We are now into the longest gap in our ability to get Americans into space on American rockets since Alan Shepard flew.
The long gap was caused by our risk aversion, because "safety," not returning America to space, is "the highest priority." https://t.co/bI0SYEDHHm
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) April 18, 2017
With the commercial crew program, NASA will have two providers of human launches, SpaceX and Boeing
Is Boeing technically a launcher? SpaceX and ULA are the launch companies. SpaceX and Boeing are the crew delivery companies.
This failure belongs to the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama and especially to Congress, which underfunded the program both Bush and Obama settled on to replace the space shuttle—a commercial crew plan to leverage development of private spacecraft.
NASA also has some dirty fingers here and throwing money at things is never a magic bullet. Neither Boeing or SpaceX are hurting for cash. They could have put forward more of their own money but why do that and mess with the compensation and development schedule set by NASA?
“Is Boeing technically a launcher?”
For the purposes of this exercise – yeah, they are.
NASA has contracted with Boeing to deliver crew. It’s largely up to Boeing how it wants to do that, so long as NASA’s safety and capability requirements are met. Boeing executed the contract by building and operating its own crew vehicle, and subcontracts the actual launch to ULA. In which, by the way, Boeing happens to be one of the two sole stakeholders.
Whether it’s a Boeing-built rocket, or a Boeing joint venture-built rocket….well, it comes out to the same thing in the end, really.
Shuttle stand down produced a gap of 1911 (admittedly non-consecutive) days.
STS-51-L to STS-26 : 975 days
STS-107 failure to STS-114 launch: 936 days
The reference was to consecutive days.
IMHO the Shuttle was retired too soon. It was unsustainable in the long run, but there were still plenty of ISS modules which did not get launched as a result. You know the ones actually used to perform experiments. Which was one of the points of the ISS in the first place.
The rest… well too much time was spent in the OSP, OSV, etc nonsense, until COTS was approved and then eventually someone decided on CCDev. Then the House basically cut funding while NASA kept piling on the requirements. So it’s little surprising the whole thing is late as a result.
Fact is if the US actually wanted they could fly astronauts to space like next time there’s a CRS flight. So it’s like Rand said the whole deal is a matter of policy rather than technical issues.
1) The difficulty with the cancelled modules was that they had all by cancelled by 2005-06 – some (like the Propulsion Module) had not even been built; some (like the Hab module) had been recycled; others (like the Centrifuge Module, the one whose loss I most regret) had not been completed. You will need additional funding just to build or finish these modules on top of the Shuttle operational costs.
2) Then there’s the cost and risk of keeping the Shuttle in operation: Much of the cost is simply from keeping the infrastructure and workforces in place. Even a stripped down, 2 flights per year extension with just two orbiters (Atlantis being held in reserve for parts) would have run over $2 billion per year – and that money has to come from somewhere – almost certainly either from the Orion/SLS budget, or Commercial Crew (or both). It’s not likely Congress was going to approve an additional $2 billion in funding to fund it.
Of course, all of us here would gladly have cancelled Orion and SLS anyway, but we likely would prefer that funding have been accelerated for Commercial Crew (along with mission hardware, advanced propulsion research, etc.), Keeping Shuttle up and running would have potentially jeopardized that priority, not least given how tepidly Congress viewed CCtCAP back then. And then there’s the risk: a shuttle extension study ordered by Mike Griffin in late 2008 concluded that a two-year extension increased the cumulative risk of a loss of crew from a 1-in-8 probability to 1 in 6; extending operations through 2015 increased the risk to 1 in 4. The risk of losing an orbiter or crew on any given mission was 1 in 77.
All that said, I think an extra year or two could have been justified, perhaps – so long as it did not jeopardize Commercial Crew or Cargo funding (and especially if it could mean adding the Centrifuge Module at a reasonable cost). But even then, you have a sizable gap in crew capability of several years.
And the thing is: This development has arrived with virtually no notice by Congress.
It might bother a few of them, but fundamentally I don’t think most care. NASA is delivering what the key stakeholders desire – jobs in the right places – and anything beyond that is icing on the cake.