NASA and the Private Sector - Page 45

On September 30 2014 01:47 oBlade wrote:
I understand this. Boeing also makes jumbo jets. How does it factor into the CCDev contract?

On September 27 2014 02:38 GreenHorizons wrote:



Why do you think we planted a flag on it? No one else has tried to claim it so we haven't mentioned that we think we own it.

On September 30 2014 02:04 misirlou wrote:
If the reason is "we owe boeing" because they made a fancy space drone, I'm pretty sure it still goes against contract award regulation

On September 30 2014 22:04 -Celestial- wrote:


All I could think of was this:
+ Show Spoiler +





Probably justified more along the lines of "proven track record" or something.

On September 30 2014 22:25 Simberto wrote:


Also, to be honest, there aren't any american flags on the moon anymore. You spent a lot of effort to surrender to the moon.

http://gizmodo.com/5930450/all-the-american-flags-on-the-moon-are-now-white

Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) is pleased to announce it will be presenting an overview of its Global Project spaceflight program Tuesday, Sept. 30 at 11:45 a.m. EST at the 65th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Toronto. The Global Project offers clients a unique turn-key spaceflight capability based on SNC’s Dream Chaser crewed space vehicle.

SNC’s Global Project offers clients across the globe access to low Earth orbit (LEO) without the time, resources and financial burden of developing the necessary capabilities or infrastructure to support a mature human spaceflight program. The Global Project utilizes the Dream Chaser spacecraft as a baseline vehicle which, in turn, can be customized by the client for an array of missions to support government, commercial, academic and international goals. The individual mission customization of the Global Project can be applied to both crewed and uncrewed variants for a single dedicated mission or suite of missions.

“The SNC Global Project provides, for the first time in history, an unprecedented and unique set of spaceflight opportunities for clients around the world,” said John Roth, vice president of business development for SNC’s Space Systems. “SNC is offering access to crewed or uncrewed space missions that include an optionally-piloted space vehicle, a launch vehicle or choice of launch vehicles, and the supporting infrastructure and systems required for such a valuable program. The Global Project offers a client the opportunity to leverage and expand its local technology and industrial base by engaging government research and development laboratories, aerospace industry and universities in developing payloads, vehicle modifications, and ground processing capabilities in support of the selected LEO missions. This program will literally make space accessible to people all over the world, enabling those who have only dreamed about going to space to finally achieve it.”

Fuck Earth!’ Elon Musk said to me, laughing. ‘Who cares about Earth?’ We were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. It was a sunny afternoon, a Thursday, one of three designated weekdays Musk spends at SpaceX. Musk was laughing because he was joking: he cares a great deal about Earth. When he is not here at SpaceX, he is running an electric car company. But this is his manner. On television Musk can seem solemn, but in person he tells jokes. He giggles. He says things that surprise you.

When I arrived, Musk was at his computer, powering through a stream of single-line email replies. I took a seat and glanced around at his workspace. There was a black leather couch and a large desk, empty but for a few wine bottles and awards. The windows looked out to a sunbaked parking lot. The vibe was ordinary, utilitarian, even boring. After a few minutes passed, I began to worry that Musk had forgotten about me, but then suddenly, and somewhat theatrically, he wheeled around, scooted his chair over, and extended his hand. ‘I’m Elon,’ he said.

It was a nice gesture, but in the year 2014 Elon Musk doesn’t need much of an introduction. Not since Steve Jobs has an American technologist captured the cultural imagination like Musk. There are tumblrs and subreddits devoted to him. He is the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man. His life story has already become a legend. There is the alienated childhood in South Africa, the video game he invented at 12, his migration to the US in the mid-1990s. Then the quick rise, beginning when Musk sold his software company Zip2 for $300 million at the age of 28, and continuing three years later, when he dealt PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion. And finally, the double down, when Musk decided idle hedonism wasn’t for him, and instead sank his fortune into a pair of unusually ambitious startups. With Tesla he would replace the world’s cars with electric vehicles, and with SpaceX he would colonise Mars. Automobile manufacturing and aerospace are mature industries, dominated by corporate behemoths with plush lobbying budgets and factories in all the right congressional districts. No matter. Musk would transform both, simultaneously, and he would do it within the space of a single generation.

Six years later, it all looked like folly. It was 2008, a year Musk describes as the worst of his life. Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy. Lehman had just imploded, making capital hard to come by. Musk was freshly divorced and borrowing cash from friends to pay living expenses. And SpaceX was a flameout, in the most literal sense. Musk had spent $100 million on the company and its new rocket, the Falcon 1. But its first three launches had all detonated before reaching orbit. The fourth was due to lift off in early Fall of that year, and if it too blew apart in the atmosphere, SpaceX would likely have numbered among the casualties. Aerospace journalists were drafting its obituary already. Musk needed a break, badly. And he got it, in the form of a fully intact Falcon 1, riding a clean column of flame out of the atmosphere and into the history books, as the first privately funded, liquid-fuelled rocket to reach orbit.

SpaceX nabbed a $1.6 billion contract with NASA in the aftermath of that launch, and Musk used the money to expand rapidly. In the years since, he has reeled off 15 straight launches without a major failure, including the first private cargo flights to the ISS. Last year, he signed a 20-year lease on launch pad 39A, the hallowed stretch of Cape Canaveral concrete that absorbed the fire of Apollo’s rockets. Earlier this year, he bought a tract of land near Brownsville, Texas, where he plans to build a dedicated spaceport for SpaceX. ‘It took us ages to get all the approvals,’ he told me. ‘There were a million federal agencies that needed to sign off, and the final call went to the National Historic Landmark Association, because the last battle of the Civil War was fought a few miles away from our site, and visitors might be able to see the tip of our rocket from there. We were like, “Really? Have you seen what it’s like around there? Nobody visits that place.”’

Musk isn’t shy about touting the speed of his progress. Indeed, he has an Ali-like appetite for needling the competition. A Bloomberg TV interviewer once asked him about one of Tesla’s competitors and he laughed in response. ‘Why do you laugh?’ she said. ‘Have you seen their car?’ he replied, incredulously. This same streak of showmanship surfaced when Musk and I discussed the aerospace industry. ‘There have been a number of space startups,’ he told me. ‘But they have all failed, or their success was irrelevant.’

But SpaceX does have competitors, both industry giants and scrappy startups alike. The company has just spent three years in a dogfight to become the first commercial space outfit to launch US astronauts to the space station. The awarding of this contract became more urgent in March, after the US sanctioned Russia for rolling tanks into Crimea. A week later, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin quipped: ‘After analysing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest the US deliver its astronauts to the ISS with a trampoline.’

The Dream Chaser, a reusable crewed space shuttle currently under development by Sierra Nevada Corporation, may one day carry people into space with the help of Stratolaunch's massive carrier plane, the brainchild of aviation legend Burt Rutan and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

The news comes on the heels of Sierra Nevada Corporation's announcement that it will legally challenge NASA's decision to snub the company's bid for a Commercial Crew Transportation contract in favor of the competition's two other proposals, submitted by Boeing and SpaceX.

Despite that setback, the company plans to build a scaled version of the Dream Chaser that can be used with the Startolaunch plane to carry three people into space or serve a variety of unmanned cargo or research missions.

Inflatable private room to dock to ISS, commercialise space.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module is on track to launch in 2015, and will be attached to the International Space Station to test the technology.

The $17.8 million BEAM inflatable module will be delivered to the ISS by SpaceX's Dragon cargo craft, where it will be installed by the robotic Canadarm2. It is expected to stay for a couple of years, attached to the Tranquility node's port aft, where it will be used to test and demonstrate the feasibility of private company Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable space habitat technology -- as well as what the company can do with low-Earth orbit (LEO).

Bigelow currently has two stand-alone autonomous spacecraft in orbit, the Genesis I and the Genesis II, both collecting data about LEO conditions and about how well the technology performs in practise. The BEAM module will allow further data collation for the company, which is planning to launch its own space station, named Bigelow Aerospace Alpha Station, to be at least partially operational as early as next year.

XCOR Aerospace(R) today announced marked progress on the path to commercial space flight with the integration of the cockpit to the fuselage on XCOR's Lynx(R) spacecraft.

With the fuselage, pressure cabin and strakes delivered, XCOR is bonding these structures together and integrating sub-assemblies, such as the landing gear, at its hangar in Mojave.

"The team at XCOR has been working a long time to reach this goal," said XCOR CEO Jeff Greason. "We always knew there would be a day when we could see a spacecraft forming in our hangar. Today is that day. These pictures show our ongoing journey to make commercial space flight a reality."

In addition to the progress noted above, Lynx's rocket propulsion system continues to be tested on a first generation fuselage that is used to perform cold-flows and hot fires with XCOR's proprietary rocket propellant piston pump technology.

On Oct. 9, under statutory authority available to it, NASA has decided to proceed with the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts awarded to The Boeing Company and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. notwithstanding the bid protest filed at the U.S. Government Accountability Office by Sierra Nevada Corporation. The agency recognizes that failure to provide the CCtCap transportation service as soon as possible poses risks to the International Space Station (ISS) crew, jeopardizes continued operation of the ISS, would delay meeting critical crew size requirements, and may result in the U.S. failing to perform the commitments it made in its international agreements.

TORONTO — NASA is examining adding a habitation module to the agency’s proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) that would allow astronauts to stay at the asteroid for several additional weeks.

Chris Moore, deputy director of the Advanced Exploration Systems Division at NASA Headquarters, said in a presentation at the 65th International Astronautical Congress here Oct. 3 that the module, intended to serve as a prototype of a habitat for future deep space missions, could be in place before the first crewed mission visits the captured asteroid in the mid-2020s.

“We’re doing a study now of different module types and different times it could be launched,” Moore said. “It may be used on the first mission, if it could be ready in time.”

Under NASA’s current ARM plans, a two-person crew would fly a 26-day mission in an Orion spacecraft once the captured asteroid reached a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon. Only about five days would be spent at the asteroid, allowing for two four-hour spacewalks, with the rest of the mission spent in transit between the asteroid and Earth.