NASA delays next flight of Boeing's alternative to SpaceX Dragon
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But they do not determine the schedule - it's determined by NASA, which has about a thousand problems of itself right now, and cannot afford to screw up either.
I do not envy anyone in that chain of delivery right now.
Interesting timing.
There's nothing Putin enjoys more than watching two senior underlings fighting like rats in a sack.
The US space and science programmes are useful collateral damage in this.
Commercial Crew Program (and also commercial resupply flights to the ISS) started during Obama presidency, so we can thank Obama for commercializing space and making NASA leaner and saving taxpayer dollars.
I think it's more likely that Jared was pulled at the suggestion of some staffers that never liked him or Musk in the first place but weren't able to get their way with Trump as long as Musk was still around.
The fact that he was quite competent and generally liked doesn’t matter to Trump, who seems set on defunding NASA and having someone there who won’t complain.
I'm sorry but what? SpaceX is private, not public, and regardless the Pentagon has zero power to force any such thing. It's making gobs of money and growing pretty fast (around $12 billion revenue this year, prediction is/was ~$15.5 billion so something like a 30% YoY increase) with most of that from Starlink, then commercial launch and gov launch. It launches more mass to LEO then everyone else on the planet combined by a long shot, for far far less $/kg. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. There would be zero interest on either side in a merger, nor is there any particularly good national security argument for it.
The real plan is the same as it's always been: have a reasonably vibrant set of multiple motivated, competitive commercial launch providers. That'll take years more but is by far the better long term solution, and there are plenty of promising options, like Rocket Lab (their Neutron medium lift rocket is apparently close to maiden flight) and Blue Origin (who finally at last seem to have been shaken up and are actually launching rockets and making engines). Old Space wants out of the launch business, which is why ULA came to be at all.
People are also tossing around "nationalization" as if it's some quick fix too all of a sudden, but nationalization doesn't nullify the 5th Amendment (or 1st). The US government would have to come up with the arguably hundreds of billions of dollars present value of SpaceX, at a time of deep budget cuts, debt worries, and high interest rates. It would also have to win a set of massive lawsuits by an extremely well funded opposition about all aspects of the mess that would drag on for years. And a lot of the value of SpaceX is in its institutional knowledge, culture, key people etc etc. Nationalization could not prevent key people all bailing and destroying much of the capability. This would all be hugely disruptive, at a critical juncture, and a big political mess too. It's concerning how blasé folks can get about expensive, complicated big deal gordian knots.
Ugh that is being way too generous. A private space industry exists despite their plans not because of them.
No, this is completely opposite to reality. The current US private space industry was absolutely the result in large part of a rare modern spell of good policy decisions and sustained support (and absolutely yes, a certain amount of luck, but it's important to create conditions where luck can snowball). Support that has paid off in spades and now is self-sustaining sure, but that's a good thing and doesn't change the vital nature of the bootstrapping period. Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew were critical, as was opening up national security launches then actually embracing it. Multiple providers is now an explicit goal of the DOD and they have repeatedly acted to support it, from awarding NSSL launch contracts with an eye towards which player really needed them to stay in business to being willing to take on more risk for less critical payloads. It hasn't been a short road or one without bumps and conflicting interests, and it's almost a miracle it happened at all given Congress' general shortsightedness and desire to use space almost purely as a vehicle for pork regardless of efficiency, but happen it did (ironically thanks in significant part to Boeing [0]). The contrast with the slow, anemic and visionless efforts of the EU during the same time period is striking.
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0: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/actually-boeing-is-p...
I agree with everything you said, but to be precise it was the DoD policy for a long time to have at least two providers. In the 90s it was Lockheed (with Atlas rocket) and Boeing (with Delta rocket). For complicated reasons they were forced to combine their rocket divisions, and they formed a joint company, ULA. But they still had these two rockets, so at least there was redundancy on the technological side, but no competition. After SpaceX entered the launch market, DoD and ULA weren't willing to allow SpaceX (not yet a part of the military-industrial complex) to compete for DoD launches, but SpaceX sued their way into these contracts. And after SpaceX became the cheapest, most reliable and fastest launch provider, the benefits of opening the market are obvious, so there's no coming back to the ULA monopoly (or any other monopoly, at least in launches).
But on the side of NASA resupply/crew programs, yeah, it was a great decision by NASA/government/congress that paid off massively, and allowed today's space boom to happen (and made SpaceX what it is today).
The US would have no problem coming up with hundreds of billions. They wouldn’t need to, though.
Perhaps you'd care to elaborate on what you think this means? Title 2 of the DPA did indeed allow seizing of private property, but like 4, 5, and 6 expired and no longer exists under present law. AFAIK only provisions of 1, 3 and 7 are still in force, and they would at most allow forcing continued Dragon production. I haven't studied it enough to know whether there is caselaw regarding interaction with the Takings Clause but I'm hardly the first to question it, at-the-time BHUA Senate Committee chairman Phil Gramm lead with that on the review of Clinton's use of the DPA for the California energy crisis. And in general commandeering and so on all require just compensation. It's also 2025, not 1955, and I'm highly skeptical the current courts wouldn't be stricter.
That's assuming it even went through at all though and SpaceX wouldn't win an argument for obvious political retaliation or other forbidden reasoning, or wouldn't drag on the legal fight long enough for 47 to be gone and the next POTUS to reverse course.
>The US would have no problem coming up with hundreds of billions.
Have you like, opened a newspaper (physical or virtual) at all since last year? Growing debt is a huge deal, politicians are arguing over single digit billions or even millions. Hundreds of billions is not small potatoes even by American standards at this point, it's more then the entirety of veterans benefits & services, well over double all education, training, employment & social services, triple the entire transportation budget, etc. It'd be a big fucking line item to take on, and would require Congressional funding.
>They wouldn’t need to, though.
Yeah, they would.
Also, it's still America. Good luck to anyone trying to "force" SpaceX, a private company, to do anything they don't want.
Is it?
I don't know if they seriously want to do it, but whether they can do it is up to a highly sympathetic SCOTUS.
Cooperation with roscosmos seems to have been largely unimpeded by Russia’s political and military actions over the years, so these all seem like realistic possibilities.
Yes, it will be a shame if the U.S. has no launch capability of their own, but short term partisan political thinking is much more important to the electorate than long term national strategic interest.
China on the other hand will probably never happen because of the general political climate in the US and this administration in particular.
Also I believe that Russia isn't being paid for astronauts to fly on Soyuz. Instead, cosmonauts fly on Dragon. It's a like-for-like exchange which is mutually beneficial (both countries need the other's cooperation to keep the ISS operational, so these exchanges ensure that can continue if either Soyuz or Dragon are grounded for some reason.)
It's a seat swap arrangement, no money is exchanged.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-extends-seat-barter-agreement-wit...
No. Obviously not.
>Perhaps China would be willing to sell seats on their launches.
That would be an extreme humiliation of the US and NASA. Abandoning civil space programs entirely would be preferable.
>Maybe India will be in a position to offer human launches to the U.S. fairly soon - should be up and running by 2027, and they seem to hit their objectives most of the time.
India is nowhere close to the capabilities of the US, China or Russia.