…as well as links, over at Clark Lindsey’s place. I agree with his take on the reusability issue. ATK made it clear that they don’t even plan to refurbish the solids. That makes sense, given the infrastructure necessary to do so and insufficient traffic level to justify it, but it doesn’t speak to a low-cost system.
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Given the announcement of SpaceX and Bigelow finally teaming up my reaction to this is who cares? Let the dinosaurs dance while the meteor heads their way 🙂
As a side note, if Governor Romney is elected and names his space advisor Dr. Griffin to run NASA again he could just declare this as Constellation II and go back to where he left off…
Interesting that they chose Japan with a focus on Asia?
look at the Bigelow thread on nasaspaceflight’s free forum — kind of disturbing if “orbital debris” is to be believed.
Yeah, I’ve been reading him for as long as he’s been posting.. Just looks like normal lean business practices to me. His complaints about the layoffs were childish.
In the last CCDev round Boeing scored higher than SpaceX.. when you consider that Boeing is at least 4 years behind SpaceX, there should be no doubt that ATK will probably score higher than both of them. It’s a government program.. “merit” doesn’t have the same meaning here. I think CCiCap is going to squeeze out someone more than just Blue Origin.. it’ll probably be Sierra Nevada Corp.. and SpaceX might not make the cut either.
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Frees SpaceX up to do it right.
The past few weeks have been extremely interesting. Bigelow and Planetary Resources made them so. ATK is just more of the same old stuff. They don’t really plan to offer a commercial service; they simply want to sow congressional FUD for commercial spaceflight and see how much crony capitalism they can get squeeze out of it.
Dang, no edit button…
I tend to agree with Trent on this one.
As long as they pay up the $1.6b for cargo delivery they will not need to make the cut. This could be a good thing.
Yes, that would be a big blow to their bottom line.
Space is a big place. There should be enough room for everybody. SpaceX, Bigelow, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, Boeing, Planetary Resources, Virgin Galactic, ATK, and anyone else I’ve forgotten; I hope they all succeed.
Failures are at least as important as successes. Successes teach us what to do, failures what not to do. At least in theory.
If only it worked with Congress.
It can, this November.
Sweet sweet November.