Six years ago this past May, when Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode a SpaceX Crew Dragon from pad 39A on the Kennedy Space center, it was the first time that a manned flight took place from the US, since the last Space Shuttle flight in the summer of 2011. With the safe return of Crew Dragon, the US space agency broke a nearly decade-long gap in its ability to put humans into orbit.
New readers or people who don't follow this closely may not be clear on this, but when the Commercial Crew program's first contracts were cut, the early winner was Boeing, and their Starliner. Nobody really thought the startup small rocket company, SpaceX would be able to do it. After all Boeing had a massive head start on the little guys and had been a supplier to NASA for practically as long as NASA existed. Since that first SpaceX flight in May of 2020, Boeing's Starliner has not completed one mission, and only made it to the space station one time thanks to a combination of luck and the extreme competence of Butch Wilmore, pilot for that mission.
That mission was later declared a Type A mishap, the worst level in NASA's failure analysis system, and probably won’t fly another crewed mission before 2028. Based on results so far, it's fair to take any date Boeing issues and double the waiting time.
A complication is starting to attract attention to the lack of a second, proven reliable, vehicle to get astronauts into space. The ISS is scheduled to reach end of life in 2030, and whether or not that's a latest or earliest date for the ISS to be deorbited is somewhat like the old jokes about optimists vs. pessimists. A common theme is that each one sees it their way.
With the International Space Station slated for retirement in the early 2030s, NASA is partnering with several US companies to develop private space stations. As part of that effort, the private companies will have to work with NASA to determine how they will transport astronauts to and from their space stations, some of which could launch as soon as 2030.
And it turns out this is more difficult than it sounds.
Over the last couple of years, we've run articles on these efforts to develop private space stations. We've seen mention of Axiom Space, Vast, Voyager, and Blue Origin. SpaceX is in a bit of strange place right now considering they're pretty much the world leader in spaceflight. They haven't been contracted to work on a new space station now, and there's apparently belief in the contracting group at NASA that SpaceX is pushing everything they do in the direction of using Starship and "it's too big" for these small space stations. Add to that the fact that there's no agreement to keep producing Crew Dragon capsules
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said the company will fly Crew Dragon and the Falcon 9 rocket for a finite number of years, possibly for less than a decade as the company transitions its launches to Starship.
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“It’s a disaster waiting to happen,” one industry source told Ars about Crew Dragon availability in the 2030s. [emphasis added - SiG]
Needing a replacement for the Crew Dragon implies that they'd like the new one to be interchangeable with the predecessor and that a well-made copy of the Dragon would be an acceptable alternative. Enter a company we've reported on a few times in the last couple of years, the European startup called The Exploration Company.
Last week, the company hosted an office-opening celebration in Webster, Texas, within a couple of miles of the Johnson Space Flight Center. Founder Hélène Huby said her company was considering making Houston the base of its operations to develop a crewed spacecraft.
The Exploration Company has already won funding from the European Space Agency to develop a cargo vehicle, called Nyx, to carry supplies to the International Space Station. An initial mission may happen in late 2028 or 2029. And Huby has made no secret of her desire to build a crew vehicle.
“It’s very clear that in the United States there is a big need for an additional crew vehicle, and nobody exactly knows if Dragon will continue to serve,” she said. “And even if Dragon continues to serve, which I wish it will because it’s an amazing vehicle, then it’s good to have a bit more competition. And also the path for Boeing is kind of uncertain right now.”
Huby is seeking to attract funding both from the European Space Agency and NASA for the development of a crew vehicle, and then to leverage that money to raise additional private capital for a crew vehicle. The company has already taken preliminary steps toward this, which she estimates will require about eight years and $4 billion.
SpaceX Dragon meets sunrise at launch pad for Crew-10 flight March 10, 2025.
Image credit: SpaceX
Eric Berger at Ars Technica adds this good summary to the situation.
If this sounds far-fetched, perhaps it should not. Huby has shown considerable skill in working with European space officials to emerge as a leading contender to build a crew vehicle at a time when leaders there have made their desire for one clear.
A little late to the party, but...
ReplyDeleteThough we've seen and heard, what, 5 manned projects from Europe in the last 30 years that never got past the planning stage. As bad or worse than all the systems based on Shuttle components that never got very far, though at least Ares1 launched (and scared the carp out of everyone involved.)
Don't know the economic viability of a 4-6 person crew vehicle in the age of Starship.
Aschbacher at ESA is laying the foundation for a money grab. The 'coalition of the willing' and more are seen as competitors for a slice of the pie. The 'rapidly changing landscape' is the political severence from the USA. Under the increasingly austere conditions, it is vital to ESA that they stake their claim wide and deep that the political will is caught up in the surge.
ReplyDeleteThe lack of progress, er, perhaps better said as a stalemate which Beans mentions is the obstructionist body politic. Aschbacher sees his role as reversing that trend. A tool to this end is to paint USA as an unreliable partner.
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We're far enough along that NASA should be out of the contracting business. The agency can be confined as regulatory or purely functionary.
The American taxpayers should not be the prime customers of private companies.
I know, this seems to be the tired old song about govt and taxpayers. Actually it is not. I am not looking backwards. I am looking to open that door to the future: private companies let their own contracts.
This is so very frustrating. Billions and billions and billions, and is NASA doing anything effectively anymore? I work too hard for my government to tax me and fund spiraling failure after spiraling failure. When Starship gets going, and I am in the camp that it will get going, it is very quickly going to make a great many things of the present obsolete. At least SpaceX knows Drago is already a relic of the past.
ReplyDeleteSpace News headline put it best : "The Exploration Company establishes US entity to pursue [US] government contracts." https://spacenews.com/the-exploration-company-establishes-us-entity-to-pursue-government-contracts/
ReplyDeleteWell, it has worked out pretty well for Rocket Lab, so I guess it's like paying to join a club. Except this club has billion dollar club giveaways, not a box of donuts.
DeleteSince I didn't go down this road while putting this post together, but the first three comments do, so maybe I should have.
ReplyDeleteI think NASA should be out of the launch business, and if they're allowed to exist let them help universities or smaller companies develop plans for science missions to new places. I find it amazing that there hasn't been a mission to Uranus, Neptune or Pluto since the one flyby they each had. For the first two, Voyager 2, and for Pluto it was New Horizons. That Pluto flyby was 2015, and Voyager 2's Neptune flyby was August of 1989 almost exactly 37 years ago. Don't tell me we know everything about Uranus and Neptune. We've learned new things about Earth since 1989 and we've got a few thousand years of observations. I can't believe we know everything about those two giant planets.
The biggest mission planned for the coming years is the Dragonfly drone to Saturn's moon Titan, leaving in two years. The biggest rocket NASA has had built is the SLS - which is so expensive, even the Fed.gov can afford to launch it often enough to be sure they can get good enough at using it.
Instead of encouraging and enabling missions (yes, including some funding) to learn more about these planets and how to get there in better ways, NASA has devolved into "we'll help pay for our plans when you'll build them for us."
Maybe the industry has changed, but today, "Cost Plus" got us Starliner, where welders are hired by going to a bar, and finding people who have never even touched a welding machine, or fixed cost which many companies find too hard to work to.
The only company with the experience and attitude to do these things is SpaceX. NASA can't keep up with them. Even with all the talk about going for reusability and the knowledge SpaceX displays a few time every week, nobody has started landing and reusing boosters except them. Not China, certainly not the European Space Agency, not Japan. No one.
The problem with saying we have to slash government spending is the vast majority of people are really saying to slash everything except their favorite waste. I think I dropped that paradigm in 2010.
One thing you didn't mention was that the Boeing/SpaceX contracts were significatly more lucrative for Boeing. If I remember correctly, Boeing got 2/3 of the contract amount and SpaceX got 1/3.
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