ignored some of NASA's stated requirements.
A former senior NASA manager, Doug Loverro, is under criminal investigation, accused of illegally trying to help Boeing resubmit its bid to make it actually conform with the requirements.
A lot of matters which might only be civil if they occurred between two private companies are criminal when the government is a party to the transaction. And that's true whether the wrong is being committed by a company or by a government official or by both.
SpaceX is a massive vindication of NASA and the commercial contracting approach. The US had been falling behind Russia and then China in launch capacity (even becoming reliant on Russian engines as well as Europe on commercial launch, but last year, SpaceX on Falcon 9 alone launched more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined.
Almost everything NASA builds is built by contractors. Private companies like Boeing or Lockheed usually get most of it. But just by taking a chance with SpaceX during commercial cargo, NASA saved them and brought American space launch capacity to a level that dominates the world.
And Starship brings it to another entire level. To get a lunar Starship to the surface and back to orbit will require about half a dozen Starship launch, each about 100-150 tons IMLEO each. A single one of these missions is about the same launch capacity as all successful Apollo lunar surface missions combined. Which makes sense when you see lunar Starship side by side with the Apollo LM: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/mslpce/starsh...
It finally feels like we’re where we ought to be in the 21st Century with respect to Spaceflight.
Or did you mean something else?
This will still be a NASA mission, with NASA astronauts with their standard US military ranks, et c.
Certain private sector industries wish to join this club. Green energy has the makings of it. Education is obviously one of them. You get the picture.
People often talk as though all the money was spent on high tech weapons and vehicles, but if you're going to have people, they have to make a living. Even if they just all sat at desks.
Although they do spend a tidy sum on hardware too, of course!
I feel bad for the Dynetics lander though, I thought that was a really interesting design but relied on expendable launchers.
https://twitter.com/wapodavenport/status/1383125840184115203
1. Ambitious space programs require solving unknown unknowns. You can't accurately budget for that.
2. Well, yes, you can budget for that by adding a large fudge factor to the cost of your program.
3. Which will mean that your program will not get funded.
NASA generally does a good job of being in the ballpark of its budget for its ambitious goals. Which, ever since Apollo, have been its unmanned programs.
The manned space shuttle, and the ISS, as well as all the hoop-a-la around getting people to the ISS are on the other hand not particularly ambitious, and are also a bottomless money pit (Ballpark cost of ISS was ~160 billion dollars. The ballpark cost of a rover mission to Mars is less than 3 billion dollars.)
While this was at one time true, I don't think it's fair to say anymore, given that the Commercial Crew contracts issued were fixed price contracts, and have been delivered by SpaceX on that fixed price contract.
2. Fifty years after the last Apollo flight, and twenty years into ISS flights, the costs of the flights have finally been brought under control. That's not exactly a shining medal for NASA's manned space program. I will say again - it's a bottomless money pit.
SpaceX is designing a multi-purpose architecture in which the lunar lander is just a variant of a craft intended for other commercial purposes (Starlink launches, commercial launch customers, space tourism, etc), so it can share development costs between the lunar lander and its own commercial investment – the other bidders were proposing bespoke vehicles with little potential for other commercial uses.
SpaceX is also a young company with a high-risk strategy of betting the company on massive growth in the space industry–which is another reason why it is more willing to invest its own money (or its private investors money) than trying to get the taxpayers to carry 100% of development costs. Its competitors are mostly older companies with a far more conservative, financially risk-adverse strategy. (Blue Origin is in a kind of odd position, of being not much older than SpaceX, yet seemingly having a culture more in common with those old conservative firms.)
I don't think it would be a first, since previous contracts (such as COTS and Commercial Crew) were both awarded as fixed price contracts.
To my knowledge, SpaceX didn't go back and ask for more money beyond the fixed-price contract. So both of those were already delivered (or are being delivered actively) on budget.
But, this award is following in those footsteps to use fixed-price contracts as a way to control costs and ensure the programs don't run wildly overbudget.
However, notwithstanding these aforementioned positive attributes, I find that Dynetics’ technical approach suffered from a number of serious drawbacks, and I concur with the SEP’s conclusion that these drawbacks meaningfully increase the risk to Dynetics’ successful performance of this contract. Of particular concern is the significant weakness within Dynetics’ proposal under Technical Area of Focus 1, Technical Design Concept, due to the SEP’s finding that Dynetics’ current mass estimate for its DAE far exceeds its current mass allocation; plainly stated, Dynetics’ proposal evidences a substantial negative mass allocation.
I expect Congress expected them to do the same thing here, but then SpaceX forced the issue by coming in under the skimpy budget Congress gave. This forced NASA's hand, giving them almost no choice but to award the contract to SpaceX.
Congress will be furious, both because they didn't award two contracts and because their golf course buddies didn't get the contract. But NASA played the hand that was dealt.
It’s not nice the military get all the funding for their stupid toys.
I think he would rather spend that money on BO to develop whatever he wants to develop next.
I don't think you want to be a commercial costumer of LM and NG, that doesn't sound fun.
> SpaceX beat out Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, which had formed what it called a “national team” by partnering with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper
NASA also identified significant risk because the LM Orion derived assent module would be far behind in development compared to the rest of the architecture.
The problem BO has is that they don't have the credibility to build a human capsule that can launch from the moon. But working with LM means they are gone do nothing more then the minimum and they want to be paid without risk for them.
> both very highly rated from a technical and management perspective and that also had, by a wide margin, the lowest initially-proposed price.
BO didn't rate as high and was more expensive.
(1) https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/option-...
I worry more about spaceX's ability to land starship on the moon. Not because they won't get it right eventually in texas, but the moon isn't smooth. I know they will have a plan to deal with that, but getting a few ton lander with 4 legs to not tip over and handle tilted land is vastly easier than a long and spindly and heavy starship - how will they handle that?
I'm sure they will land it on the moon multiple times before they put any people on it. (And the other choices like National Team or Dynetics would have done the same.)
What's amazing is that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon with humans on it the first time. And the Space Shuttle had astronauts on-board its maiden flight. People took risks with human spaceflight back then that they don't any more. Computers are so much more advanced now, you don't need astronauts to fly things. Even the Space Shuttle, technically could have been fully automated, but NASA had a culture of wanting to put a human in control. And a few deadly disasters have changed the attitude around risking astronauts’ lives to become more risk-averse.
In no small part due to Neil Armstrong's ability to act under pressure.
There were actually theories that Moon might be covered in fine dust heavy landers might just sink in, so one of the objectives was testing that out. And thankfully the theory turned out to be incorrect. :)
It was only after the Columbia disaster that they actually enhanced the Shuttle to enable it to be fully autonomous and perform landing and re-entry without a crew. If the Shuttle was damaged and re-entry was too risky, then the crew would shelter in the ISS and the Shuttle would attempt to re-enter and land without the crew onboard – best case scenario, the Shuttle lands intact; worse case, it breaks up on re-entry while the crew remain safely behind on the ISS. They never had to use this autonomous re-entry/landing capability, however.
https://www.buran-energia.com/bourane-buran/bourane-consti-r...
That's not true. They implemented "Remote Control Orbiter" (RCO) capability which was based on a special "In-Flight Maintenance (IFM) cable". See this NASA presentation for some details: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20070019347/downloads/20...
The plan to intentionally trigger the orbiter to break-up on re-entry was really only for STS-114 – that was the first post-Columbia mission, but RCO and IFM cable weren't available yet. From the next mission, STS-121 onwards, the IFM cable was stored on-board the ISS, so the plan was to use RCO to re-enter and land under remote control. (I'm not sure what the plan was for STS-125, which I believe is the only post-Columbia non-ISS mission – they couldn't use the IFM on the ISS since it wasn't reachable from their orbit; I don't know if NASA had a second IFM cable to use for it.)