Suspicion and mistrust between the US and China persist in many political circles, though I agree that commercial ties make war less likely a single incident could change things for the worse. If the US and China become rivals in space it will certainly not help. Membership in the ISS will also help mitigate tensions between China and India, and between China and Japan. ESA is already pushing for closer work with China, partly to reduce dependence on Russia as a sole source for human access.

Moreover, as much as we might wish otherwise, Chinese GDP is likely to surpass that of the US within 15 years, and it is unlikely the US can afford to lead the exploration of space alone. If we are to succeed, we must learn to work together.

doesnt matter…those relations are forming in the hundreds every day between US and Chinese people both in Business and government and it has not changed things all that much.

RGO

“Orion was shoehorned into this role in a Powerpoint that I remember well, presented almost off the cuff when NASA was finally asked how we would support the ISS after the termination of Shuttle and realized they hadn’t thought about it.”

That seems like a bit of an exaggeration. It seems to me that they had thought long and hard about how they were going to make Ares I fit the bill. There was no Plan B, and Plan C was Commercial.

“If we need a runway lander Dreamchaser is inferior to Boeing’s X-37-based OSP proposal by nearly every criterion and should be dropped.”

I think Boeing and BO are the least predictable. I’ve read that Boeing has said they won’t complete CST-100 without funding, although I have yet to find a source. While Bezos has the money to go pretty far with BO, because the company’s so secretive it’s tough to say how determined he is. SN, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have the funding to complete DC without NASA support. Regardless, I’m not sure I can make a conclusive argument in Boeing’s competitive superiority, other than “c’mon, they’re Boeing.”

I find your assertion that DC is inferior to a putative X-37C interesting. The specs seem roughly similar, and DC is welded metal while X-37C seems like another billion dollar study troll. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to see Boeing turn over a new leaf one morning and fund a X-37C to completion, but, well, “c’mon, they’re Boeing.”

Regardless, I think a 1.5G runway lander would be a valuable thing to have up and operating. Why do you say that X-37C is superior?

Obviously China would add competition and eliminate both an expensive monopoly and an obvious single point failure.

Second, ASTP was a flash in the pan, but I don’t think anyone who wasn’t in the program can understand the impact of ISS. In a few years I went from an environment in which even bringing a camera to work was forbidden to actually sitting next to a Russian at a firing room launch console, chatting during holds about the training Russia had provided to the Chinese before their first flight. We quickly came to see each other as colleagues rather than potential adversaries. While there have been enormous difficulties, and even some backsliding under the Bush and Putin administrations, the ISS program has made a substantial and lasting change in the way American and Russia regard each other. Not to mention that without the Russians the program would never have gotten the critical mass of support in Congress that got it off the ground, and would be grounded now.

I absolutely agree that our political leaders have said this, as a way to keep their campaign contributions coming in from the SLS/Orion contractors. But Gerstenmaier has correctly said that Orion would be extremely inefficient in the roll of LEO logistics. Orion was shoehorned into this role in a Powerpoint that I remember well, presented almost off the cuff when NASA was finally asked how we would support the ISS after the termination of Shuttle and realized they hadn’t thought about it. Orion is _very_ poorly designed for LEO logistics, with less crew and cargo capacity than Dragon and a heavy service module which is unneeded. And unless the ESAS was a complete con job Orion can only carry crew with SLS. Are we going to spend more than we spent on a Shuttle launch to put four people and a few hundred pounds of cargo in low earth orbit?

The two strongest competitors are obviously Boeing/CST-100 and SpaceX. Bezos should get R&D funds as VTOVL has future applications. If we need a runway lander Dreamchaser is inferior to Boeing’s X-37-based OSP proposal by nearly every criterion and should be dropped.

But the real downselect is not among the CC contenders, it is between LEO and BLEO, i.e. Orion. LEO and BLEO are not complimentary, they are competing strategies for HSF, and we cannot afford both.

“As Ronald Reagan once said, “Trust, but verify.”

As Vladimir Lenin used to say, and Reagan quoted many times.

Fred Willett wrote @ April 16th, 2012 at 10:00 pm:

“I think we’re now past the tipping point.”

I’ve tried several times in the past few years to postulate at what point we would be past the tipping point. Even if SpaceX has two successful COTS flights this year, I’m not sure that would necessarily do it.

To my paranoid mind, both the Senate and the House members’ questions in hearings have indicated willingness to stall commercial space until SLS can catch up. “Downselect”, to me, means “Downselect to Boeing and one other player, take your pick, and we’d prefer it to be Sierra Nevada because that will steer money and safety to traditional contractors while providing a non-traditional player as cover.” The cost of using SLS for Station is not dissuasive for the folks I’ve watched in those hearings, and in fact they talk about it as a done deal.

SpaceX has a lot of launches in their manifest, but they’re by no means an established player until they get successfully into the meat of their manifest in the next few years. They haven’t yet transitioned to being a going concern, and there are still at least a few situations I can imagine that would jeopardize the company.

I don’t know how determined Jeff Bezos is, either. He could, like Beale, just decide to pack it in one day. Same goes for Bigelow.

It seems to me that if Boeing weren’t a winner in the downselection, they would need to continue with CST-100 anyway just because they’d suddenly find themselves receding quickly as a player in any sort of spaceflight. I also have trouble swallowing the idea that they wouldn’t get selected; someone would get wind of it and simply make a phone call.

Sierra Nevada is the weakest player, simply because they don’t have the money to continue with DC if they’re not selected, and I don’t know of anyone who would step up and pay them to finish. I suppose there’s a chance someone like Boeing or LockMart might buy them out. Bigelow seems to have bet on CST-100. There’s also a chance of an outside player, someone really bizarre like ATK, but I haven’t read too much about DC’s per-flight overhead and I’m not totally sure it’s a cost-effective vehicle anyway.

So the point is that I’m not sure we’re past a tipping point yet. My thought this year has been that if we could make it one more year, we might be golden.

Inviting China to join the ISS program would help to build trust and understanding between the superpowers.

Inviting China to join the US at the Ground Round would help to build trust and understanding between the superpowers. Oh, wait…

By working together, we can learn to live together.

Or learn not to like how one another work, and seek out better ways to kill each other.

The US cannot afford another half century of cold war.

Yes, nothing would kick butt like returning to a $500 billion GDP and Jim Crow.

Agreed with that, but…

“Inviting China to join the ISS program would help to build trust and understanding between the superpowers. By working together, we can learn to live together.”

Why? What is there about a space project that everyone thinks will reset behavior and history?

Unfortunately, I cannot remember its name, but I agree with a line in a 70’s study of future space policy options that said;

“The political situation in space, will reflect the political situation on Earth. Not the other way around.”

ASTP for example was nice, but that’s not what changed the Soviet Union, nor is our relationship with the Russians completely non-adversarial, even today. After all, is that not a major why we need domestic alternatives to reaching LEO? Adding Chinese dependency to the mix, would be a step backward…