NASA announces $1.1 billion for trio of spaceships | Hacker News Reader

NASA announces $1.1 billion for trio of spaceships

cosmiclog.nbcnews.com

54 pointsadastra18 comments

Its incredible to see the Dream Chaser being a contender. Is essentially a small-ish space shuttle and designed to be mounted as-is on top of a larger rocket. Its surprising to see continued interest of a lifting body in space, but I guess the DoD is fond of the X-37B's shuttle-eque design.

It does seem like a waste of resources considering Orion is being developed as well as the Dragon capsule. Do taxpayers need to pay for a shuttle clone? I'd rather see a new robotic mission or telescope instead of yet another human vehicle design that will never see space.

NASA needs multiple winners so they will never be dependent on a single vehicle again. The multi-year standdowns after the shuttle accidents and being dependent on Russia for astronaut transportation are both pretty highly undesirable, to say the least. They could have picked only two winners, but there's a risk one of them could drop out. Boeing has said they might shut down their program if NASA doesn't address their liability and indemnification concerns, for example. Having two leaders plus a back-up is a sound strategy.

The real waste of resources is Orion. NASA is spending more on Orion than all these other spacecraft combined, yet despite Lockheed first beginning development on Orion 6 years ago, it won't do an unmanned flight until 2015, three years after SpaceX. The total cost will be almost $10 billion. That's why the Obama Administration tried to cancel it... but Congress had other ideas.

I'm gonna hazard a guess that SpaceX will have a reusable Falcon 9 test by the time Orion is ready for a real mission.

>The multi-year standdowns after the shuttle accidents and being dependent on Russia for astronaut transportation are both pretty highly undesirable, to say the least.

Meh, the time from Apollo to shuttle was 7 years I think. We survived just fine. I just hate the idea that we're draining the budgets of good space missions because of our obsession with basic human transport to LEO, which we can buy from the Russians. The heavy rockets and their accompanying capsules are interesting because they can out of LEO, but I hate that we're blowing hundreds of millions on things that will never, ever fly thanks to congressional input and defense cronyism. The Dream Chaser should never, ever been part of this. I wonder how many good robotic missions or telescopes that boondoggle has cost us. Heck, the Dream Chaser is LEO only, which is a shortsighted waste of resources.

Orion/SLS as a main with Dragon/Falcon as a commercial backup is more than enough. Elon Musk isn't going away anytime soon.

Variations of transportation vehicles can provide a better cost-optimized solutions for different scenarios.

If they can reuse the shuttle a couple of times in space before they have to take it back to earth - that could be a cost saver. They use the dragon capsule (or boeing equivalent) to take people up to the station and use the shuttle to transport them around them in space.

I can see a lot of cost savings doing this.

Less weight = less fuel = more money saved.

The dream chaser mounts on an Atlas V. Its a completely expendable 250 million dollar rocket. Not sure if there's substantial savings as opposed to mounting a existing (or soon to be existing) capsule on a smaller rocket.

> use the shuttle to transport them around them in space.

What LEO destinations are there other than the ISS? I guess you have edge cases of Hubble repair, but a whole delivery system just for that seems like overkill.

Judging from the shape of the SpaceX capsule, it seems pretty like it has a limited maximum re-entry velocity, whereas orion is designed pretty explicity for a high speed re-entry.

I think when space-x says that dragon is capable of returning from the moon, they intend on using the capsule draco thrusters to enter the atmosphere as slowly as possible.

Quite cheap. Just 10% more than Instagram, and that doesn't fly into space.

The acquisition price for Instagram has been falling with Facebook's stock. The budget for these spacecraft is bound to be much, much higher than initial estimates (based on historical precedent).

FWIW I am not complaining about the budget for these or the virtually guaranteed overruns. I think a strong space program is essential if the US is to remain technically relevant over the next 50 years.

440 Million of that is for SpaceX. I know HN loves to hear about them so I thought I'd point that out. ;)

If I am not terribly mistaken, this is more money than they have received either from NASA or Elon so far. Pretty significant.

Coincidentally, that's also the same amount of money Knight capital lost in their half hour of software muck-up this week.

I know it's a few days after the "Who's Hiring" thread, but for those of you interested in being a part of this stuff first-hand, we're hiring at Blue Origin: http://www.blueorigin.com/careers/careers.html

It's truly an amazing thing to be a part of and we're always looking for the best and brightest. I'm head of software development, but of course we're recruiting for other disciplines as well.

This is great. The more competitors, the more viable the market.

Given that Boeing does not have a flying (in space) version of their capsule yet, I find it a little surprising that they are receiving more funding than SpaceX, who have demonstrated their vehicle already. Perhaps it's driven by the stage of development?

My guess is that SpaceX is confident that they can fulfill their end of the contract for only $440M, so why ask for more?

It is too bad that Blue Origin isn't in the list.I would much prefer that they were in rather than two 'good-old-boys club' contractors and one new entrant. The politics in this process which are really not serving either NASA or the people of the US well, really suck.

What ever happened to Orbital Sciences?

Orbital isn't building man rated vehicles.

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