Why Are NASA's Astrocrats Still Waiting for a Taxi?
For Throwback Wednesday, off-planet privatization
Crew-7 is back on Earth, and alive. It’s the latest in a string of successes for SpaceX’s deal with NASA to send personnel to and from the International Space Station. Soon, Boeing will have the opportunity to (finally) prove it can do the same.
In the late winter of 2020, I reviewed the rocky path that brought commercialization to the nation’s manned-spaceflight program.
Enjoy!
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America, you’ve spent more than $100 billion to design, build and operate the International Space Station. And come autumn, the orbital outpost might not have a single American on board.
That’s the harsh truth offered by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which recently warned that “the NASA presence on the ISS is set to drop to … none by October 2020 if a Commercial Crew Program contractor is not able to begin flying.”
While NASA has relied on contractors to deliver cargo to the ISS for more than seven years, the firms that secured successful bids to transport astronauts are experiencing serious “schedule slippage.” Let’s examine why.
A decade and a half ago, George W. Bush’s administration established NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Program. The shuttle was to be phased out — a long-overdue mercy killing for a legendarily underperforming, hideously expensive vehicle that had a nasty habit of annihilating its entire crew every 68 missions.
But no replacement spacecraft was available. Four years earlier, the VentureStar, a single-stage-to-orbit concept that supporters claimed would finally deliver on the shuttle’s initial promise of thrifty, regular service, got the budget ax — after burning through more than a billion dollars and failing to get a prototype to the launchpad.
Washington wasn’t about to abandon the ISS, and Russia’s Soyuz system could provide rides — for a while, and at an always-rising price. But to its credit, NASA did not waste more time and revenue on another cost-plus, Big Aerospace “solution.”
Its new approach, congressional auditors explained, was “to facilitate the private demonstration of safe, reliable and cost-effective transportation services to low-Earth orbit.”
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