The questions says it all. With the retirement of the shuttle, when it the next projected time that NASA will send a man/woman into space?
SpaceX’s Dragon crew module has been contracted by NASA for flight testing.
So, around 2015 maybe?
The title and the OP ask different questions. Private companies have sent humans into space, and might do so again before NASA does. No private company has ever sent humans into orbit, just a quick up-and-down, but even that might conceivably happen before NASA does again, depending on what happens with the funding situation.
I suppose SpaceX could continue and send someone up in the Dragon just with private funding. But if they lost NASA funding, why would they? Are there any other potential customers? Of course SpaceX is privately funded and Elon Musk is definitely the sort to send someone into orbit just because he can.
Is there any other private company which is working on a orbital human spacecraft with even a slight chance of success?
Isn’t Scaled Composites working on a larger orbital version of Spaceship One?
-XT
SpaceX claims that they can get American astronauts up there for less than half of what the Russians charge. NASA wants them to prove they can do so safely before committing. They’re already scheduled for about a half dozen resupply missions.
The SpaceX website says they’ll be ready for manned spaceflight by 2014. We’ll see.
Crossing my fingers! I’m a big manned-spaceflight buff.
They’re working on it, and I wouldn’t bet against them succeeding eventually, but everyone involved knows that it’s a much harder problem than up-and-down, and I don’t think they’re making any promises about when they’ll be able to pull it off.
And the space station? Is there anybody up there now? How will we re-supply it? And more important, how will we get them down?
The Space Station is still up there and manned. The Russians are taking over the responsibility of bringing people and supplies up and down. The “International” in its name isn’t just there for decoration.
What about Virgin Galactic, or are they totally dependent on what Scaled Composites comes up with?
They are not operational yet, and their flights are going to be sub-orbital. As Chronos said, they could develop an orbital craft, but that’s a hypothetical – and SpaceX already has a reusable orbital craft developed and operational.
There have been around 65 manned flights up to the ISS, and about 25 of those have been with the Russian Soyuz (the other ~40 were with US Space Shuttles).
I know this comes as a suprise to people, but Elon Musk has virtually no money still invested in Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX). Despite bold talk, he hasn’t funded SpaceX indefinitely for the grandiose notion of going into space; he put in seed money to attract other investors. SpaceX is currently on contract to provisionally provide supply and logistic services to NASA for the International Space Station under the Commercial Orbital Transportation System (the unfortunately named COTS), managed through the Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office (yes, C3PO…as least someone is having fun with this). This assumes they can meet all of their technical objectives to demonstrate capability, which they have arguably done to date (albeit marginally). Orbital Sciences Corporation with their Taurus II space launch vehicle and Cygnus cargo capsule is the other successful bidder out of over a dozen serious contenders (although they are not, at this point, attempting to develop manned launch capability).
There are a large number of aerospace startups that have tried to get into the business of building launch systems. Kistler Aerospace (later Rocketplane Kistler), Rotary Rocket, and Blue Origin (funded in part by Amazon.com tycoon Jeff Bezos in a less flashy and bombastic competitor to SpaceX) were all contenders in the field; however, most of these companies hobble along for about a decade trying to develop their technology before running out of funds or interest. There are a large number of other companies that are essentially engineering houses that develop concept designs but are inadequately funded or equipped to build and test full scale systems.
SpaceShip Two is a space launch vehicle in the same way that kissing your cousin on the cheek is “getting some action”; it just barely achieves the boundary of space, and is short of achieving orbital energies by about an order of magnitude. It is a suborbital vehicle intended to service the questionable business model of suborbital space tourism, and cannot be scaled up to an orbital space vehicle capable of reentry speeds. The flights of SpaceShip One were plagued with near-catastrophes that place into question the basic viability of the shuttlecock-type reentry approach for even a suborbital craft.
Stranger
I would think we could outsource that. China maybe?
I’m a huge fan of (manned) spaceflight too, but I’m also a diehard realist.
A real spacecraft is like a real submarine, the only ‘agencies’ that have the necessary resources to build a real one are superpowers. Sure, Branson et al can pour money at it, but its really out of the league of even billionaires. That Virgin flight was neat and all, but it only just barely did what NASA did (and less than what the Soviets did) 50 years ago! And we haven’t heard much from them since.
And the biggest thing I don’t like about independent manned space ventures like that is that I can absolutely 100% guarantee you that someone will be killed. Fairly soon in fact, if it’s aggressively pursued. Too many variables, too much ego, too many individuals more than willing to take too many risks too soon. I don’t blame them, if I had a chance I’d take a pretty big risk too for a chance to get into space. But it would be a PR disaster of epic proportions and diminish support for manned flights in general.
All of NASA’s failures, Apollo 1, Challenger & Columbia, were all caused by bureaucratic decisions not engineering ones. And if you think private funding eliminates bureaucracy, well guess again!
Making the X-15 into a space bus.
I would bet $100 that we will not see another human being launched from US soil into orbit in the next 20 years. And I only limit it to 20 years because you can’t really predict anything 20 years in advance, space technology included. SpaceX will make a good go of it, but they’ll run into the same technical glitches and safety concerns that everyone else has, only to find the US government totally tapped out and unwilling to make the nearly open-ended commitment that has historically been necessary to develop a human spaceflight system. Mercury/Gemini/Apollo had to succeed because of the Russkies. Shuttle had to succeed because originally it was going to carry all military payloads as well as civilian ones. There is no similar imperative now; the military has its own unmanned systems. Also, there’s close to zero private capital available for investment in human spaceflight. No business case.
They did it for at least an order of magnitude less money and resources, though, so it was still pretty impressive.
-XT
I can also fly from America to Spain for vastly less cost, time, and resources than it took Columbus to venture to the New World. That doesn’t mean I should have a holiday named after me.
Stranger
Isn’t it kind of, well, optimistic, to assume that our military will never need manned space programs? I can’t help feeling like we’re letting a military advantage lapse by shutting down our manned space flight program while other countries continue to develop theirs. As a nation, I think the US should be ashamed that we don’t have anything ready to replace the shuttle program.