If you talk to most people, the concept out there of private citizens in space is pretty much "billionaires flaunting their money and showing off." That's the impression of the Blue Origin New Shepard suborbital flights, and I've seen at least a dozen cartoons from different artists riffing on that idea.
On the other side, there wasn't much said about the Inspiration4 mission last fall and I've seen nobody making fun of it or even acknowledging it. This was largely a philanthropic mission, raising a quarter of a billion dollars for St. Jude Children’s Hospital and their fight against childhood cancer. That mission was largely funded by Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old billionaire entrepreneur and CEO of Shift4, an integrated payment processing company.
Today, Isaacman and SpaceX announced a partnership to do this sort of thing over again; the Polaris Program. Combined with an already-announced partnership with Axiom Space, they currently represent six manned Crew Dragon missions with the first launch No Earlier Than the fourth quarter of this year. That mission has been named Polaris Dawn and is a Jared Isaccman-led crew.
[T]he mission will be Crew Dragon’s second free-flyer mission after Inspiration4, meaning that the spacecraft will fly on its own for the full five-day duration. That gives SpaceX and the Polaris team far more freedom, freedom that they plan to take advantage of.
SpaceX aspires for Polaris Dawn to be the highest Earth orbit humans have traveled to since the 1960s and the furthest humans have been from the planet since the 1970s. NASA’s Apollo missions, which sent humans to the Moon, hold the all-time record, which Polaris Dawn will barely scratch the surface of. But in Earth orbit, the record – 1368 kilometers (850 mi) – was set by Gemini XI in September 1966.
The mission is to be a combination of medical research and doing new things that either just aren't done or haven't been done in decades. One those is to test an EVA-rated spacesuit developed by SpaceX by taking a spacewalk in one.
At approximately 500 kilometers above the Earth, the crew will attempt the first-ever commercial extravehicular activity (EVA) with SpaceX-designed extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits, upgraded from the current intravehicular (IVA) suit. Building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require thousands of spacesuits; the development of this suit and the execution of the EVA will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions.
I remembered reading about SpaceX saying they'd do alternate spacesuits last summer, but I didn't remember the money quote.
NASA had been working to develop a new EVA suit since 2007 and "With $420M spent and another $625M expected, suits won't be "ready for flight until April 2025 at the earliest."
2007 to 2025? Eighteen years and over a billion dollars to develop a suit? SpaceX's design will be ready for that "first-ever commercial EVA" by the fourth quarter when Polaris Dawn launches.
Polaris Dawn crew, (L-R) Anna Menon, Mission Specialist & Medical Officer; Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Pilot; Jared “Rook” Isaacman; Sarah Gillis, Mission Specialist. Isaccman and Poteet are both executives at Shift4 as well as extremely qualified pilots; Gillis and Menon are both engineers with SpaceX on the manned spaceflight side. More detailed biographies on the four at the bottom of the mission page.
The performance gap between old-school space methodology and the private industry approach is growing wider by the month. This suit development is a perfect example of it. At what point will it become obvious to all that the old-school approach is simply a money pit that does not deliver the desired results, but just a government funded jobs program to funnel money to selected contractors ?
ReplyDeleteBTW, KSC was a great visit today.
My wife and I were talking about the space suit thing. It's practically a joke:
DeleteNASA contractors, "It's now 2007, so we'll have it for you by 2025. Maybe. That'll be $1.05 billion."
SpaceX: "EVA spacesuit development? We can have it for you in 90 days. Is that soon enough?"
BTW, KSC was a great visit today.
Good to hear.
NASA learned from their space suit fire a few years ago. Fortunately that suit was unoccupied and on the ground when that happened. Hopefully SpaceX won't have to learn the hard way with the suit occupied...
DeleteI always thing of Jerry Pournelle's "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" (Saturday, September 11, 2010):
Deletehttps://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucraticorganization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be thosewho are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicatedclassroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers andlaunch technicians andscientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in theformer Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself.Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, manyprofessors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASAheadquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain andkeep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and controlpromotions within the organization."
Back in late '80s and early '90s I was working on some NASA projects from the contractor side and my wife was working on the Cape for the launch contractors. We both made the observation that the most remarkable thing about NASA was that people still got things done despite
DeleteThey're virtually the perfect example of an arthritic bureaucracy.
SpaceX is eating NASA for breakfast, lunch, AND dinner. NASA is waaaaaay too hidebound and political, passing out public pork to their buddies and mostly pissing away the money.
ReplyDeleteSpaceX can do it better-faster-cheaper. NASA is officially a dinosaur!
Igor, SpaceX is eating everyone, NASA, ESA, JAXA, the ChiComs, the Russians, Indians and, well, everyone for breakfast, lunch, dinner, afternoon snack, midnight munchies and obscure hunger pains.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering what SpaceX was doing regarding an EVA suit since NASA's backassward hack of a Russian suit was going just where NASA always goes, nowhere.
Just knew they were working on something. NASA's suits are too bulky, too ugly, too not-sci-fi enough.
So... now we get to wait to find out if it's something completely new or a derivation/extrapolation of the existing flight suit.
It has been eerily quiet here near the Cape with no launches after the January pace SpaceX was on. Spaceflight Now is showing two for February.
DeleteThe last numbers I heard were that they were aiming for over 50 launches this year, which is as many as China is planning on.
Knowing SpaceX, the new EVA suit will look like something off of the Expanse, which a lot of their people most likely watched. The current suit looks a bit like the Expanse suits, but in white. I think their EVA suit will be the same. They will be very SciFi like suites.
DeleteJust found out from the SpaceX webpage that the EVA suit will be an enhanced Flight Suit. So either a super flight suit or added pieces parts. Soooo cool...
Delete