“However, Does the government spend billions of tax payer dollars so a few business folks who see a market can get rich? Where is the benefit to the Republic in that?”

That’s not the problem before us. NASA needs crew transportation to the ISS starting in 2016. NASA cannot have the SLS+MPCV ready by then, so either NASA buys more Soyuz flights, or they step up and fund part of the costs for two or more commercial crew carriers.

Let’s put this in perspective by using some simple math:

– NASA is paying about $56M/person for Soyuz, or a total of $335M for 6 crew during 2013-14. Let’s say Russia doesn’t raise that price for 6 years (unlikely), so we assume $56M/person to the ISS thru 2020.

– If NASA paid SpaceX $300M to “man-rate” Falcon 9/Dragon (what SpaceX says they need), then they said they would charge $20M/person to the ISS. Dragon carries up to 7 crew, and we only need to carry 3/flight, so let’s assume the worst price, which is 7 x $20M = $140M, and divide that by actual flights of 3/flight, or $46.7M/person.

– Over the period of 2016 thru 2020, if you add up all those costs, it turns out that even with paying SpaceX the $300M, it would cost the same amount for Soyuz as it would for SpaceX, or about $1.7B. Add on the trickle-down benefit of that $1.7B being spent in the U.S. for material and jobs, and overall it would be much cheaper to pay SpaceX for the crew transportation than paying Russia.

Now I don’t advocate NASA funding only one domestic crew provider, but if all we want to do is a one-for-one replacement for Soyuz, then SpaceX would be the less expensive choice, and better deal for the Republic.

With commercial crew in operation, non-NASA customers (your “few business folks”) can buy a ride to LEO for the same price NASA pays, which if they fill up a Dragon, would be $20M/person.

I’d say that would be a good investment by the Republic.

Lumping Branson, who has actually signed up thousands of real customers for Virgin Galactic, together with the crackpot Bigelow, who has signed up exactly zero for his orbital fantasies, is quite the exercise in spacy rhetoric.

There are what, 6B people on the planet? Bigelow and Branson are putting up their own money for tourism in space. There are a few others out there too with space tourism plans. And indeed, there are customers who have plunked down serious money to be on Bransons Galatic flights, once operational. I will grant you that.

However, Does the government spend billions of tax payer dollars so a few business folks who see a market can get rich? Where is the benefit to the Republic in that?

States will often spend dollars making their states more attractive to tourists.

I do not believe that is the parallel here.

“Both SpaceX and Bigelow defy this rule since they are being backed and run by hardheaded engineering and business types, not just dreamers and speculators.”

I would argue you are already past the dreamers with Bigelow Aerospace and Virgin Galatic. Bigelow wasn’t the dreamer, it was more like Constance Adams. With Virgin it was Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites. Neither of the dreamers brought anything to market. It was the businesspeople, Richard Branson and Robert Bigelow, that are actually bringing them to market.

googaw wrote:

“To have NASA outline the basic constraints of what it wants to buy while protesting that the private company will be responsible for the detailed design and actually building and operating the thing does not solve the problem.”

Nowhere have I stated I want NASA defining anything for commercial space, it has actually been the opposite. I said from the start that this is a transportation issue for the Nation and not an exclusive NASA issue and my prefered path was to cut NASA out of it and any grants should have been overseen and administered by the Dept of Transportation and the FAA. As both Rand Simberg and Robert Oler, I believe it was them, said any technical expertise could be hired by DoT and NASA would not be allowed to over burden the process.

“The United States is going to have a transportation problem when the contract with Russia runs out for the soyuz.”

You’re right. And for that, we need solutions, not rhetoric. It’s obvious that NASA does not have the mandate nor the ability to create a crew transportation system by 2015, so unless we want to continue to send money to Russia, we need fund a competitive and redundant commercial crew system.

The funded need exists (ISS thru at least 2020), and NASA’s overall costs will be lower, even if it has to cough up a few billion dollars in matching funds to help get the marketplace going. Remember, NASA spent $9B on Ares I, and all we got was one dummy test flight with hardware that was never going to fly again.

Let’s remember what the commercial sector has stated they need:

$1.3B to “man-rate” Delta IV Heavy (launcher & infrastructure)
$400M to “man-rate” Atlas V (launcher & infrastructure)
$300M to “man-rate” Falcon 9 and Dragon

So far that adds up to $2B, and the U.S. gets three man-rated launchers, and one man-rated capsule. Add in $1B for Boeings CST-100 (my SWAG), and we’re talking around $3B to get a redundant LEO crew transportation system that everyone can use, and which should cost far less/person than Soyuz (and carry twice as many people). The resulting spending on future markets will more than pay for the initial investment, and we’ll expand into space much faster than NASA could have done on it’s own.

My $0.02

” I think there is a good chance that the first businesses may not succeed,”

You are probably correct there …’

Ok there are valid examples however in looking at the current stock in so-called Newspace companies we can see several exceptions to the rule. Both SpaceX and Bigelow defy this rule since they are being backed and run by hardheaded engineering and business types, not just dreamers and speculators. Virgin Galactic is still in with a chance although I don’t think their business model is as compelling as the other two. Other companies are surviving and seem to be thriving although much smaller and likely to be swallowed up if too successful.

Cheers.

What NASA needs most is a radical physical downscaling. Not just in terms of the size of its bureaucracies, but also in terms of the size of its spacecraft. Most of what NASA has in Powerpoint slides and CAD files right now is at least an order of magnitude too large to fit in its future budget. For example many of the proposed R&D projects such as propellant depots, inflatables, and variable-gravity biology research could learn most of what they need to learn with far smaller spacecraft than have been proposed. The big spacecraft designs come out of tradition and a perceived need to have big bureaucracies working on big projects. We can no longer afford that. Miniaturize or die.

Vladislaw, it’s the “taxpayer kick[ing] in something to get it started” that has been, until the 20th century, very uncommon and, when targeted towards speculative markets, spectacularly unsuccessful. And there is a strong relationship between the “taxpayer kick[ing] in something to get it started” and government as the main initial customer (or in the case of CCDev, the only initial customer) specifying the product. It is the high-level constraints such as NASA will lay down for CCDev, not the design details, that cause the biggest distortions away from what a market would do. To have NASA outline the basic constraints of what it wants to buy while protesting that the private company will be responsible for the detailed design and actually building and operating the thing does not solve the problem. It’s like having the government specify and pay for building a mile-high mountain in Nebraska and claiming that it will be successful in the private market as a ski resort because a private company will be responsible for the design details and for building the mountain and running the ski resort. The problem is the idea, not the implementation. The government funding a particular idea removes the most important role of the market, namely rejecting bad ideas. People in both government and the private sector propose and try to sell vastly more bad ideas than good ones. Without the “creative destruction” of the market rejecting these bad ideas, most of the benefit of the market has been destroyed.

“None of these things were invented to government specification. Government departments of various sorts, usually military, sooner or later learned about the private innovations and purchased their own rides and often altered technology for their own purposes (e.g. military airplanes).”

No where did I write anything about government being the inventor or innovator, quite the opposite, the entrepreneurs are the dreamers. When I refered to the governments helping hand it was in the guise of being a customer first and foremost. When I did refer to government helping it was in the form of land grants ( something I have expressed several times on here about how Luna could be developed through land grants because it would instantly create wealth and markets)

NASA does not seem to fund dreamers, they might fail.

The United States is going to have a transportation problem when the contract with Russia runs out for the soyuz. They can buy more launches from the russians, fund the development of a domestic human space launch sector or they can build their own.

My point is, historically the taxpayer has tended to come out on top when the federal government’s transportation needs are handled by commercial firms, even if the taxpayer has to kick in something to get it started.

It is like people who continuously say the Bush tax cuts for the rich when people at the bottom end of the scale got the most tax relief in proportion to their incomes.

Regardless of the accuracy of Fox news’ reporting, it is nice to see space related issues getting some air time. The future of NASA is a serious issue and hopefully the msm starts paying attention. As Mr Foust stated, it is too bad the segment was so short.