Monday, April 18, 2011

NASA awards $270 million for commercial crew efforts

NASA today awarded nearly $270 million to four companies developing the U.S. vehicles that could fly astronauts after the shuttle.

Winners of funding in the second round of the Commercial Crew Development program, or CCDev, were as follows:

-- Blue Origin, Kent, Wash.: $22 million
-- Sierra Nevada Corporation, Louisville, Colo.: $80 million
-- Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), Hawthorne, Calif.: $75 million
-- The Boeing Company, Houston: $92.3 million

Boeing and SpaceX are developing capsules, while Sierra Nevada is building a space plane (pictured). Blue Origin, founded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, was funded in the program's first round to advance a system that would push a spacecraft from a failing rocket and will mature its New Shepard spacecraft.

"We're committed to safely transporting U.S. astronauts on American-made spacecraft and ending the outsourcing of this work to foreign governments," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "These agreements are significant milestones in NASA's plans to take advantage of American ingenuity to get to low-Earth orbit, so we can concentrate our resources on deep space exploration."

4 comments:

Gaetano Marano said...

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do you want to know why NASA burns so much money in projects without future nor with enough funds like the CCDev-2 toys???
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simply because, after the Shuttles retirement and the failure of the (wrong and expensive) "Plan-A" (the Constellation) NASA desperately NEEDS to demonstrate that it has a "Plan-B" or a "Plan-C" or a "Plan-D" to send manned vehicles to LEO and (maybe) to the Moon
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but the funded programs have little or no chances of success, because ...
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Blue Origin can't make more than its (strange and dangerous) suborbital vehiclEGG, while, develop a LEO-only, cheap, Kliper-like, biconic, reusable capsule, isn't a childs game!!!
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Sierra Nevada Corporation can't develop a LEO-only Shuttle 2.0 with 1/1000th the funds used to develop the original one, so, the Dreamchaser will ALWAYS remain a Dream-mockup
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Boeing surely has the technology to develop the LEO-only CST-100 but it needs 30, 50, 100 times the funds awarded now
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SpaceX can develop a LEO-only manned Dragon within 4-6 years but it needs at least TEN times the funds awarded now
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also, ALL these projects have one thing in common: NONE OF THEM HAVE A MAN-RATED ROCKET TO LAUNCH THESE VEHICLES WITH CREWS (and will not have a man-rated rocket for 5+ years!)
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three of them (SpaceX, Boeing and Blue Origin) use a VERY SMART "pusher escape system" that, unfortunately, ISN'T THEIR OWN IDEA:
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newspaceagency.com/articles/03notblueoriginidea.html
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Gaetano Marano said...

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some additional figures ...
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SpaceX has invested $1 billion ($400M of Musk's money + $600M of NASA and investors' money) in EIGHT YEARS to develop a Soyuz class rocket and a Progress class space cargo, Lockheed Martin needs $9 billion to develop and build the Orion and has spent over $100M (with ATK) only to develop and test the Orion LAS while ATK has spent $3 billion only to add a 5th segment to the standard SRB, last, develop and build the Shuttle costed dozens of billion$ and also the X-38/HL-20 costed over $5 billion before be deleted since it was a too limited and too dangerous vehicle
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so, can Blue Origin develop and build a reusable Dragon-like capsule AND a "pusher" version of the Orion abort system AND a reusable (DC-X-like) and man-rated Falcon-9-like rocket with (.....ONLY....) $25M given by NASA ???
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the answer clearly is a BIG "NO"
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could Boeing develop and build an Orion-like capsule with 1/100th of the funds ($90M vs. $9B) needed by Lockheed Martin to develop the Orion???
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also this time, the answer is a BIG "NO"
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SpaceX said months ago that it needs $300M from NASA to ONLY develop the Dragon LAS, so, now, can SpaceX develop the LAS, finish the crewed Dragon, man-rate the Falcon-9 and perform two-three tests of all these things (for a total cost up to $1B) with (....ONLY....) $75M ???
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again, the answer is a BIG "NO"
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and can Sierra Nevada Corporation develop and build a ($5B) X-38-like "Little Shuttle", man-rate it, build 3-5 working models of the Dreamchaser and perform 2-3 tests atop an Atlas V (at $150M per test ONLY to buy the rocket) ALL THIS with a total of $100M received from NASA ???
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again, again and again, the answer is another BIG "NO"
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and, after all, not even NASA believes that one of these toys can REALLY fly before 2017 (or much later) that's why NASA has already awarded several contracts to Russia, to carry cargo and astronaut to the ISS with the Soyuz and Progress from 2011 to 2016 !!!
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Gaetano Marano said...

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now, also China copy my ideas ... :)
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i66.servimg.com/u/f66/12/96/61/99/03-04-13.jpg
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that's just a copy of my 5.5 years old idea!
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"The LSAM+Shenzhou "cheap" alternative" article:
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gaetanomarano.it/LSAMshenzhou/lsamshenzhou.html
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Mark Lopa said...

All I know is that Sierra Nevada space plane is damned cool and I hope it flies some day. Is that shuttle-derived, or their own design?