Did you miss the bit about “what they’ve actually done, not what they say they will do”? Once SpaceX actually does send people around the Moon, then you can say that they’re at Apollo 8 level. And if what they say is true, then you won’t have to wait long. But right now, they are not at that level, because they haven’t yet done it.
Well, that’s why I said perhaps before Apollo 7 at this point, though even that isn’t accurate since they haven’t actually put it all together to do even an unmanned test…yet. But all the pieces are there and many have been tested at this point. It’s not all fantasy since NASA is exploring having SpaceX do crewed missions to the ISS at some point.
In the OP I’m speculating that in 2020 they have in fact done the tests and flights they are planning, including the one to send tourists around the Moon and have done further tests to land on the Moon.
Pegasus is an Orbital Sciences (now Orbital ATK) air launched commercial small payload launch vehicle. Although it has been used for a handful of NASA small observatory (SMEX) satellites, it is a commercial vehicle that was actually developed with a small amount of USAF support and has been used to launch payloads for other government agencies and commercial interests. Orbital ATK continues to offer the Pegasus, although the price has gone up nearly an order of magnitude from the initial costs. The Minotaur-C is little more than a rebranding of the venerable OSC Taurus with NextGen guidance and avionics; from a propulsion standpoint it is essentially a wingless Taurus on top of a Castor 120 motor as the “Stage 0” liftoff stage, with different apogee motor and fairing options
The first uncrewed Falcon Heavy has yet to launch, having been delayed multiple times, and is projected to fly sometime late this year. If it is successful, SpaceX will then need to demonstrated crewed certification capability, which would include a launch escape system and all of the redundancy and health & status features required. The notion of performing a crewed mission around the moon in the 2018 timeframe is risible; setting aside the need to develop and demonstrate a crewed capsule capability for that duration and train the passengers (who, even if they aren’t going to be doing anything to pilot or service the vehicle will still need to be capable of self-maintenance and rescue in the free fall environment), as well as make some kind of arrangement for telemetry, tracking, and communications. The only suitable facilities of that class available to US operators is the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN), and while NASA has made public statements offering access to commercial users the system is obsolescent and heavily taxed by even the modest amount of interplanetary missions.
SpaceX has not demonstrated the capability for a Lunar landing vehicle (the fiction that they’ll use a Dragon capsule for all planetary body descent and ascent is cartoon engineering at its finest) nor any of a multitude of other needed capabilities for a Lunar surface mission. This is notwithstanding that the Falcon Heavy is just slightly more capable than a Saturn IB and has less than half the payload capacity of a Saturn V. I expect their architecture for a Lunar mission, such as it is, would be to launch two F-H vehicles, one with the command/service and lander vehicles, the other with the trans-Lunar injection system which would rendezvous in Earth orbit, but all of this would need to be demonstrated before any responsible party would engage in a crewed Lunar mission. At this point in comparison to the Apollo program, SpaceX is at a pre-AS-201 phase of development with regard to Lunar mission capability.
Stranger
NASA started development on the lunar lander module in, IIRC, 1964…so, 4 years from start of development until their first test flights. I don’t think it’s that big a stretch to say that SpaceX could, in theory, have a similar capability on the same time table, especially considering that if the president and congress authorized it NASA could just give them the plans for the original one (assuming they don’t have them already), if nothing else. As to testing Falcon Heavy, as you said they plan to do several tests this year, but also as you said they have had several delays, so who knows? But this is only 2017…so, 2020 is still 2.5 years away from the hypothetical, and I don’t think they would have trouble testing their craft by then, especially since they still want to start doing crewed missions to the ISS at some point in the near future. And they still want to send those tourists around the Moon prior to that time frame as well.
Could they put it all together? I don’t see why not, but as I’m sure you will be quick to point out that doesn’t constitute evidence. What I really wanted to know was what you answered quite well up thread, which is, leaving aside whether they could do it technically, could the president and Congress direct NASA to use a private contractor for the mission. As I said earlier, I appreciate all the answers…it’s what I thought, but I thought it was an interesting enough question to ask here in GQ and get some others perspective. My own has been mainly from a DOD/DOE perspective WRT government contracting, I’ve never dealt with NASA at all, and while it SHOULD all be the same I can tell you there are a lot of differences between DOD and DOE WRT contracting.
That’s why I said the money could go in the form of a prize. Just because ‘Cost-Plus’ has been the way industry has fleeced the government in the past doesn’t mean we have to do it that way in the future.
Fixed cost contracts would work, except private industry has learned that governments tend to keep changing the requirements on long-term projects as the political winds blow in different directions, and this drives up costs.
My preferred method of funding is simply to announce that you need to put payload X in location Y under these conditions, and then let launch providers bid for the contract. That’s the way private satellites contract with private launch providers. Why should NASA be any different? Let all the launch services bid for a very well-defined contract.
Failing that, just announce a large prize for the first company to land people on the moon and return them safely, perhaps with some staged up-front capital for meeting certain milestones.
First, we aren’t talking about satellite launchers - we’re talking about sending a presumably manned mission to the Moon or Mars. That’s the context in which I said that NASA has been working on (and failing at) providing a working system for such missions.
Let’s recap NASA’s experience in manned space flight since Apollo.
After Apollo, NASA came up with a couple of missions that were essentially using repurposed Apollo hardware. Skylab was launched with a Saturn V, and used an Apollo command/service module to take the astronauts up and back using a Saturn 1b - itself a vestige of the Apollo program.
After that came Apollo-Soyuz, which also used surplus Apollo hardware.
Next came the Space Shuttle, which by most engineering standards would be considered a partially failed project, because it never did come close to its requirements for launch cost and turnaround time.
The Shuttle was partially the victim of politics, not of NASA’s engineering skills or those of its subcontractors. During the Apollo buildup, NASA intentionally spread its facilities around the country in as many states as possible, to maintain political support. This was a smart political move, but made NASA operations more expensive.
When the Shuttle was green lit, it also had to be spread around so that all the various politicians who voted for it could wet their beaks. This is the same type of political compromise that drove up the costs of the Concorde and Airbus aircraft.
The shuttle was further compromised by the needs of the military, which required certain orbits to be reachable and certain payload sizes to be accommodated.
NASA originally said that the Shuttle would cost $43 billion to develop, and $54 million for each flight (in constant 2011 dollars), and would deliver payload into orbit for $1400/kg, again in 2011 dollars.
In fact, the per-launch cost of the shuttle by 2011 was $450 million - only about 9 times over NASA’s estimate. If this had been a privately funded program, it would have failed right there. In 2011 dollars, the total cost of the Shuttle system was estimated at $196 billion.
It also never flew anywhere near the number of times per year it was supposed to. NASA originally projected 50 flights per year, which was later downgraded to 12-15 flights per year. In fact, there were a total of 135 flights of the shuttle, over a period of 30 years, for an average of 4.5 flights per year.
The whole purpose of the shuttle was to bring down the cost of space access. It completely failed in that. And of course, we now know that NASA’s safety estimates were way off, and it took them nearly 25 years to finally admit that the design was inherently unsafe and needed to be scrapped.
After the Shuttle, the ISS was the next big program. It too went way over budget, primarily due to constant requirements changes dictated by changes in Congress and the Presidency. During this time, the Space Launch Initiative was the new big project to build a manned rocket. That program came up with three designs, none of which proved to be feasible, and SLI was cancelled.
The failure of SLI led directly into the new Constellation program, which was immediately hamstrung by political decisions that required the use of ex-shuttle parts and facilities, to keep all those NASA facilities open in the states of powerful politicians. Crazy decisions were made, such as trying to use a Shuttle-derived solid rocket booster
to send astronauts into orbit. Obama mercifully pulled the plug on Constellation in 2009, and took the smart road and decided to let private space companies figure out how to get the astronauts up to the ISS. But this meant completely ceding manned space flight to the Russians and Chinese for a decade or more.
However, the foolishness didn’t end there. Remember those powerful Senators with the unnecessary NASA facilities in their states? Can’t have that. So the Senate directed NASA to build a new heavy-lift rocket program, the SLS. This despite the fact that SLS had no mission, there was no funding to build the thing on the schedule demanded, and it was still being saddled with the idiotic need to reuse Shuttle hardware wherever it could.
Like the Shuttle, SLS promises to be somewhat of a White Elephant. It is an EXPENSIVE rocket. So far, 7.7 billion has been spent on it, and it’s projected to cost about $20 billion by 2023. It is also expected to cost over $1 billion per launch, and the launch manifest only has 12 missions planned until 2033.
That low cadence means every SLS mission will be a one-off, with no chance to develop a launch rhythm that you need to shake out potential safety issues and procedures.
So… As I said, NASA has been trying and failing to come up with a real successor to the Space Shuttle for at least 20 years.
In the meantime, SpaceX`s Falcon Heavy is expected to fly later this summer, and it can lift almost as much into LEO as the block I SLS. (54 tonnes vs 70 for SLS). But more importantly, SpaceX is guaranteeing launch prices of about $90m, as compared to over a billion for SLS.
Both Blue Horizon and SpaceX are planning boosters that will lift even more than SLS. And they will also be priced much lower than SLS. They will likely be able to lift mass into GTO or lunar orbit for 1/5 to 1/10 of the cost of SLS.
I’m not knocking SpaceX. I love what they’re doing. I’m just saying we need to keep a sense of realism going.
The reality is that SpaceX may do great things in the future - but it hasn’t done them yet. They may be talking about sending people to the Moon or Mars. But the reality is they haven’t put a man into orbit around Earth yet. China’s done that. SpaceX hasn’t even sent animals into space and brought them back safely. Iran has done that.
That’s the reality of SpaceX. Forget about America. They’re still trying to catch up with Iran.
They’re also still catching up with Scaled Composites. They’re the private company which actually has put a man into space. Mike Melvill flew SpaceShipOne above 100 kilometers in 2004 - which is the official boundary for spaceflight.
But what is Scaled Composites doing in 2017? Very little. Which shows how difficult it is to sustain a space program.
Really? Because what SpaceX has actually done is fly payloads into orbit, fly the first stages back down to land at both ground locations and on freaking moving barges in the ocean, and show the capability to quickly turn around and safely re-fly those boosters.
That is a hell of an achievement, which required a bunch of ground-breaking technologies, such as the ability to restart an engine while flying backwards at hypersonic speeds. It promises to completely change the way space access is done.
SpaceX has also developed a crew spacecraft that has 3D-printed engines that can be used both as a launch escape system and to provide retro-propulsion for powered landings. That’s a bloody impressive feat as well.
SpaceX has also designed their own rocket engines from scratch. A whole bunch of them, with higher performance than any other engines to date. They have also been pioneering the use of hyper-cooled fuels to raise performance to unheard of levels.
Blue Origin has not only demonstrated retro-propulsion, but they have been testing their own engines, including the BE-4 which can burn either liquid hydrogen or methane. This engine is finally going to replace the Russian RD-180’s that American rocket companies have been saddled with.
That’s kind of like saying that the first digital calculators were no big deal. After all, mechanical adding machines had been doing the same thing for decades…
What SpaceX is doing now makes those old Atlas and Titan rockets look absolutely primitive.
Just what NASA rockets are they launching?
Look, NASA has done wonderful things. I’m a fan. JPL should be a shrine to human achievement. But the fact is, when it comes to actually lifting stuff into orbit, private industry surpassed NASA some time ago, and the innovation in the private sector is accelerating. NASA can’t hope to compete with SLS.
That’s ridiculous. Scaled composites is just boosting an aircraft to the legal limit of space with rocket power. It’s suborbital, lasts for a few minutes, and has no real expansion capability beyond that.
I believe that’s because A) they had a fatal crash, and B) their technology is a dead-end.
SpaceX CLEARLY has the capability to do much more than Scaled. They could have put people in their Dragon Capsule and safetly flown them to the ISS and back. To say they haven’t demonstrated any significant capability yet is just ridiculous. They are regularly sending spaceships to the ISS which dock, are refilled, then safely land back on Earth. Next year, their Dragon V2 will be man-rated, but V1 could have carried people if SpaceX was willing to do so and the government allowed it.
If we had an ISS emergency and SpaceX was the only game in town for some reason, it could be pressed into service to fly a Dragon to the ISS and bring the astronauts back, with hardware currently in its inventory.
Setting aside the fact the Lunar Module could not fit within the fairing diameter of the Falcon Heavy by a fair margin (it barely fit within the 21 foot base diameter of the Lunar Module Adapter) it is not the vehicle you would want to use for any future lunar missions. It was at the limit of its capability to deliver two astronauts and a very lightweight go cart to the Lunar surface at moderate latitudes. Unless the point of returning to the Moon is just to erect another flag and put down a few more footsteps, it isn’t capable of allowing a mission to accomplish much more than the original Apollo missions for which the only goal was to get there and bring back a small amount of surface samples.
Going from an as-yet unflown vehicle to an Earth Orbit Rendezvous, two successive heavy launch vehicle flight, trans-Lunar injection and orbit with return in two and a half years is beyond ambitious even if no problems or failures are encountered. Apollo-Saturn was a highly accelerated effort with an essentially unlimited budget, using “all up” integrated flight testing instead of the planned incremental testing which encountered several near-catastrophic anomalies, and it still took three and a half years from the first flight of the Saturn IB (testing the first stage of the Saturn V) to Apollo XI lunar lander. I know that a lot of people seem to believe that we don’t really need to do testing and that we can just run engineering simulations to “prove” that everything will work, and thus accelerate development efforts and dispense with the time and cost of testing, but in two decades of engineering practice I have yet to see that approach produce viable results. I will personally be highly surprised if SpaceX flies their own private crewed mission to LEO before sometime in 2019 and is certified to fly NASA astronauts to the ISS by the end of 2020, regardless of what Musk and Gwynne Shotwell say.
IF the government is getting “fleeced” by cost plus incentive fee contracts, that is because of contract mismanagement by the government. One significant aspect of CPIF contracts is that contractors have to report schedule issues in an Integrated Product Team (IPT) and provide regular contract deliverable reports per the Contract Data Requirements List (CDRL), ensuring that the government contracting authority is well-informed about the status of the program. One of the supposed cost-cuttiung measures of FFP contracts is that a lot of these reporting requirements are cut and the contractors only have to provide status information at contract milestones. In theory, this reduces a lot of the overhead costs for both the government and the contractor by just managing the contract “by requirements”. The problem is that the contractor can use this to mask problems and issues that are occurring, especially capability mismatches between contractors and subcontractors, until they grow into huge stumbling blocks that require additional money and time. This is particularly true in the early development phase while requirement allocations are being performed. In many successful programs that are CPIF, independent oversight by independent technical representatives gives guidance to the government on whether the contractor is deviating from the intent or is using a less than optimal technical approach, and the contractor can be contractually redirected or incentivized by withholding their for-profit fee. In FFP, the government contracting authority really has no authority other than to withhold payment at a given milestone by demonstrating that the contractor has not provided sufficient deliverables, often with little insight into details.
The problem of requirements creep is a separate one that goes beyond contracting and into the overarching politics behind development efforts, and the only real way of dealing with it is to lock in requirements after the initial system requirements analysis phase and then don’t change them unless there is some prevailing reason to do so. Unfortunately, on large projects it is rare that the contracting authority has the final say and requirements are levied that make no sense, e.g. the Bradley Fighting Vehicle program.
I know this appeals to libertarian-minded people, but there is a point at which private industry simply cannot develop the capital to develop a technical capability, and that breakpoint is on close order of about US$1B, e.g. the cost of a refinery, cryogenic processing plant, or similar complex systems which take several years to construct. Even then, backers fund these efforts with a very specific return on investment that can be essentially guaranteed by market forces over a moderate duration even though predicting the market conditions and specific amortization schedule is a black art.
In the case of a multibillion dollar program such as a return-to-Lunar-surface effort, the prize would have to be sufficiently attractive to not only bear the costs of the development effort but the interest accrued against it, particularly if there is no other commercial viability in the foreseeable future. The reason the SLS has such a low projected launch rate is because nobody currently needs a 130 ton to LEO launch capability, at least not anywhere near the costs of an SLS launch. The Falcon Heavy is practically speaking the heaviest commercial capability that is likely to be in sufficient demand to justify launching a few a year for commercial services, and even SpaceX recognizes this (hence why they have campaigned and politicked heavily to be awarded the ability to compete on EELV defense and GPS contracts).
There are areas of development where appealing to innovation makes a lot of sense, but heavy capital investment infrastructures are not one. For example, there is no possible fiscal justification for deploying and maintaining the Global Positioning System constellation, even though there are now several multi-billion dollar commercial industries using the formerly military-only capability, and has become an enabling technology for everything from autonomous cars to real-time aviation navigation. The reason we have governments is to provide services that private industry cannot afford or that do not have a foreseeable ROI on their own, and expecting “the market” to suddenly become prescient and start investing in far future capabilities with no business case. As a practical matter, there is no way the US Congress is going to approve a discretionary line item for a “prize” of billions of dollars for someone to undertake a stunt like going to the Moon, even if there were a prevailing reason to do so. The people who control that discretionary money want to see that a certain portion of it goes to making sure their constituents and friends get a reasonable slice of that money rather than a payout to some random future winner of a contest. And while that may seem self-serving, it also makes sense; they are, after all, elected to represent their constituency and make sure that tax monies are spent in a way that benefits more than a few space enthusiasts, which means jobs back on Earth.
Can they use a private company? Yes. Will they get to the Moon or Mars for $20 billion? No.
SpaceX is a lot closer to being able to put people into orbit than either Iran or Scaled Composites have ever been. Sending a rocket, with or without a passenger on board, up to the “edge of space” and then right back down is a lot easier than putting one into orbit. SpaceX has put payloads into orbit. The only reason they haven’t put humans into orbit is that they’re not yet confident enough in the safety of their equipment. Scaled Composites was that confident… but it turns out that maybe they shouldn’t have been. But if they weren’t worried about the risks, they could do it right now, with a fairly high probability of success.
SpaceX isn’t nearly as impressive as their hype makes them out to be. But that shouldn’t diminish the fact that they are, in fact, still really impressive.