I have a lengthy post up over at Open Market on today’s developments.
16 thoughts on “Some Commercial Crew Questions For NASA”
Commercial space can not only get manned spaceflight back on track, it has the potential to blow open human exploration and exploitation of space. Why on Earth would we want to stop that? We know what NASA and business-as-usual will get us.
That Commercial Crew funds van be ‘held hostage,’ at least means they know which project NASA likely values more…and that some elements of Congress see it as a threat, implies they understand its potential better than one might think.
If Commercial Crew is killed (and possibly by a kind of strangulation), it’s looking more like premeditation, and less like an act of carelessness.
The real question is, will the would-be providers have the spine and a business case to say NO to the FAR rules and just back out, carrying on without NASA.
reader, no.. they wont.
I wish they would but all indications are that the NASA response to the so-called partners has been “we’ve made our decision, what are you gunna do about it?” and the partners have answered: nothing. When they get awarded contracts under FAR, no matter how SAA-like they are, we can stop calling them partners and start calling them contractors.. or just “borg”.
Pro-Libertate,
Yes, space commerce is far too important to humanity’s future to drag NASA into the critical path.
@ reader:
SpaceX is certain to, it’ll just take longer. Blue Origin I’m pretty sure will continue with suborbital, but orbital? Don’t know. My impression is that Boeing and Sierra Nevada need Commercial Crew to close their business cases.
But, I’ve been wrong before…
Well NASA has just wrested control of those companies from the engineers and turned it over to the bean counters who will embrace their new nit-picking, cost-inflating, obfuscating Overlords.
They have just poisoned SpaceX. Elon better call his buddy in the WH before it’s too late.
I bet the Chinese are happy about this.
So long to the “new” future of USA manned spaceflight.
NASA is all about paper now. Paper, not progress.
Elon doesn’t have “a buddy in the White House.”
He does when it comes to Tesla. He’s received almost $500 million from the government for Tesla.
I meant with regard to space. The White House cares about Tesla, because it’s “green.” It doesn’t give a rat’s about space, or SpaceX.
>>When they get awarded contracts under FAR, no matter how SAA-like they are, we can stop calling them partners and start calling them contractors.
Exactly my thoughts. I do not believe either that any of the current would-be partners will back out.
From what i recall from various occasions Gary Hudson has spoken about the matter, Alternate Access to Station program went pretty much down the same road. CCDev-2 would become an AAS rerun.
thats CCdev-3 of course
Rand,
When ZerO came to make his big announcement at KSC about going to an asteroid or something stupid like that, he bypassed the shuttle facilities he was about to gut and let rust and stopped by CCAFS just to see how one of his campaign donors was doing:
Sorry about the snark. I’ve been reading AoSH too much lately.
There more to this. Aren’t you a reporter?
That isn’t news. Everyone was aware of it, and commented on it at the time. The fact remains that Elon got a lot more money from the Bush administration than the Obama administration, at least so far.
So it seems that NASA is trying to “level the playing field” by making Commercial as expensive and possibly as useless as the SLS?
The only company it would truly favour is Boeing which has a foot in both camps.
Commercial space can not only get manned spaceflight back on track, it has the potential to blow open human exploration and exploitation of space. Why on Earth would we want to stop that? We know what NASA and business-as-usual will get us.
That Commercial Crew funds van be ‘held hostage,’ at least means they know which project NASA likely values more…and that some elements of Congress see it as a threat, implies they understand its potential better than one might think.
If Commercial Crew is killed (and possibly by a kind of strangulation), it’s looking more like premeditation, and less like an act of carelessness.
The real question is, will the would-be providers have the spine and a business case to say NO to the FAR rules and just back out, carrying on without NASA.
reader, no.. they wont.
I wish they would but all indications are that the NASA response to the so-called partners has been “we’ve made our decision, what are you gunna do about it?” and the partners have answered: nothing. When they get awarded contracts under FAR, no matter how SAA-like they are, we can stop calling them partners and start calling them contractors.. or just “borg”.
Pro-Libertate,
Yes, space commerce is far too important to humanity’s future to drag NASA into the critical path.
@ reader:
SpaceX is certain to, it’ll just take longer. Blue Origin I’m pretty sure will continue with suborbital, but orbital? Don’t know. My impression is that Boeing and Sierra Nevada need Commercial Crew to close their business cases.
But, I’ve been wrong before…
Well NASA has just wrested control of those companies from the engineers and turned it over to the bean counters who will embrace their new nit-picking, cost-inflating, obfuscating Overlords.
They have just poisoned SpaceX. Elon better call his buddy in the WH before it’s too late.
I bet the Chinese are happy about this.
So long to the “new” future of USA manned spaceflight.
NASA is all about paper now. Paper, not progress.
Elon doesn’t have “a buddy in the White House.”
He does when it comes to Tesla. He’s received almost $500 million from the government for Tesla.
I meant with regard to space. The White House cares about Tesla, because it’s “green.” It doesn’t give a rat’s about space, or SpaceX.
>>When they get awarded contracts under FAR, no matter how SAA-like they are, we can stop calling them partners and start calling them contractors.
Exactly my thoughts. I do not believe either that any of the current would-be partners will back out.
From what i recall from various occasions Gary Hudson has spoken about the matter, Alternate Access to Station program went pretty much down the same road. CCDev-2 would become an AAS rerun.
thats CCdev-3 of course
Rand,
When ZerO came to make his big announcement at KSC about going to an asteroid or something stupid like that, he bypassed the shuttle facilities he was about to gut and let rust and stopped by CCAFS just to see how one of his campaign donors was doing:
http://nimg.sulekha.com/business/original700/barack-obama-elon-musk-2010-4-15-14-32-0.jpg
There more to this. Aren’t you a reporter?
Sorry about the snark. I’ve been reading AoSH too much lately.
There more to this. Aren’t you a reporter?
That isn’t news. Everyone was aware of it, and commented on it at the time. The fact remains that Elon got a lot more money from the Bush administration than the Obama administration, at least so far.
So it seems that NASA is trying to “level the playing field” by making Commercial as expensive and possibly as useless as the SLS?
The only company it would truly favour is Boeing which has a foot in both camps.
Any comments?