NASA told to get act together on commercial crew vendors as chance of US-free ISS rises

as opposed to

NASA. Whose shuttle programme eventually left the US without a manned launch capability

Re: Spanked?

I assume 'Spaffed' would also be acceptable?

Re: Spanked?

Spanked is the 'merican term for the same thing afaik.

Re: Modest proposal time

let me get this clear:

you want to establish a colony on the Moon (colonialism is so 1800s. not cool)

effectively making the astronauts _immigrants_

let them breed

their offspring would be both E.T. (having matured in different planet) and arguably different species

and then you let them take over the ISS???

that ain't gonna fly.

(oh! NASA! i see what you did there)

Re: Modest proposal time

"slumped stumped pissed-upon-straw-haired wannabe leader" - while I am happy to throw all the insults you like at Trump, could we possibly pick ones that don't apply just as much to Boris? (In fact Boris' hair looks more pissed-upon than Trump's.)

Re: Other solution

These missions do have the "it must be done right now" priority from SpaceX. The problem is that space is hard, and rushing things leads to mistakes. Also NASA being slow with paperwork, and the promised funds weren't actually made available during the early stages.

Re: Milking it..

Boeing are milking any NASA contracts they get for every penny,

Not just Boeing and not just NASA contracts. They're all just milking the tax dollar trough for all they can get.

Re: Milking it..

"NASA themselves are part of the problem though - they insist of a specific set of tests over extended periods, and demand successful results at least a dozen times before certifying any part of the project, which slows things down again"

I know - damn NASA with their health and safety. Morton-Thiokol have a lot to answer for.

It isn't really comparable - the idea here is to pay the development costs and then prices will tumble. So the price tag is just the total development cost divided by the seats, when in fact the development cost will eventually be spread over many more flights.

Well, that's the idea, anyway...

Comes with free rocket

The commercial crew per seat cost includes the rocket and and ground support equipment. NASA have chosen the number seats and launches per year so Boeing and SpaceX can work out how much overhead and non-recurring engineering cost to add to each seat. As NASA wants a new rocket for each launch both service providers have to build the same number of rockets but SpaceX get most of their rockets back and can use them for commercial launches and Starlink.

Re: You keep using those words "fixed price"

Well they very much depend on the planning assumptions that have been made and their validity. Not to mention having a tightly defined scope, which I suspect they don't/can't have.

Rocket science - it's not brain surgery.

Re: I don't get the delay....

Apollo astronauts used a mixture of courage and ignorance of the danger to get to the moon. If they had known then how dangerous their rockets really were - they would probably still have gone but would have used a larger supply of courage.

Commercial crew has to make do with much less ignorance and hardly any courage. To make up for it, Boeing is now far more skilled at fleecing NASA. Among other things, Musk wanted this project to fund development of retro propulsive landings. As everybody knows it is completely impossible to land a rocket by flying backwards with the engines burning at minimum thrust NASA stomped on that plan and effectively forced him to use parachutes. Musk has this strange concept of proving parachutes (don't) work by tying them to a lump of concrete and throwing them out of a helicopter instead of using the standard formulae for parachute design. This insane choice has caused delays because it turns out reality does not obey the standard formulae for parachute design.

Re: I don't get the delay....

They didn't have to deal with nearly as litigious a culture back then, or contend with social media witch hunts over every little perceived slight to anyone or a mainstream media actively trying to incite division, drama and scandal in the name of clicks.

Re: I don't get the delay....

I'd say the risks were pretty well quantified, but people have trouble associating the probability of risks vs what actually happens. When you look at the Apollo missions as an example, there were 32 astronauts - 3 died (Apollo 1) and 3 almost died (Apollo 13). Neil Armstrong is often mis-quoted when people say they had a 50/50 chance. The full quote is a 50/50 of successfully landing on the moon - he thought there was a 1/10 chance they wouldn't survive - similar to what the overall programme ended up as.

Similarly the space shuttle. During the Rogers commission it demonstrated that the odds of failure were close to 1/50 to 1/100 (compared to the management view of 1/100,000). Of the 135 missions, 2 ended in disaster - a failure rate within the predicted range.

Funnily enough Nasa were highly criticised for the Shuttle failures and the lessons learned have put a toll on the size of the quality assurance. To look at it in isolation may lead to criticism of over-complicating it, but managing down to low failure rates is expensive and time consuming with good reason.

The people that then criticise this approach have little understanding of the human cost that drove the need for it. It's worth noting that the Russian approach to space flight was a lot more gung-ho - they just got lucky (and covered up their failures). Gagaran was strapped into what was basically a cannonball.

wank and send tweets