NASA and the Private Sector - Page 11

The astronauts living on the International Space Station (ISS) are gearing up for a milestone event in February — the first visit of a commercial spaceship to the orbiting outpost.

The private spaceflight company SpaceX plans to launch its unmanned Dragon capsule to orbit Feb. 7 atop the firm's Falcon 9 booster from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida. The capsule will carry a load of food, clothing and other supplies for the six-man crew of the space station.

On December 09 2011 10:05 BestZergOnEast wrote:
The colonization & resource extraction of/from outer space is absolutely crucial to the long term success of longevity. NASA's efforts in this regard are counter productive. When it becomes economic to mine asteroids, teraform Venus or set up colonies on the moon companies will do so. Until then public sector efforts to explore space are a gigantic drain of resources that can be better used on Earth. Economic development and technological progress must happen before we are ready to conquer outer space. Ultimately NASA is a form of welfare for the elite; it's welfare for rich scientists / bureaucrats & companies that thrive off procurement. Why should the government take money from the working poor and give it to the elite?

"In preparation for the upcoming launch, SpaceX continues to conduct extensive testing and analysis. We believe that there are a few areas that will benefit from additional work and will optimize the safety and success of this mission. We are now working with NASA to establish a new target launch date, but note that we will continue to test and review data. We will launch when the vehicle is ready."

The main SpaceX factory, which also houses company offices, comprises 550,000 square feet in a three-story building that Boeing first built to assemble 747s. Included are avionics-, rocket-, and capsule-fabrication areas, quality-control testing facilities, and a glass-walled mission control center that will monitor and direct the Dragon capsule in flight.

Company founder and CEO Elon Musk is already looking far beyond the ISS flight. SpaceX is also working to make its rockets and its spacecraft reusable; he says that's the key to making space flight affordable enough to allow, say, human colonization of Mars. Musk's plans include incorporating landing gear into future Falcon 9s and Dragon capsules. Each of the two rocket stages would fly a controlled trajectory back to Earth after accomplishing its mission of pushing a Dragon capsule into orbit, and touch down gently on land for refurbishment. Rather than parachuting to a water landing, the Dragon capsule would fire its own onboard rocket motors to make a precision landing on land as well.

Launch of a SpaceX commercial cargo ship on an initial test flight to the International Space Station, originally planned for Feb. 7, is expected to slip to at least the end of March, officials said Friday, to give engineers time to complete additional hardware and software testing in the wake of a recent simulation, software analysis and work in Florida to close out the craft for flight.

The company has not set an official target launch date for its Dragon cargo carrier, but the long-awaited mission is not expected to fly before March 20 and it could slip to early-to-mid April depending on what it takes to shoehorn the flight into an already busy space station schedule and to book a slot with the Air Force Eastern Range, which orchestrates all East Coast launches. Three of the station's six crew members plan to return to Earth March 16, a European cargo ship is expected to arrive March 19 and three fresh crew members are scheduled to dock on March 31.

"There's a great deal of work ahead before everything is closed out and ready to go," said Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of the commercial cargo program a NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "As we both are proceeding toward the launch, SpaceX concluded that they just wanted to take some extra time to do additional testing to make sure this vehicle is as ready to go as it can possibly be, at least to the same level that they were for the previous launch."

On January 21 2012 17:42 aksfjh wrote:
Doing some numbers from wikipedia, it looks like the shuttle was VASTLY superior in payload cost per kg.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Background
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget

NASA ran at about $1400 (USD2011) per kg, and the Falcon 5 is only projected about $2,900 (USD2011) per kg. I'm assuming this takes into account launch vehicle reuse, but they haven't managed to retrieve any rockets yet after launch. I'm not really impressed.

On January 22 2012 09:43 JohnBiolante wrote:
Boeing's new 787 jetliner, which does not break the sound barrier or high altitude, cost $15 billion to develop; even the relatively simple rocket-powered small vehicles needed for space tourism should cost billions to develop. Yet all space tourism companies claim they can develop suborbital spacecraft for $1 billion or less. I mean I sure as hell ain't getting on no space-bound machine that didn't cost tens of billions of dollars to develop and test.

With limited money for science and an over-budget new space telescope, the space agency essentially had to make a choice in where it wanted to explore: the neighboring planet or the far-off cosmos.

Mars lost.

Two scientists who were briefed on the 2013 NASA budget that will be released next week said the space agency is eliminating two proposed joint missions with Europeans to explore Mars in 2016 and 2018. NASA had agreed to pay $1.4 billion for those missions. Some Mars missions will continue, but the fate of future flights is unclear, including the much-sought flight to return rocks from the red planet.

Despite the dangers, Musk is clearly a fan of the rocket-powered approach. He told PM that SpaceX has come up with a solution to make both the lower and upper stages of the Falcon 9 reusable. (The Dragon capsule that will fly atop the rocket has already demonstrated that it can be recovered in the ocean after it splash-lands with a parachute, though SpaceX is building vertical-landing capability into that as well.)

The key, at least for the first stage, is the difference in speed. "It really comes down to what the staging Mach number would be," Musk says, referencing the speed the rocket would be traveling at separation. "For an expendable Falcon 9 rocket, that is around Mach 10. For a reusable Falcon 9, it is around Mach 6, depending on the mission." For the reusable version, the rocket must be traveling at a slower speed at separation because the burn must end early, preserving enough propellant to let the rocket fly back and land vertically. This also makes recovery easier because entry velocities are slower.

However, the slower speed also means that the upper stage of the Falcon rocket must supply more of the velocity needed to get to orbit, and that significantly reduces how much payload the rocket can lift into orbit. "The payload penalty for full and fast reusability versus an expendable version is roughly 40 percent," Musk says. "[But] propellant cost is less than 0.4 percent of the total flight cost. Even taking into account the payload reduction for reusability, the improvement is therefore theoretically over a hundred times."

A hundred times is an incredible gain. It would drop cost for Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket—a scaled-up version of the Falcon 9 that’s currently rated at $1000 per pound to orbit—to just $10. "That, however, requires a very high flight rate, just like aircraft," Musk says. "At a low flight rate, the improvement is still probably around 50 percent. For Falcon Heavy, that would mean a price per pound to orbit of less than $500." Falcon Heavy is particularly amenable to reuse of the first stage—the two outer cores in particular, because they separate at a much lower velocity than the center one, being dropped off early in the flight.

The target launch date for SpaceX's first test flight to the International Space Station is now no earlier than late April, the company announced Thursday, as the California-based firm and NASA continue extensive software testing to prove the Dragon spacecraft can safely approach the 450-ton orbiting complex.

"SpaceX is continuing to work with NASA to set a new target date for launch, expected to be late April," SpaceX said in a statement. "The primary driver for the schedule continues to be the need to conduct extensive software testing. This is a challenging mission, and we intend to take every necessary precaution in order to improve the likelihood of success."

NASA and SpaceX officials previously selected March 20 as a "placeholder" date on the Air Force range, but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said last week he expected the flight would slip until April.

Sources said SpaceX has reserved April 20 for the launch on the Air Force Eastern Range, which manages a network of tracking and communications assets for rocket launchings from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

A launch in late April is contingent upon not only the completion of software testing, inspections and reviews of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, but also on finding a place for the mission in the space station's traffic pattern.

A Russian Progress resupply craft is due to lift off April 20 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Progress and Dragon missions will use different docking ports on separate ends of the space station, but officials prefer several days between arrivals and departures of visiting spacecraft to give crews time to prepare for the next vehicle.

The space station's robot arm is expected to grapple the Dragon about three days after its launch, but after the capsule makes a practice rendezvous with the outpost to check guidance, navigation and abort functions.

Josh Byerly, a NASA spokesperson, said last week the Dragon mission would have until about the third week of April to lift off or else be delayed to May.

The SpaceX flight, which is carried out under a developmental agreement with NASA, will try to demonstrate the Dragon spacecraft can deliver cargo to the space station on operational flights beginning later this year.

Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk says SpaceX is developing a plan for trips to Mars that will eventually cost just $500,000 per seat. Musk founded SpaceX 10 years ago and interplanetary travel has always been one of his goals for the company. Few details were provided about the Martian voyage, but Musk did say we can expect to hear more about the plan in less than a year.

The bargain basement price for a trip to Mars also highlights Musk’s main effort behind SpaceX, to bring down the cost of delivering a payload — human or cargo — into space. In an interview with the BBC, Musk acknowledged the first seats won’t be selling for $500,000. It will take a while to get down to that price. But Musk says the half-million dollar ticket could happen a decade after trips begin.

“Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket — half a million dollars. It can be done,” he told the BBC.

Musk did hint that one of the keys to low-cost trips to the red planet would be the ability to not only refuel there, but also to reuse the entire spacecraft on the return trip. In the BBC interview Musk said by reusing the spacecraft, you end up with the same sorts of costs airlines face. Musk compared it to flying today where a 747 isn’t simply thrown away after a flight to London. Like the airplane, the cost of the spacecraft could be spread out over numerous flights rather than just a single trip making fuel one of the main expenses rather than the entire ship.

The $500,000 price tag is around one percent of the cost NASA is currently paying to send a person to the space station on a Russian Soyuz rocket. Though it should be mentioned that the $50 million trip with the Russians is a known quantity at this point and so far SpaceX has only had four successful rocket launches.

The talk of Martian travel came on the heels of SpaceX’s most recent development news of its Dragon capsule. As the California company prepares to send an unmanned Dragon to the International Space Station next month, it completed the first crew trial with NASA. The event gave NASA astronauts a chance to test out the 7-seat capsule that is being developed to carry human passengers as well as cargo.