http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php
Pressurized Volume (Dragon) = 245 ft^3

http://www.orbital.com/NewsInfo/Publications/Cygnus_fact.pdf
Pressurized Volume (Cygnus) = 660 ft^3

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/167126main_Transportation_Logistics.pdf
Pressurized Volume (Space Shuttle’s MPLM only, not including the Shuttle Cab) = 1,095 ft^3

COTS-CRS Contract $3.5 Billion for 12 (Dragon) + 8 (Cygnus) = 8,233 ft^3 or $425,632/ft^3

Four STS Flights $2.4 Billion = 4,380 ft^3 or $547,000/ft^3

……but wait STS also enables crew rotations at $80 million per seat. Assuming 2 crew rotations per flight that is a $640 million dollar value lowering the effective $/ft^3 to $401,826/ft^3 which is lower than the price we are paying in the COTS-CRS contract

Again my point isn’t that we shouldn’t have COTS, my point is that the STS isn’t the big money pit everyone is making it out to be. It is actually more cost effective than COTS-CRS however you want to measure it.

Given the gap in COTS logistics support facing us, due to understandable development delays in COTS, in combination with new policies of ISS logistics and life increase over what the GAO assumed last year a modest extension of the STS is good idea.

That is why the Congress wants the STS retirement to be based on the effective utilization of the $100 billion ISS. If we aren’t going to be able to utilize the ISS there is little value in COTS-CRS as well.

Many of wish that we had retired the Orbiter two decades ago and had begun the development of the Jupiter/Orion once it was clear we were never going to get to the airliner like cost structure. Had we done that the ISS could have a been large ground integrated system (a close proto-type of the deep space Mars transit hab) launched in one shot using the Jupiter avoiding the combined high costs of an RLV and modular in space construction. We would likely be landing on Mars right about now for the same money we have spent up to this point. But that did not happen.

Regardless, it’s still not too late to follow that path. If we should destroy the existing $40 billion dollar HLV industrial base though, the HLV path will be shut and we will need to wait for a technology breakthrough approaching the dreams of the science fiction writers (nothing would make me happier) or until we have recovered fiscally from the baby boomers. Re-warming of a (Kero/Lox) HLV (ie a Modern Day SaturnV) is simply not going to generate any lifecycle cost savings over just using the (SRB/LOX/LH2) HLV that we already have.

I wish we hadn’t foolishly destroyed our first Kero/LOX HLV (ie the SaturnV) but at least our generation can learn from their mistakes and stop chasing low cost rainbows.

http://despair.com/mis24x30prin.html

I’m all for funding ways to find low cost approaches but lets wait until they prove themselves before we destroy what works.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/167126main_Transportation_Logistics.pdf

The 16mT per flight of the useful pressurized dry mass the STS can deliver to the ISS (plus a free crew rotation at no extra charge) is based on the ability of the Space Shuttle to deliver the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module. That is unless you think the ISS astronauts are somehow holding their breath as they remove supplies.

Again, STS is in fact less expensive (even at only two flights per year) than COTS-CRS. The President’s own policy significantly expands the ISS support requirements well beyond the prior policies logistics level. A prior logistics support level we cannot achieve even now due to serious COTS-CRS delays. So shutting down STS is equal to shutting down ISS, until such time COTS delievers at about 2x the orginal rate they are currently planning on.

It just makes too much sense to use the STS to give the ISS a logistics back push into the future before we shut STS down at this point.

Anyway the $1.6 Billion for SpaceX is for 12 flights of Dragon x 2,550kg = 30,660kg or $52,287/kg. Orbital gets $1.9 Billion for 8 flights of Cygnus x 2,700kg = 21,600kg or $87,962/kg. Collectively the COTS contract based on the number above is $3.5 Billion/52,260kg or $66,972/kg for cargo only capability.

This number is conservative though because the same GAO report also shows 20 flights for $3.5 Billion that delivers 36,900 kg or $94,850/kg? It’s not clear what the correct price is for COTS is but it must be between $87-94K/kg based on the GAO report.

The Authorization Bill puts the cost of 2 STS flights per year at $2 Billion dollars. These two flights can deliver 32,000kg of payload to ISS which based on the more COTS-CRS friendly price of $66,972/kg above is worth $2.143 Billion dollars. Let’s also not forget that the Russians have now given us a market price for a crew seat to ISS at around $80 million dollars, with slim assurance that it won’t climb still higher if we should foolishly get rid of their only competition at this point. So if we rotate four crew members (American + International Partners we are on the hook for) on each Shuttle mission that is worth $640 million dollars in terms of crew rotation cost avoidance per year. Further that crew rotation money is spent right here employing Americans who just so happen ‘thanks to ITAR’ not to be helping Iran improve the range of its missiles until they can hit our cities….so we got that going for us under this compromise plan….which is nice. After all its really hard to put a value on a city full of millions of happy tax paying citizens.

So the combined ‘value’ of an STS extension is equal to $2.783 Billion dollars or $231 million dollars per month.

Even if the legislation passes this week (they still don’t have the votes as of yesterday), he’s not getting anything close to what he wants. He wants single payer. More political foolishness from Robert.

All, the Jupiter/Orion systems will be ‘at least’ ¼ the cost of STS on a $/kg basis based solely on removing the dead weight and cost of the Orbiter..

there is no data to support that statement. You have no clue what the processing cost of “Jupiter/Orion” is… and “dead weight” differences is not a valid analysis…

Robert G. Oler

Robert G Oler, get help, the sooner the better. Reading like Math is fundamental…

oh wow was that clever!

when people run out of answers or logic the first thing that they do is to start personal attacks.

You have a photoshoped launch vehicle whose cost are unknown both to build and operate…and has no mission that the American people are willing to pay for.

When you can answer that, then people who are making decisions on national space policy…might think about taking you seriously.

Until then…nice viewgraphs

Robert G. Oler

Even COTS and Commercial Crew are luxuries, largely matters of (in this case misplaced) nationalistic pride. They are not necessities for doing the important ISS experiments. Having some U.S. transport to and from the ISS is desirable but there is no need to get carried away into spending several billion dollars a year just on this one minor element of our overall space program. Remember, just a few months ago NASA was happy to let the ISS crash into the Pacific in 2016. That’s what it thought of the importance of ISS science: for NASA ISS was a big construction project for the sake of learning how to construct big things, and the science was and is only justificatory hype and afterthought. The construction having been completed the main purpose of the ISS for NASA is finished.

I think the science and astronaut shows do have some value, but not anywhere close to enough to justify Shuttle, Ares, or DIRECT levels of spending. My recommendation would be to cap total U.S. spending on the ISS, including our share of the transportation to and from, at $3 billion per year. This leaves plenty of room for COTS/CRS but is nowhere remotely near enough funding for Shuttle or DIRECT.

Shuttle extension by itself would eat up nearly that entire budget, and that’s before adding the huge costs of bringing the Shuttle tooling and workforce back on line and far before adding in the monstrous R&D costs of DIRECT. COTS/CRS on the other hand comes in at less than $1 billion per year, leaving more than $2 billion per year to spend on experiments (remember those?) and the crew support cargo itself. CRS costs could easily be scaled back to $500 million per year once the current contracts are satisfied. Falcon/Dragon and Taurus II/Cygnus give future NASA planners the extremely valuable option of scaling down or up our trips to and from the ISS with reasonable granularity, rather than all-or-nothing Shuttle/DIRECT approach of having a massive standing army or nothing. Here too flexible path thinking is greatly superior to locking in rigid plans that can only be canceled wholesale.

And as Jonathan points out Dragon and Cygnus will fly much more frequently than the Shuttle, giving an experiment turnaround time that is of great importance to effective science. And Dragon cost is actually much lower per kilogram than Shuttle as well as more importantly being up to an order of magnitude lower in cost per year.