NASA told to get act together on commercial crew vendors as chance of US-free ISS rises Auditors minced no words in their assessment (PDF) of NASA's Commercial Crew providers: overdue, overbudget and overpaid. This was not supposed to have happened. SpaceX and Boeing should have been flying crew to the International Space Station by now thanks to fixed-price contracts. Or not so fixed, as the inspectors observed …
It's said that this was part of the reason for the Soviet copy of the Shuttle (Buran) being so similar to the US version.
Soviet rocket scientists looked at the design, and just couldn't work out why the Americans would make such strange decisions, like adding the enormous wings when much smaller ones (like on the X-37B, or the HL-20) would have worked as well, and allowed it to carry more payload with less risk.
The Soviet leadership over-ruled them, and said that the Americans must have some secret reason for using this design, and so the Soviet Union must have an identical Shuttle! The idea that it was the end result of an awkward botched compromise was clearly capitalist misinformation and should be ignored.
Buran was still bloody cool though, and it's a shame it only made one (unmanned) test flight.
Perhaps NASA should have been willing to shell out more money initially, in order to attract more contract providers...
SOCIALISM isn't fixing this, by the way... (doing it THAT way would wheel spin us in "development" of "the next system" which would be a moving target and a cash pit at many times the current cost, as history would indicate)
However I think this will work out just fine. There are a few snags remaining, they didn't launch a ball of flame with dead astronauts coming back to earth, they've put caution and safety FIRST, and it delayed things. Well, so what. We're *SO* close to having this now, I'm sure it'll work.
And yeah, I'm in favor of UPPING the budget for NASA, not for the ISS so much, but because NASA dollars spent on rockets and R&D result in jobs, jobs, jobs. It's the *kind* of Keynsian economics that works, because you PAY PEOPLE TO WORK and GET SOMETHING IN RETURN. And technology always improves with these kind of government contracts, and it all pretty much 'trickles down' into the REST of industry, as history demonstrates.
It's all good. Apollo 1 was a disaster. And a couple of shuttles. But there was a 'stand down' each time, and some re-evaluation, and we fixed it, focused on safety, and moved forward. NASA is doing it right, I think, but more money approved for contracts would help.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
let me get this clear:
you want to establish a colony on the Moon (colonialism is so 1800s. not cool)
effectively making the astronauts _immigrants_
let them breed
their offspring would be both E.T. (having matured in different planet) and arguably different species
and then you let them take over the ISS???
that ain't gonna fly.
(oh! NASA! i see what you did there)
my point exactly.
colonies = not cool
colonials = revolting* all the time
one blink of eye and you're legal alien all of sudden.
luckily there's not much up there in the Moon, it's a real wasteland, so they would not be dangerous
(ha! they could maybe throw rocks ;-) nothing else's up there)
and btw, that bypass was a real dick move, Jeltz
*) as in "making revolutions". although seeing their slumped stumped pissed-upon-straw-haired wannabe leader stepping all over his tongue, the other meaning of revolting surely tends to come to mind
"luckily there's not much up there in the Moon, it's a real wasteland, so they would not be dangerous
(ha! they could maybe throw rocks ;-) nothing else's up there)"
Well, there's always that former secret Nazi base, presumably mit über-weapons awaiting der launchen coden
If the yanks could just establish a breeding colony of astronauts on the Moon, transfer to the ISS would be almost trivial, gravity well wise.
Nice idea but it wouldn't work. El Presidente would force a giant wall to be built between the Earth and Moon to keep the aliens out.
Musk is very sensitive to getting set "a challenge". Tell him he get's 10 million dollars and another 6 launches on the contract if he get's the in-flight abort and the Crew Demo 2 flown before the end of February, and give him all the support he needs from NASA and KSC. I'd bet he'd get it done.
The little Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly incident the Crew Demo One capsule suffered has already been solved (and succesfully tested), as far as I know SpaceX is preparing the hardware for the In-flight abort test as we speak and the capsule and hardware for CD2 are also already at the cape. They can get it done, if it wasn't for these missions not having the "it must be done right now" priority that some people think they should have.
Why not save time by combinig the two tests?
So you do the launch abort test - blow up your Falcon in flight, with the astronauts in the Dragon capsule. Which separates itself off from the exploding rocket. Then - another Falcon, that's you've launched a few minutes later than the first, catches the capsule in mid-flight, mates with it, and takes it off to the ISS as normal.
What could be more exciting than that?
Obviously if anyone offers me a seat on that mission, I'll be jumping at it like a shot washing my hair that day...
Boeing are milking any NASA contracts they get for every penny, even, I believe, slowing down development on purpose just to ensure the next glut of cash to get them 'back on track'. SpaceX could have had Crew Dragon flying already, but as NASA have to answer to taxpayers and congress, everything is mired in red tape and funding issues. NASA themselves are part of the problem though - they insist of a specific set of tests over extended periods, and demand successful results at least a dozen times before certifying any part of the project, which slows things down again. I'm not even going to mention SLS either, which is the most enormous cash sucking pig of all time. SpaceX could launch 10 or more Falcon 9's for ever SLS - if it ever gets off the ground!
"NASA themselves are part of the problem though - they insist of a specific set of tests over extended periods, and demand successful results at least a dozen times before certifying any part of the project, which slows things down again"
I know - damn NASA with their health and safety. Morton-Thiokol have a lot to answer for.
It isn't really comparable - the idea here is to pay the development costs and then prices will tumble. So the price tag is just the total development cost divided by the seats, when in fact the development cost will eventually be spread over many more flights.
Well, that's the idea, anyway...
The commercial crew per seat cost includes the rocket and and ground support equipment. NASA have chosen the number seats and launches per year so Boeing and SpaceX can work out how much overhead and non-recurring engineering cost to add to each seat. As NASA wants a new rocket for each launch both service providers have to build the same number of rockets but SpaceX get most of their rockets back and can use them for commercial launches and Starlink.
Apollo astronauts used a mixture of courage and ignorance of the danger to get to the moon. If they had known then how dangerous their rockets really were - they would probably still have gone but would have used a larger supply of courage.
Commercial crew has to make do with much less ignorance and hardly any courage. To make up for it, Boeing is now far more skilled at fleecing NASA. Among other things, Musk wanted this project to fund development of retro propulsive landings. As everybody knows it is completely impossible to land a rocket by flying backwards with the engines burning at minimum thrust NASA stomped on that plan and effectively forced him to use parachutes. Musk has this strange concept of proving parachutes (don't) work by tying them to a lump of concrete and throwing them out of a helicopter instead of using the standard formulae for parachute design. This insane choice has caused delays because it turns out reality does not obey the standard formulae for parachute design.
Plenty of early rockets were going kaboom. But less of that happened as the programs went on - once they'd perfected the technique. So they were blowing up Redstones and Atlas's for fun before they started doing manned launches - but the number of explodey ones did drop noticeably afterwards.
And they had far fewer explodey problems with Saturn, as I recall. Though I was reading a piece the other day that somebody linked to on here on a piece on Apollo 12, about the Apollo 13 fun and games. Which was talking about all the things that went wrong. So for example they'd used a bunch of fireproofing coatings on their control panels (after Apollo 1) - and these also happened to be waterproof. Which came in amazingly handy after they shut down their spacecraft for most a the trip to the moon and back - such that the control panels were covered in condensation when they went to re-start the command module. And they were lucky that there wasn't a massive short-circuit.
Also the centre engine cut out a few minutes early - and I think it was Lovell who commented that this might be our glitch for the mission. But according to the after-action report - that engine shouldn't have cut out as the sensor that did it wasn't reporting a problem - and they weren't sure why it did. But it was a damned good job that it happened - because the rocket had started pogoing and the engine had already deformed its own mountings and was getting rather close pushing itself into its own fuel tanks and ripping the entire rocket apart.
I'd say the risks were pretty well quantified, but people have trouble associating the probability of risks vs what actually happens. When you look at the Apollo missions as an example, there were 32 astronauts - 3 died (Apollo 1) and 3 almost died (Apollo 13). Neil Armstrong is often mis-quoted when people say they had a 50/50 chance. The full quote is a 50/50 of successfully landing on the moon - he thought there was a 1/10 chance they wouldn't survive - similar to what the overall programme ended up as.
Similarly the space shuttle. During the Rogers commission it demonstrated that the odds of failure were close to 1/50 to 1/100 (compared to the management view of 1/100,000). Of the 135 missions, 2 ended in disaster - a failure rate within the predicted range.
Funnily enough Nasa were highly criticised for the Shuttle failures and the lessons learned have put a toll on the size of the quality assurance. To look at it in isolation may lead to criticism of over-complicating it, but managing down to low failure rates is expensive and time consuming with good reason.
The people that then criticise this approach have little understanding of the human cost that drove the need for it. It's worth noting that the Russian approach to space flight was a lot more gung-ho - they just got lucky (and covered up their failures). Gagaran was strapped into what was basically a cannonball.
Getting a rocket certified for human launch has to be one of the most difficult and time consuming things there is, and they seem to be keeping a special eye on Boeing right now for some strange reason. SpaceX has been launching uncrewed capsules to the station for years now without difficulty, but putting people aboard is a red-tape driven enterprise. They've probably been ready to go with a crewed launch for a long time, so there is effectively no one to blame but the government.
To be fair, SpaceX's testing revealed that the parachute modeling NASA used for previous missions was, in fact, faulty and had to be re-modeled. SpaceX chose to use newer material (Zylon?) as well to handle the stress of the chute opening sequence. Lessons learned and all that.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
