10 thoughts on “Space Access Society Update”

  1. Well, it shouldn’t be any problem. Just divert all of the remaining funds for FY-15 to Boeing, and that will give them enough to write a proposal for a risk-reduction contract to “buy down” the “risk” of the program. And then Boeing, “the company that developed almost every U.S. manned spacecraft,” can demonstrate its magnificent mastery of this technology by…well, getting to CDR, and then having the program terminated for the convenience of the (now out of money) government with full termination liability. Because that is what Boeing does best.

    It might be pointed out that Boeing has never – and I emphasize never – built a manned spacecraft, let alone “virtually all U.S. manned spacecraft.” McDonnell Aircraft (not even McDonnell-Douglas) built the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft, and Rockwell International built the Apollo CSM and Space Shuttle Orbiter.

    Boeing bought these companies long after the last person associated with any of those projects retired. It has no “corporate memory,” and certainly no experience at building manned spacecraft. The only existing company on earth that has actually developed a spacecraft capable of carrying people, and flown it numerous times with perfect success, is SpaceX.

    If anyone thinks that “buying the blueprints” confers expertise on the buyer, consider the fate of Orbital’s Antares. Aerojet didn’t just have the “blueprints,” they had the actual engines in hand. And they don’t to this day fully understand how they work, or what some of the design practices were that led the Soviets to certain features of the engines. The developers are all dead. The million little things they knew about the engine died with them. No one ever writes that down, nor could they. And no one who buys they hardware would be able to learn from it anyway.

    But Boeing hasn’t even bought blueprints. It bought corporations, mostly for their ongoing contracts, some of their technology (that which still had the people who knew it working there), and their legends. When it owned Rocketdyne, Boeing claimed to have developed almost all of the rocket engines that took America to the moon. At the time, Boeing knew less about rocket engines than almost anyone reading this blog. Today, it knows i>far less.

    Boeing is the worst possible bet for commercial crew.

    Though I don’t know as much about Sierra Nevada, I do know that they have flown something that has a very long development history within NASA. Boeing hasn’t done that.

    The best possible bet is SpaceX, because it has demonstrated exactly as much with Dragon as NASA did with the Mercury capsule before Alan Shepard first took flight (with a better success rate). SpaceX has actually done this. It hasn’t just talked about doing it, it hasn’t just bought companies that did it once upon a forgotten time. It has f**king done it.

    I don’t really care if they carry Boeing until it collapses under the weight of its FAR-based contracting practices. As long as they keep one of the two actual players, so that we have American access to space. My money (if I were allowed to invest it) is on SpaceX.

    2. That depends on how you define Boeing. The Boeing space division is really the old Rockwell Space Division, which built the Shuttle. Boeing virtually scrapped their own space division after the acquisition, relocating their own space workers from Washington to California. So, there is an institutional heritage, FWIW.

      NASA decided it wasn’t worth anything when it picked Lockheed Martin, which had never built a manned spacecraft to build CEV/Orion — much to the chock of Boeing, which thought it was a shoe-in. The old Martin company was involved in lifting-body development in the 60’s and 70’s, assuming that means anything. But then, after winning the CEV contract, Lockheed Martin was not allowed to build its original lifting-body CEV design and was directed to build “Apollo on Steroids” instead.

      So, even if they had anything useful in the old archives, that wasn’t used.

      Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

  2. OT, I see that SpaceX is going ahead with their floating platform for the next space station flight. Is this really what they will do going forward, or are they just temporarily stuck till they get permission to come down on land? What are they supposed to do with a first stage standing vertically on a gently rocking floating platform? Sounds nuts.

      1. Yeah, but don’t they need lots of specialized equipment to lower the stage to horizontal? Probably with special modifications to work on this barge? Just seems like a waste if the whole point is just to convince someone that they should be allowed to do this on land a couple of flights from now.
        On the other hand, maybe they think it will sometimes come in handy to be able to land it anywhere in 7/10s of the earth’s surface.

        1. There are some serious performance advantages to landing near the end of the arc instead of having to boost back to the launch site. The rocket equation can do some nasty things to a vehicle that has to boost a payload, then kill all the forward velocity, then re-accelerate to a similar velocity back to the launch site. Landing only is relatively inexpensive in propellant in comparison.

          It may be easier to visualize if you add numbers. 1,000 m/s downrange velocity requires 1,000 m/s to stop, and then another 1,000 m/s to accelerate back to the launch site. The 2,000 m/s to RTLS with these numbers would have a mass ratio of about 2. Recovery propellant equivalent to the stage dry mass would come out of the second stage mass, not to mention the lower impulse to that second stage.

  3. I greatly enjoyed MfK’s observations – and agree with the thrust of his argument – but I would offer one small quibble: The only existing (private) company on earth that has actually developed a spacecraft capable of carrying people, and flown it numerous times with perfect success, is Scaled Composites – albeit only in suborbital flights.

    SpaceX’s Dragon V1 was of course designed to be developed into a crew vehicle, but it is not really capable of carrying crew. It’s Dragon V2 is the version which will accomplish that, but it has not yet flown. That said, SpaceX is clearly much, much closer to having an operational vehicle, as opposed to the power points and test objects which comprise CST-100 so far.

    I do think it is good not to single source commercial crew; that said, if the Senate’d favorite contractor had to be one of the awardees, I’m glad SpaceX is the other. At least we will have a fighting chance to fly Americans into space on an American vehicle before the next presidential administration.

    1. [Dragon 1] is not really capable of carrying crew.

      I’d more than quibble with that. You should have chosen a different word than capable. I’d ride D1 in a NY second.

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