I got up at O Dark Thirty this morning to catch a flight to DC for the Space Transportation conference tomorrow, and haven’t had a lot of time to catch up on news, But Bob Zimmerman has thoughts on the announcement.
One of the reasons I left Rockwell over a quarter of a century ago was that it had become clear to me that they were never going to do anything commercial in space. It annoyed management when I told them this, but they knew it was true; they weren’t in the space business, they were in the government-contracting business. We’ll see how this goes.
So, here’s my Theory of Why:
As we all know, Russia has a plan (mostly scoffed at) to add a Science Power Tower to the Russian Orbital Segment, then undock from ISS before splashing in the 2028-2030 time frame, creating Mir-2, serviced by Oryol and/or or Soyuz/Progress.
So now, Axiom Space (60 or so former NASA and contractor managers, who supervised the building of ISS) will subcontract with Boeing, Thales, and others (the teams that actually built ISS) to build the so-called Axiom Commercial Segment. Before splash in 2028-2030, with an added power tower, this will undock, creating the Axiom Space Station, which will have been paid for by the US taxpayer. Axiom is supposed to host 8 crew in its final form, and will likely be serviced by Starliner, Dream Chaser amd Cynus. (I expect Dragon to get the boot once DC is flying.)
Axiom and Mir-2 will either be independent co-orbital stations, or will dock (an adaptor can be added to Axiom) with the power towers clocked 180deg apart, as a replacement ISS with a crew of 12 (which is, I think, what NASA and Boeing want). ISS-2 would basically be ISS with larger habitable volume and no useless truss.
NB: ISS splash would be via either a reactivated Zarya, or some Cygnus-based module.
I expect Dragon to get the boot once DC is flying.
Just curious: Why?
Partly because Dream Chaser can take over Dragon’s downmass and external cargo capability. Partly because Axiom is pretty much a front end for Boeing. Partly because Congress clearly favors Boeing (see House budget doc). Partly because I think if Axiom comes true, NASA will fund DC-crew. And finally, if Starship flies, and SpaceX lands crew on Moon and Mars, its relationship with NASA will come to an end, by NASA’s (i.e, Congress’) choice.
The House Science Committee draft of NASA’s budget and priorities certainly makes it seem as though the four-decade norm of indolence and corruption in NASA contracting is safe for another few decades and can utterly ignore the NewSpace sector, but this bill is a gambit, not a lock. There are many things, some of them much more nearly certain to occur than the passage of a final conference bill that closely resembles this draft, that could, individually and – especially – in combination, derail the notional bright and mandated-accomplishment-free future for the Dark Side outlined therein.
These are, in descending order of probability:
1) SpaceX getting SHS orbital by 2021 and operational by 2022.
2) SpaceX getting people to the Moon by, or before, 2024.
3) SpaceX getting people to Mars years before 2033.
4) Boeing being crushed under the burden of lost/delayed sales and liability judgements stemming from the 737 MAX disaster.
The first three would have the effect of making the continued existence of NASA an increasingly tough sell. If much of what NASA has traditionally done is successfully pre-empted by the self-funded private sector, there will arise efforts by Congressional coalitions with their own corrupt priorities to attend to seeking to close NASA down mostly or entirely and take or divvy up its former budget for their own purposes.
If the fourth item occurs, it will, among other things, eliminate the obvious intended beneficiary of the recently reported-out NASA budget draft – and those comparable to follow in subsequent years as the intention seems to be.
Anent Dragon 2 vs. Dream Chaser, DC is notably more expensive to launch than D2, for freight or for notional future crew. Still, by the time phase 3 of CRS and phase 2 of CC roll around in the mid-2020’s, SpaceX may not care too much about D2 being dropped for ISS if it is already well along in retiring the Falcons in favor of SHS.
It’s also easily possible SpaceX may have decided by then, following the example of Starlink, that a permanent LEO presence entirely of its own or as a partnership with – perhaps – the Gateway Foundation would be a way of initiating a second very profitable and open-ended revenue stream based on Earth-orbital infrastructure. One could, for instance, easily imagine a version of GF’s Von Braun Space Station with four dozen D2’s around its rim to act as “escape modules” rather than the Dream Chasers of current renderings.
It’s going to be an interesting next few years. For the old-school dead-enders at NASA and its legacy contractor base, that will almost certainly apply in very much the Chinese sense.
I came to conclusion well before I retired that there are NO “Space” companies (until SpaceX). I had a boss who liked to ask “What does XXX make?” His answer was “Money”. They are all “Government Contracting Companies”.
+1
It isn’t necessarily a bad thing to be a government contractor but far too many companies wallow in the corruption rather than reach for the greater, but riskier, possibilities open to their companies.
Maybe there needs to be a corruption index based on the ratio of former politicians and government workers in management, BOD, and figurehead positions to civilians. It could be called the Tweed Corruption Index. It could be used to analyze specific companies and how they rank against others in their industry.
I’d just like to see Reynold’s revolving door tax.
I wouldn’t so much call it “corruption” in the usual sense, but more as a rot that’s a symptom of a near monopsony that’s also a huge bureaucracy. How many good project ideas don’t go anywhere because the innovative aerospace entrepreneur has no idea how to navigate the byzantine hierarchy? Success might be more dependent on hiring veteran insiders who know how to walk proposals through the “unofficial” process that actually gets results, and who know which signatures are really important, which desks are roadblocks and which are just speed bumps, and which offices carry unseen weight. This would apply to navigating the DoD, or probably even Walmart’s departments that decide what products to put on the shelves.
But the rot of corruption is that coming up with a great design or out-of-the-box breakthrough takes a back seat to figuring out what crazy thing the customer might buy. That’s how Boeing ends up pushing for the Lunar Gateway instead of building a low-cost reusable orbital commercial launch system. The right people at NASA were willing to shell out money for the Gateway, useless at it is, so that’s what gets proposed and that’s what gets funded and developed.
The system does okay if the only competition is Soviet, who use the same system of building whatever aerospace vehicle a government bureaucracy thinks it needs.