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Commercial Crew

16 Comments

Greg Autry has a good overview of the current state of play:

All three commercial efforts should be funded. However, if the program must be reduced, it should be noted that both SpaceX and SNC are committed to pursuing a private market in space regardless of NASA support. Boeing’s panel representative expressed a lack of interest in continuing without government funding and in a cynical attempt to prod Congress the firm publicly announced looming layoffs. Professional investors only bet on teams that truly believe in their future returns and never on firms for which outside investment is the only goal. NASA must begin to think like an investor in America’s future.

Good luck with that.

16 thoughts on “Commercial Crew”

  2. All of which is irrelevant. Rep. Frank Wolf said that CCDev’s goal should be getting astronauts to ISS, not stimulating the development of a commercial space industry and NASA (reluctantly?) agreed.

    1. Ed,
      The good news is that Frank Wolf is retiring this year. The bad news is he’s not the only one who thinks that way. I don’t think CC is a lost cause, but I do think that NASA not fundamentally botching it is smaller odds than many would like to admit.

      ~Jon

  3. Good article by Greg Autry, especially his continuing calling out the NASA porkers in congress. The more the general public knows about this and who’s perpetrating it, the better. Greg Autry’s columns on Forbes.com are usually a good antidote to Loren Thompson’s swill. While he admitted to being partial to Dreamchaser, I was disappointed he did not mention the fact it was designed solely for the Atlas V , and how that could impact its selection, in light of the RD-180 situation.

    1. Good points about the SNC Atlas V tie up. As you know from my Forbes pieces I’m aware of that. Dream Chaser should be able to fly on a Falcon 9 or Ariane 5, but it is certainly an issue. Leaving SpaceX out of the program would be insane because only they have a pure American solution today.

  4. Great article in the main, but…. it should have mentioned that while Boeing has completed 18 of 20 benchmarks (it did mention that) those benchmarks are not the same as the ones for DC or Dragon. For just one example; Boeing doesn’t have to actually build a spacecraft, not even an unmanned version. And they haven’t. Their benchmarks have been almost entirely paperwork ones (design reviews, etc). Currently, CST-100 is very much a powerpoint spacecraft, in spite of having received the largest share of commercial crew funding.

    I very much like the point he raised; that SpaceX and DNC have stated that they’ll go ahead even if they don’t get the commercial crew award, while Boeing won’t. That, plus the fact that CST-100 doesn’t actually exist yet, plus the Atlas 5 issue, are my three biggest reasons for agreeing that if a cut needs to be made, CST-100 is the one to cut.

    I loved the analogy to Amtrak.

  5. I’d like to see both capsules fully funded, since that will give the highest probability of Orion being cancelled as obviously redundant. If anything can be salvaged from Orion for a commercial Orion Lite, that would be fine too, but only if it doesn’t require special privileges that its competitors don’t have.

  6. Completely off topic, but as I’ve been saying for years, the rise in obesity is likely linked to antibiotics, and won’t be cured by Michelle starving the children.

    Doctors found that mice given low doses of penicillin for their first month of life, a key development period, were 25 per cent heavier and had 60 per cent more fat than mice who went without.

    1. I shouldn’t encourage off-topicness I suppose, but I can’t say that surprises me. A lot of recent research has shown that the nature of one’s intestinal flora is a key factor in whether or not you are obese. Antibiotics of most kinds mess badly with intestinal flora. In another decade or two I suspect we’ll understand the functions of the multifarious gut bacteria a lot better than we do now. Obesity is probably not the only pathology that will be found to be closely corellated with having the “wrong” gut bacteria.

    1. Yeah. I went over there and slapped him around a little. It’s been awhile since I last did that and I needed the practice.

  8. Of course Commercial Crew should go entirely to Boeing. Dreamchaser has flown a spectacular approach and landing, and Dragon has gone into and returned from space several times. Such recklessness cannot be tolerated. Boeing is taking the only prudent course, spending large amounts of money on risk reduction, and avoiding as long as possible (at a large dollar amount of profit) the risk of succeeding in flying something. They will continue to reduce risk after selection, and after years of a near billion dollars a year of funding, will finally reduce the risk to zero when they find the program cancelled, and have not had to take the ultimate risk of building something. By then, everyone will have forgotten that human beings have flown in space, and no one will care to try again. It’s a winning situation all the way around.

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