https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/nasa-will-pay-boeing...
RIP Boeing.
The fascinating thing is that the lack of competition allowed the space launch industry to switch from "invent" mode to "monetize" mode way too early. It is also what makes the Starship work both more credible and more interesting. There are a lot of technical problems to work through on Starship between now and it being as reliable as say Falcon is, but if (when?) they get there, the ability to put 100 tons into LEO for just the cost of the propellant and some depreciation on the vehicle? That really changes the economics of having things in space in a way that is hard for folks to imagine.
One of the things I've always looked for in hiring people is the ability to "unconstrain" ones thinking by "rules." Those are the kinds of people who can think about a world where we have a technology to say, "nullify gravity", and what impact that might have on what we do or how we do it. Constrained thinkers will say, "There is no way to 'nullify' gravity so it isn't worth wasting any time thinking about what we could do if we could."
This capability shows me someone who is able to step into a different frame of reference with their reasoning skills intact and sharp. As a result, when there is an "unexpected" discovery or event, they waste little time in cognitive dissonance says "This can't be happening" or "That isn't possible what I'm seeing" and instead jump right to "Hmm if we can do that then <x>, <y>, and <z> could be done too!"
There are a lot of things to dislike Elon for, but one thing that he shares with Steve Jobs is if he believes a thing he is "all in". Sometimes it takes that to get to the other side of an "unthinkable" change.
Its also this kind of thinking that gets people into trouble ie. completely destroying a working codebase because one only thinks in first principles and cannot map human factors(which are inherently too complex to reason mathematically) onto this other plane of thinking.
There needs to be a balance between the unconstrained dreamer and the practical realist.
Steve Jobs had a group of trusted confidants (Tim Cook, Ive and the other leaders) to help reel him back to reality from time to time.
You could argue that Bill Gates had Ballmer to help keep in him check.
If the only capability is incredibly expensive and highly reliable, no demand that only works under cheaper and relaxed reliability exists.
Luckily, the market's caught up pretty quickly.
Which means overruling Citizens United and campaign funding reform.
Boeing though has so many government contracts that are used so often for other projects you can’t shut down so you are correct.
As for the 2x part... it's cause their bid was 2x what SpaceX bid itself. And both got their bids accepted.
Mostly.
NASA did just give Boeing extra money for some pretty dubious reasons.
> NASA instead requested Boeing “propose prices for additional flexibilities to fill an anticipated crew access gap, including shortening its lead times for rocket and spacecraft production,” the report states. After what OIG described as “prolonged negotiations,” NASA agreed to pay Boeing an additional $287.2 million for those mission flexibilities.
> The OIG report concluded that much of those payments were not necessary, since there were other methods to provide schedule flexibility to mitigate gaps in crew access to the station. The report specifically notes that, five days after NASA agreed to the additional payment to Boeing, the company submitted a proposal to NASA offering to sell five Soyuz seats it has acquired from Russian company RSC Energia for $373.5 million.
> The report concluded NASA’s payment of $144 million to accelerate the timetable for two of the four Starliner missions was unreasonable, and that it overspent by $43 million when it granted Boeing authorization to proceed on one Starliner mission a year earlier than necessary.
> OIG also criticized NASA for not giving SpaceX, the other company with a commercial crew contract, an opportunity for offering its own proposal to address any gap in crew access to the ISS. “In our judgment, contacting both providers would have been a prudent approach to maximize the Agency’s options while also ensuring fairness,” the report concluded.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-inspector-general-criticizes-addi...
Actually, a multiple award approach for a very high risk, technically challenging widget makes perfect sense, and is the same thing seen for similarly challenging weapon systems e.g. the Advanced Tactical Fighter F-22 vs F-23 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/americas-f-23-ste...
> The report specifically notes that, five days after NASA agreed to the additional payment to Boeing, the company submitted a proposal to NASA offering to sell five Soyuz seats it has acquired from Russian company RSC Energia for $373.5 million.
This looks like Boeing was doing some horse trading that could have been pretty financially risky particularly considering the value of money.
> The report concluded NASA’s payment of $144 million to accelerate the timetable for two of the four Starliner missions was unreasonable, and that it overspent by $43 million when it granted Boeing authorization to proceed on one Starliner mission a year earlier than necessary.
Sometimes when thinking about the Industrial Base of the United States, there is a good rationale for keeping an incumbent's design & engineering capabilities active, while bringing competition to the table and potentially displacing it with a more agile competitor.
If truly getting the best and most efficient designs out there was the true goal, there should have been more awards, and for funded development to enable a greater diversity of competitors with designs being put forth.
There lots of more relevant and important technologies that need more funding.
The CommercialCrew program was not done for research, it was trying to solving a particular problem at the time and do it fast and efficently.
If NASA want to spend money on more experimental human spaceflight, the CommercialCrew program was not the place to do it.
SpaceX has been built on launch contracts displacing ULA.
It is clear that the longterm for SpaceX, and their competitors, is going way past mere launch services (as complex as those are) to cis-lunar and interplanetary missions.
Getting a healthy ecosystem with robust competitors is just the start. NASA and peer govt organizations are looking for partners on this, since companies are expected to bring their own funding to bear too.
https://www.space.com/nasa-funding-moon-power-exploration-te...
No. The CRS missions were displacing Arianespace. The CommercialCrew flights were displacing Russia. Commercial came from Proton, Soyuz and Ariane 5. Only military came from ULA.
> NASA and peer govt organizations are looking for partners on this, since companies are expected to bring their own funding to bear too.
Yes, its called the Clips program. IT shouldn't be part of CC.
OK.
I'm not really sure what your point is. NASA gives out contracts to new companies all the time. And the award was in a firm, fixed-price contract.
The difference between that and the previous example is that NASA had already awarded Boeing money for CCtCap (the commercial crew contract). And then they just decided to give them more money, for what can charitably described as bad reasons.
1. COTS was a milestone based, firm, fixed-price contract. Which means that NASA didn't have to pay for work that didn't get done. If SpaceX failed at development, NASA could have chosen a different company and retained most of the money.
Which actually happened - Rocketplane Kistler basically did just that. And NASA replaced them with Orbital Sciences.
2. Established companies like Boeing and Arianespace entered bids and NASA seemed to think those bids were worse than the eventual winners.
3. The program largely worked - SpaceX and Orbital Sciences were successful at delivering cargo to the ISS. And all indications are that Sierra Nevada will be successful soon.
4. It was way less expensive than the traditional NASA route.
> In 2011, SpaceX estimated that Falcon 9 v1.0 development costs were on the order of US$300 million. NASA estimated development costs of US$3.6 billion had a traditional cost-plus contract approach been used. A 2011 NASA report "estimated that it would have cost the agency about US$4 billion to develop a rocket like the Falcon 9 booster based upon NASA's traditional contracting processes" while "a more commercial development" approach might have allowed the agency to pay only US$1.7 billion".
As a Washington state resident that used to be proud of Boeing, now days, I just despise them. I work with lots of fine ex Boeing engineers at my current place of work. I feel for all of the fine individuals that still work at Boeing, but other wise, I wish them the same death I wish on IBM now days.
No "Rest In Peace" from me. More of "Don't let the door hit you..." feeling.
It's worth a case study - why didn't they try to pay Gwynne Shotwell 10x more + CEO role + (M\B)illions worth of stocks? Even if they did, why didn't she accept? She would certainly have turned their fortunes around.
What gets in the way is that the US has several replacement space station programs in the works while Russia knows very well that they almost definitely can't get a comparable replacement station up with how hollowed out their industry is.
Plus, since the start of the war, NASA has been investigating options for taking over the tasks the Russian side of the station handles with the various supply vehicles just in case.
The orbit raising has been performed by the Progress resupply vehicles from Russia and Shuttle and other vehicles from the US. As of 2018 the Cygnus resupply vehicle from the US was capable of performing the orbit raising mission.
While the Cygnus was still docked at the space station's Unity module on Tuesday (July 10), the spacecraft fired its main engine for 50 seconds as part of a test to determine whether the cargo ship can be used to raise the space station's orbit, Frank DeMauro, Vice President of Advanced Programs at NGIS, told Space.com.
About the size of a short bus, the Cygnus may look puny compared to the ISS, which is as big as a football field. But its powerful Delta-V engine provided enough thrust to raise the space station by about 282 feet (86 meters). "The burn went extremely well," DeMauro said. "The spacecraft behaved exactly as we expected."
https://www.space.com/41172-cygnus-leaves-space-station-orbi...
Ok, let’s break this down from the start. Russia has launched 10 space stations. The ISS was built using modules that were built for the Mir-2 station. The ISS was built on top of Russian modules.
Meanwhile, NASA wasn’t even able to fly their own astronauts to the ISS for a decade until Musk stepped in.
Russia has also demonstrated that they continue to have this capability as they added the first expansion to the ISS in over two decades recently.
I would hazard a guess that Russia’s capability in this area is much more… capable than the US at this time. They are also far more likely to be able to come to a collaboration agreement with china than the US is at this time. They also helped india kickstart their space program recently.
In conclusion: Russia bad? Maybe. But they weren’t stupid enough to outsource their manufacturing and allow the loss of institutional knowledge that the US has.
This can be seen from how many next generation rockets, rocket engines and crewed vehicles they've announced over the years which have never really ended up amounting to much. For instance, the timeline on Orel makes Orion seem like a speedy development.
Finally, while the US did make that mistake at first, they've very obviously more than recovered that knowledge considering how many different engines, launch vehicles, spacecraft etc are in actual (as in having working hardware to show and not just mockups and promises) development by several different American companies.
Plus, much of the former Soviet space program can be attributed just as much to Ukraine, where a lot of the R&D happened ;)
Under Borisov's management there are rumors that they are building a new satellite factory that should be starting production soon.
And realistically, let's not forget that the US has always significantly lagged Russia in this field. If it wasn't for Operation Paperclip they would not have been competitive at all.
>Ukraine
Let's be honest here: Ukraine has existed as a state for less than 40 years in it's entire history. The geographic location of current Ukraine has nothing to do with the accomplishments of the former USSR. This is evidenced by the complete and utter lack of any accomplishment in the field by Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR.
Side note: Gotta love this tweet threatening Musk for praising the Russian space program: https://twitter.com/KristiTalmadge/status/110375176440949555...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_space_stati...
That said, I think the real money-maker will come from factories in lunar orbit. Even if the economics of Terra importing goods from Luna never quite pan out, being able to build even some (let alone most, let alone all) of a spacecraft in space from spaceborne materials would be a game-changer for exploration and eventual colonization of the Solar System and beyond.
Non of those companies will invest billions on their own. All of those companies investment is predicated on NASA support.
Do you really believe Northrop Grumman will invest billions of its own money?
The Startups are to small an inexperienced.
And Bezos has already said they will not do this unless they get NASA investment.
To just link to a bunch 'commercial' stations is missing the point. These concept exists because NASA has announced they will fund multiple 'commercial' station. But unfortunately Congress has not given NASA the budget for these.
However, that does bring to mind something I never thought about. There is talk of privatizing ISS since NASA doesn't want to continue funding it. How do you privatize something made by multiple nations? Or is that precisely why the privatization isn't taken seriously?
The PRC is banned from the ISS, due to NASA being legally forbidden from dealing with them.
The talk about private space stations isn't really about privatizing the existing ISS. There are private trips to there every once in a while (required to be led by any former astronaut at the ISS though).
Besides that maybe you're thinking of Axiom's space station, which is intended to have modules docking to the American side of the station and gradually building off of it until their modules can handle being independent, at which point the ISS modules would be disconnected and deorbited, leaving their private space station on its own.
Antares used a pair of Russian RD-181 engines. The first stage was built in Ukraine (Dnipro). This sort of cooperation is basically dead.
> Some of the most unique missions clearly don't need multiple capabilities in this country, and if we talk about fair and level competition, is it two companies, is it three companies, is it four companies? When does it stop, and how do you limit other companies from wanting to participate, and taking a niche of the of the product?
This was the same hearing in which Gass gave a last ditch defense of Russian engines, and fought Musk in favor of cost-plus and ULA's ~$800m/y subsidy for existing.
Even the people that follow newspace probably normally don't realize just how rotten through the industry and its governance had become.
(It might even be less heat impact to the capsule than the Dragon-style rockets, as the hot spent rocket remains on the capsule; Apollo-style abort towers jettison.)
They do.