“Here’s where he said $500M, and that was back in 2004″

I heard him say 400 million on a spacenews video, it was after the two launches of his two test articles and his new factory had already been started. I assume that he must have about 100 million invested so far. I know that he is testing some other things that are for the future. One thing in particular is a machine to move lunar regolith on top of one of his inflatables.

“For CCDev NASA wanted crew transport ASAP so Boeing had to go with the simpler but expendable CST-100.”

You are mistaken – NASA has not told CCDev participants “ASAP”.

NASA hasn’t even committed to when the final competition’s will be for the final CCDev step, nor does it know when the funding will be available.

And as Martijn pointed out, you keep mis-remembering that CST-100 is being designed to be reusable for up to 10 missions. Here is an Aviation Week article that mentions that in case you don’t believe us:

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/asd/2010/07/20/14.xml&channel=space

“Vladislaw, Bigelow has made no commitments of $400 million or anything similar.”

Here’s where he said $500M, and that was back in 2004:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0409/27bigelow/

Seriously dude, haven’t you heard of the internet?

Start with Wikipedia, and then as you gain confidence in your ability to find and understand information, then you can move on to big boy searches in Google…

Your comment ended in mid-sentence. I agree launching crew is probably not a good way to get RLVs started, although you never know, and Blue Origin does appear to be moving in that direction. But what I had in mind was not launching crew, but propellant in support of an exploration program as a way to create a large enough market.

One of the good things about propellant is that it is cheap compared to today’s launch prices, even for expensive propellants like hypergolics. If you want to use expendable spacecraft as payloads, then you’ll spend most of your budget on the spacecraft themselves, which leaves much less money for launches and consequently much less money for commercial R&D which is presumably a percentage of turnover. If you use propellant for reusable spacecraft as your payload, you can spend most of your budget on launches. Also, if you lose a propellant load it’s not a big deal (losing the RLV itself is a bigger problem), whereas losing a spacecraft is expensive.

Another good thing about propellant is that it is easily divisible, so it makes a perfect payload for launch vehicles of all sizes, including very small “sub-scale” ones. For starters you could buy up most excess launch capacity in the US (on a cheapest first basis). This means that the high fixed costs can now be divided over a large number of launches, which should reduce launch prices almost overnight.

In the longer term (5-15 years) you could expect to see small ~1mT RLVs. Once these had proven themselves both technically and economically, I would expect the business case for 5mT RLVs capable of carrying crew to close. At that point we will have become a true spacefairing civilisation.

Finally, propellant (unlike other bulk materials) is terribly useful for, well, propelling a spacecraft, which is precisely what you would have to do for manned exploration. And at least in theory there is still USG funding for manned exploration. In this way funding RLVs would require no additional NASA funding, nor any management attention.

You keep saying this, but it isn’t true, at least not according to Boeing. They say it will be reusable for 5-10 times if I recall correctly. Something similar was the plan for Orion, but that had to be ditched when they tried to reduce mass by enough to fit the constraints of Ares I. Maybe they’ll try to make MPCV reusable again.

X-33 was never intended to fly SSTO. It was canceled because it was running over budget and behind schedule, and had too many high-risk (and unnecessary) technologies in it. It was a flawed program from the beginning.

Vult: Another good point, but (don’t laugh now) NASA wants to “refurbish” LC-39 VAB and MLPs and force the selected Commercial Crew contractor to adapt their vehicles and entire processing flow to use them, because the 55-year-old LC-39 is an “existing facility” and already “man rated”. Hopefully this idea will be dropped.

Excellent point!!! That was the plan with the RLV program of the 1990’s, (yes, under Clinton). Incremental development. Build a little, fly a little, learn a little.

Then NASA canceled the X-33 because it couldn’t fly SSTO. I remember one of the ESA guys at the Space Congress was shocked. He said “This is an engineering test vehicle. We would learn a lot from it even if it doesn’t go into orbit.” The NASA program manager didn’t understand his point. The engineers were not meeting specs. No magical SSTO, so obviously it was worthless. Well, the X-1 never flew in combat, the Wright Flyer never crossed the Atlantic. But NASA doesn’t understand the meaning of the letter “X”. Even today (I have seen it more than once) NASA people assume they can specify a totally new operational vehicle and achieve performance objectives by simply writing them into the specs.

The NACA organization, which did only R&D, has become a NASA organization that does only political demonstrations. That was what we needed in the 60’s, when we hung balanced on the brink of nuclear war. But times have changed.

An excellent point Martijn, but as you point out the demand must be large and the R&D within the time and money constraints of the company. In human spaceflight the market is not certain (although probably >50 rides per year if cost >I think you’ve indicated you would love to work on a small RLV.

Thanks for remembering, hey, if the people in this group were running the program we would be going places!

But the reason I said “subscale” isn’t a matter of size per se, it’s the need to fly an engineering protoype _before_ attempting the design of any vehicle for operational use. The attempt to jump directly from paper to an operational vehicle was the primary cause of the unanticipated cost of Shuttle operation.

Development doesn’t have to start at zero. The X-37 was well designed based on lessons learned from the Shuttle, and had excellent aerodynamics and TPS. In fact, Boeing used the X-37 planform in one of their two OSP proposals. The X-37 would have been the prototype, the larger but similar OSP the operational vehicle. But X-37 was dropped by NASA, OSP was dropped by NASA.

For CCDev NASA wanted crew transport ASAP so Boeing had to go with the simpler but expendable CST-100. Yet NASA also chose the Dream Chaser, apparently because it looked familiar (the “lifting body” has been around since the 60’s) even though its L/D is vastly inferior to the X-37, OSC Prometheus, and Boeing winged OSP and no lifting body has ever landed on a runway unpowered and at a realistic mass. Apparently lift and drag are not concepts NASA is familiar with anymore. NASA has also shown no interest in the LOX/RP-1 reuasable winged flyback booster that DOD is trying to get started.

So essentially the nation’s entire effort in reusables, which reached its peak in the 90’s, is now classified and hangs by a thread.

Bigelow Aerospace to offer $760 million for spaceship

“Bigelow Aerospace intends to spur development of a commercial space vehicle to take people into Earth orbit by offering to sign a contract worth $760 million with any company that can meet their criteria, company president Robert Bigelow says.”

So much