Several things constitute a “commercial” contract:

— Payment on delivery of product (whether hardware or service)
— Fixed price
— Substantial contractor cost-sharing

Typical defense contracting, which is what NASA and most other government contracting is modeled on, involves none of these things. The government pays up front and incrementally for work completed, not product delivered. The government pays for the cost of the product plus some modest profit fee, even when the cost goes through the roof. And the contractor invests little of their own funds.

Note that some big, old defense contractors have undertaken projects like EELV and even experimental LV demos that involved some of these attributes and thus acted “commercially”. So it’s not a question size or age of the company. It’s a question of whether the government is acting like a commercial customer and whether the company in question (big or small) is willing to work on those terms.

FWIW…

lol

there is a trick in a government where free enterprise rules, but with government interaction in the form of R&D and regulation to making it all work.

We have followed the “government only path” for 40 years and go nowhere. Time to try something different.

Robert G. Oler

sorry if you thought I had implied that Spudis was a Ares hugger…he clearly is not.

My point was that the American people dont buy the VSE’s explanation of why we should return to the Moon.

Really neither do I.

It is dangerous to write history while the events are still playing out, but the first read on history is the viewpoints of current observers and in my view the space station will be viewed as the “last great NASA project”.

What NASA got use to with Apollo and has since spent four decades trying to recreate is something “wonderful” in space that accomplishes heroic kind of massive herioc “Leap” that changes everything.

I no longer think that is possible. We have spent over a couple of 100 billion trying desperatly to “do this or that” which opens space….we finally got the station and that is what we ought to try and use…and just put the cap on trying to do things like “live on the Moon” or whatever. At some point if the station works the technology will grow (with some R&D efforts) that will take us to the Moon …until then we should explore with our machines.

Robert G. Oler

“If the same money goes into private enterprise which does things like you know build great commercial airliners and the best medical system known to man …etc it is hard for me to imagine how the rest of the world will keep up.”

Yeah right. Is this the same private industry that can’t wait to send our jobs over to China for the cheap labor? The same private industry that hasn’t built a new nuclear power plant in this country in decades? The same private industry that is crippling our ability to compete around the world thanks to the fact that they provide the most expensive and inefficient private health insurance system in the world resulting in the US having one the highest infant mortality rates of any industrialized country? Somethings are done more efficiently by private industry and some things are done more efficiently by government.

If we had waited around for private industry to decide to launch the first satellite into orbit, we’d probably still be waiting!

“It’s interesting that Ares isn’t being put forth in the competition against the other commercial options. Doesn’t ATK think it could compete?”

ATK knows they can’t and they know it extremely well, I think they’ll also be smart enough not to make too much noise. ATK are good at what they do, extremely good, but what they do is useful as boosters while being completely unusable as first stages for anything delicate be it humans or technology (it’s simply not something current solid rocketry technology lends itself to at the scale we’re talking about).

Robert G. Oler I have to correct you about Dr. Paul Spudis: he is no way conceivable any kind of Ares or Constellation hugger. Quite the opposite he has tirelessly for many years pointed out that ESAS/Constellation/Ares does not follow the VSE at all.

(I see others too have again pointed out to you that ESAS/Constellation etc. are not the VSE, I wish you would grasp that point Robert because you don’t do anyone any favors by equating the two, it just confuses those who don’t know better).

Not even NASA under Griffin was bold enough to call what they were doing the VSE hence the various names they made up in its place (can’t remember them right now, they’re seldom used since they focused everything on Constellation).

The Obama administration’s approach realigns NASA with the ideals of the VSE and does it extremely well, what makes Dr. Paul Spudis worried as far as I can tell is that Flexible Path seems a bit woolly and yes it is a bit woolly and ambiguous but given time I think he’ll come to see that it’s actually a benefit and improvement upon the VSE because if there was anything that more than anything else enabled NASA under Griffin to subvert and defecate all over the VSE as it was intended it was the date for a return to the moon.

As for the strange people that are trying to defend Constellation by putting the new approach in a bad light using all sorts of insane logic; the rest of this comment is for you.

The simple facts that have been proven over and over again are that under Constellation NASA decided to pour everything into NASA-internal LEO access with cost-plus contracting to big aerospace, quickly ran out of cash trying to make some obscene designs work (only the smallest of them actually, the Ares V wasn’t even truly on the go yet but still ran into difficulties), quickly failed to meet any and all reasonable deadlines, quickly scrapped, delayed, or outright deleted (like NIAC) many other parts of NASA in a vain useless attempt to fund Constellation, and quickly scrapped or delayed all the bits and pieces needed to actually have a purpose for the obscene launchers such as the majority of robotic precursor missions to the moon and initial work on the Altair lunar lander not to speak of the majority of the actual hardware to be used by manned missions on the moon. It was all gone, and fast.

I bet none of you cried much over the loss of those jobs.

And I’ll add that the VSE was never intended to require a rise in funding for NASA, the VSE said straight out that it was intended to make NASA make it all work under the existing budget level using if they absolutely had to whatever time they required to do so and where it not for the obscene designs pushed by Griffin when he became administrator it would have been perfectly possible to achieve. In fact NASA already had a plan in place to do just that before Griffin arrived.

So to those this is aimed at: please stop trying to act like Constellation was a good thing or even truly attempted to do any of the things you claim: it didn’t and that’s why it failed and failed hard. That is not opinion it is fact.

Sending astronauts throughout the inner solar system is not a vision?

“A vision doesn’t guarantee success, but without a vision it is a guarantee of failure.”

History doesn’t bear this out. Despite suppossedly following a “Vision for Space Exploration” for six years, NASA has no actual exploration hardware to show for it. Despite setting targets, dates, and extensive architectural plans, the Space Exploration Initiative died at the study stage. Same goes for NASA’s post-Apollo Mars vision.

“Vision” is secondary to funding and hardware. None of these prior efforts got substantial, or any, actual exploration hardware under development despite extensive vision documents, targets, dates, and plans. The new budget promises to get actual exploration hardware under development right out of the gate. I’ll take that over a paper “vision” any day.

“We are talking about the government here. Many NASA managers have built very successful careers flushing millions of dollars down the toilet, year after year after year.”

Like spending billions of dollars on the nation’s fourth intermediate-lift LEO launch vehicle and practically nothing on actual exploration hardware, despite having a “Vision for Space Exploration” that directed to the NASA Administrator to do otherwise?

“A serious R&D program would say, for example: We are going to launch an empty tank, then robotically fuel it on orbit, by 2015. Then if they don’t do it, the program has failed, period.”

Read the budget documents. They include references to schedule and budget caps like:

“…funded at $0.4-$1.0 billion over lifetimes of less than 5-years”

“…smaller scale (less than $100 million generally) and shorter duration projects that are competitively selected”

“…missions that are less than $800 million in life-cycle cost”

They also include technical details like:

“…in-orbit propellant transfer and storage, inflatable modules, automated/autonomous rendezvous and docking, closed-loop life support systems”

“…in-situ resource utilization and advanced in-space propulsion”

“…New approaches to first-stage launch propulsion; In-space advanced engine technology development and demonstrations”

“…robotic precursor missions to the Moon Mars and its moons Lagrange points Moon, moons, points, and nearby asteroids to scout targets for
future human activities, and identify the hazards and resources”

“…Demonstrating a factory to process lunar or asteroid materials”

FWIW…

“…with no vision is worse than a vision with no budget”

Exactly! And 10 years from now when the tax payers ask what have you produced with the billions we gave you for R&D, NASA will say what they’ve pretty much been saying about the ISS, a lot of good science and a lot of good possibilities for the future. But we really can’t develop anything right now because that would hurt our endless R&D budget plus its time to extend our $3 billion a year ISS program to 2028:-)

It’s a bit early to know all the details, but I suspect there will be a mixture of both. A certain amount of broad basic and applied research is needed. Technology demonstrations of various sorts, including in space, are also needed as results look more promising. The budget information makes it pretty clear that real technology demonstrations are part of the mixture. For example:

“Flagship demonstration program: … Demonstrates critical technologies such as in-orbit propellant transfer and storage, inflatable modules, automated/autonomous rendezvous and docking, closed-loop life support systems, and other next-generation capabilities.”

My interpretation of this is that there would be work on in-orbit propellant transfer and storage, including technology demonstration(s) in orbit.

Technology demonstrations are also part of the “Heavy-Lift and Propulsion” line that contains the quote you mentioned.

The ISS work looks like it will be the location for some of the technology demonstrations.

The “Space Technology” line includes mechanisms like prizes that typically involve demonstrations of meeting specified technology goals.