Different Mission = Different Spacecraft

And when ISS is gone...
No reason for them to exist?

"No reason for them to exist?"

True, if one is a pessimist on commercial flight and that nothing commercial will replace ISS. Whether there will be a reason for them after ISS is the experiment. Bring it on.

To add to madscientist's point, - There is already 1 private company that wants this capability

Also, if you have a deep space ship (which, despite what some people at other forums like to claim, is coming), then there is another market for them.

Or can't free enterprise play a role here?

I think I recognize that bullet list... could it be from this post by Warp? ;-)
It'd be cool if Oberg got the idea from here.

Jim's good, and I'm sure came up with this list himself :)

It's a good piece. I wish more of the MSNBC space coverage would come from him!

If we build the planetary spacecraft at ISS and quite playing apollo on steroids we might get someplace!

This is a no-brainer. Private industry can make a space vessel for LEO or even for loops around the moon. No problem. But I support the notion that NASA should have its own in-house capsule design even if it will be contracted out to industry just like most of constellation [orion,ares] is). Hopefully, NASA will make it simple and not make a do-all vehicle like the Shuttle ended up being. Furthermore, if you think the US had the better space capsule (Apollo) than the Soviet Union, think again. While Soyuz has proven its reliability, also read the web page - http://www.astronautix.com/craftfam/soyuz.htm, to realize that the Soyuz design is lighter and more spacious than the Apollo and overall a more practical design. It was designed to go to the moon but has functioned as a LEO orbiter just fine for over 40 years. Furthermore, the Chinese did not design their space vehicle after the Soyuz because of the communist kinship. Rather, it is the smarter and more practical design. Its said that the Soyuz capsule is so cramped. Well, thats just the re-entry capsule portion in which the three space-farers reside for a couple of hours going up and coming down.

When you think about it, a descent-only Orion is all that is needed, if you have commercial crew ascent services and are launching entire mission vehicles on uncrewed cargo launchers. If the mission vehicle doesn't have EOI capability, you just attach an Orion CRV so the crew can bail out and descend in it.

Yes, there were some Soyuz-like concepts in the early days of the CEV process. You wonder if things would have gone differently for CxP if they'd been willing to follow the resulting improved R&D path instead of pushing heritage a little too heavily.

As someone noted here , a long time ago, just what operational spacecraft did NASA ever build?
There may have been more involvement years ago, but my observation is that , as time goes on, there are fewer and fewer civil servants at NASA in general.
Those who do the hard work are middle managers who oversee and monitor the contractors. In fact it is the contractors do the bulk of specifications work which is then scrutinized by NASA middle managers. More now than in the past. As a contractor myself I find these middle managers provide a valuable service of maintaining a high threshold for technical verification and integrity.
Most of the old Nasa guard is gone, and won't be long before it's all gone. The ranks of 30 and 40 something middle managers also grows thin.
Seems to me there are very few Nasa operations people , monitors yes, but the majority of those in the trenches are contractors.
Beyond that the thin margin of those Nasa non-managers and non-operations scientists and engineers are doing R and D work, assisted by a host of contractors.

When you think about it, a descent-only Orion is all that is needed, if you have commercial crew ascent services and are launching entire mission vehicles on uncrewed cargo launchers.

Or if you plan to use the Shuttle to lift the Retro Apollo/Olds Orion lifeboat to the ISS.

This is another Trojan horse for Shuttle Orbiter life extension.

the X37B is now in LEO.

I could not be happier!

The SPN on this is ridiculous. We don't need Orion lite as a crew rescue vehicle. That job should be performed by the commercial crew vehicles just like Soyuz does and is the most cost effective way to provide that capability. This is just a political pay off to Colorado to protect Democratic Senators and COngressman in a swing state that was looking at 1000 to 2000 job losses. Here at JSC we already have a new name for ORION CRV, Stimulus-1.

I am also guessing that commercial crew guys were complaining to Bolden that they couldn't meet the 6 month loiter requirement or it would make their vehicles to expensive and they wanted the requiement removed from them. Cheaper for them and more expensive for NASA.

But it's mostly about buying votes in Colorado.

Folks:

Yeah, Jim writes a good line. Informed but accessible. If he did get some ideas from Warp, it would be just clarification of a new idea that a lot of us are thinking about. Who knows, maybe someone high up (or wanting to get there) will read Jims' article and go "Aha!" and implement one or two of those ideas. So, through proxy, Warp gets an idea turned into hardware.

Sound far fetched? I have helped beta test software for years (It's something a burned out machine level computer programmer does for fun). Some of those programs got very popular (anyone use RainMeter?). So, through proxy, I was able to get some ideas translated into software that literally millions of people use. Sometimes I get credit, sometimes not. Doesn't matter, I can see the results.

So Warp, keep those ideas coming. I might pass the idea of using battery only for the taxi flights to Spacex just to make sure they get it.

Around a decade ago, I was fooling around with an idea of a "usable" launch system (meaning some parts were reusable but nothing was thrown away). My goals were:

- 500 metric ton to orbit (over a million pounds).
- Nothing thrown away.
- No new technology (but scaling was allowed).

What I came up with was a launch system that could put up a ring type space station almost 700 feet (over 200 meters) in diameter it six launches. It would use parts of the launcher and payload canisters in the construction. I ran the idea past Gary Hudson and Edwin Aldrin at the time and they both said it was 20 years ahead of its time. Some of the tech I used is flight tested now (RS 68, Transhab (Genesis 1 and 2).

Maybe we should start the Open Source Space Station Project. If anyone scoops any idea we come with, everybody benefits.

tinker

I agree with ex_navy. All we are doing is just duplicating the capability we already have on ISS with Soyuz, so just let the commercial guys develop the capsule.

Oberg is correct in that cutting out all those capabilities will make it a lot cheaper and easier to build. Just don't think that this capsule can then be scaled up to be a deep space vehicle. Spacecraft that are highly customized for a particular mission can never be economically adapted to other types of space applications. We'll have to develop a BEO vehicle pretty much from scratch.

Is there anything in Obama's NASA budget specifically for development of a BEO capable vehicle?

When was the last time you ever heard of a launch service go out of business because of a rocket failure? They typically go out of business for other reasons. By the time the rocket is launched, the risk is offloaded to obscure insurance companies similar to credit default swaps that caused our recent financial meltdown in the mortgage industry.

Someone opened Pandora's Box when SpaceX started publicly advertising the fee they charge to take something to space. In essence, they are a fee processor. If you pay the fee and you don't like what you get, they try to get you an insurance claim, and they keep marching forwards. Just like the airlines which have killed thousands of people and they are still in business because they provide a relatively safe service and generate tax revenue.

Why can't SpaceX?

For those who seem dead set on condemning companies in their infancy like SpaceX, constantly claiming they are absolutely unsafe no matter what, and at the same time they demand the government not retire the space shuttle that killed 14 people, I chuckle.

The word "kill" is a little harsh since it sounds so violent to the public and causes one to react on a lizard-brain-like emotional level. A better word would be "loss-of-crew" used always as a noun or past event and never used as a verb. Using it as a verb evokes legal liability in the context of a confession to a crime. This is the word NASA uses to smooth out the public perception of a catastrophic event that includes loss-of-crew and loss-of-life. It is fascinating how things keep going on because of the choice of words and people’s perception.

I suppose if I learned how to talk that way, I would become the next Richard Branson. It probably won’t happen since people in high places not only have to be smart enough to say the right thing in front of many people without hesitation, they also have to be good looking. This makes Gwynne Shotwell my number one choice for President of SpaceX;) She and Mr. Musk have luck on their side and they are absolutely going to take that company into the big leagues and no rocket failure and especially the long line of gripers and complainers are going to stop them. How they accomplished the closure of their business case before taking these huge leaps of business risk is worth a book or two.

NASA is going to have their hands full with the impending explosion of cheap access to space. The Cold War is over. The Space Access Race has begun. They put the space tourists out of business. You see the forces of their control to access to space when they buy all of the seats in Zero-G and Virgin Galactic. NASA can't pay every space access company for seats to space to maintain space access supremacy for long, however. You are just now seeing dramatic changes in NASA and they are not giving up just yet.

When NASA eventually gets overrun with cheap space access companies is the day we start sending real scientists into space instead of post-Cold War blemish free astronauts. Through high powered space flight automation and dramatic improvements in hardware, the only time you need a well-trained astronaut to fly a vehicle is when something goes drastically wrong on the way up and on the way down. Never has an astronaut saved a crew by grabbing the stick when something like that happens. No offense, of course. Most of their hard training is focused on such actions. Neil Armstrong grabbed the stick and saved the crew once while in-orbit and the Apollo 13 mission took an army of people working in unison but they were due to Space Race shortcuts combined with severely limited computer and hardware power compared to today’s new space travel systems.

Like the recent Story Musgrave blog, I too, like to tell it like I see it.

Um... no, it isn't a 'trojan horse' for shuttle extension. Why not? Because Orion can't fit in the shuttle's payload bay! It's too wide!

Joe:

That's a great op-ed article all by itself.

The Shuttle was designed, built and flown for three decades with serious abort limitations for the crew so don't worry about pulling your punches on that topic.

All of the "new space" human launch options will have full envelope abort scenarios built in for sure so safety will definitely improve.

If someone uses safety as an argument against "new space" you can be sure that they are uninformed or have a hidden (or not so hidden) agenda.

tinker

Well I am going to use it. Can "new space" design a safe rocket and capsule? Yes, the design knowledge is fairly well known and well distributed through out industry. Can "new space" operate as safely as NASA and it contrctor workforce? No, they cannot unless NASA mandates or puts the right incentives in the commercial crew contract to take advantage of people and companies with actual HSF experience instead of trying to re-learn it on their own. Operational safety and safety design are two completely different fields. Human rating requirements will get you the safety engineering designed into the hardware system. Hard won experience passed down through an operations culture is what ensures operational safety, not technology. Can "new space" eventually acquire that experience on their own? Sure, but at a price in money and lives that are unacceptable and unnecessary. Nothing in the current plan provides the means or methods to ensure the transfer of 40 years of experience and culture about how you do human space flight safely (again not the technology) and that should be of great concern to all supporters of human space flight no matter how much or little you support commercial space flight.

ex_navy:

You certainly aren't in the uninformed category so what's your agenda? Heritage is an important aspect of space bound technology but that must be balances with the advances that come along the way too.

Scaled Composites build pressure vessels for Spaceshipone that performed fine in a vacuum three times out of very unheritage materials.

The X37b flew with an advanced thermal protection system that's decades ahead of the Shuttle (and long overdue).

In the first example, Scaled was way outside the box and they succeeded. The word may be still out on the X37b but I expect they'll do OK. To properly move forward both these techniques must be utilized with balance. We have to take chances, even gamble on success. Let's just not do it with people like we did with the Shuttle program.

If the early aircraft industry were as constrained as you would like human rating spacecraft to be where would we be now?

tinker