“I expect the GOP to support commercial crew more and more as they get educated about it and the companies involved keep getting stuff done.”

One indication of that was the recent visit to SpaceX headquarters by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. They even had their pictures taken with Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell.

I expect the GOP to support commercial crew more and more as they get educated about it and the companies involved keep getting stuff done. And once the GOP sobers up and realizes that just because Bronco Bama likes a program it doesn’t necessarily mean the program is bad. I think the GOP will act more and more like adults now that the hysteria is flattening out.

“Not for HSF– which is the focus of this discussion.”

The U.S. Government, and NASA, entrust the design, manufacture and operations of their hardware to “private business ventures” all the time.

When was the last time NASA actually built and flew something?

NASA is a contracting agency, meaning that it is a funnel for government dollars to “private business ventures”. In return those “private business ventures” provide products and services – this is pretty standard stuff.

For instance, NASA relied on Rockwell International to design and build the Shuttle, and then relied on Boeing (who bought Rockwell International) and Lockheed Martin to operate the Shuttle.

The only question here is when does “space exploration” become a contracted service instead of a government-led activity? JPL is a contracted R&D Center, and they pretty run the whole Mars rover program – NASA is just the customer. The lines are already blurry.

But the bottom line here is that Congress has not funded any “projects of scale” for HSF exploration. None. Nada. ZERO.

All they have partially funded is a gigantic rocket and a very limited capsule to use for local “trips”. But no trips beyond development, and they are already late on funding any immediate uses of the SLS after it’s ready to fly for real.

Good response. I know that SpaceX have gone down the road of developing their systems and hardware such that rather than try to eliminate the possibility of failure, they’ve designed them to be resilient to failure>

Yes…

NASA has so fracked up “reliability” notions with their “fabled MC” analysis that they have 1) made spaceflight so expensive, 2 limited badly what they can do and 3) started listening to it instead of what the vehicle is trying to tell them.

If NASA had run MC analysis on either Lindbergh’s flight or Earhart’s or any of the other “flights” aviation would still be waiting for the Wright brothers or someone to “beat the odds”.

Lindbergh went single engine because he knew that even two engine if one motor failed it was end of mission, he didnt take any survival gear because if the motor failed it didnt matter…no navigation gear other then a compass because there was none that he could use and Europe was big. Lindbergh pushed for reliability in the motor.

Earhart needed the range that a twin would give her so she amped up to a twin, but the rest of it is pretty same except; the Pacific is bigger then the land masses…so she needed help finding Howland,. They had a mitigation for that they worked up some beacon from the USCG…now that didnt work but it could have and had it worked, she would have found Howland. Noonan got her very very close; maybe within 20 miles.

So the trick is to focus on things for real reliability that you cannot replace or at least try and find things to mitigate their failure while you fix them …you try and mitigate all the things you cannot control (low sun cycle; maybe some sort of “safe house” for modest exceptions)…but in the end you have to accept “end of mission” as a possible scenario if you WANT TO PUSH THE LIMIT.

A fun time always can be had in “safety discussions” when you ask NASA people if they have run MC analysis (they have) on John Glenn’s first flight or the Apollo 11 mission…or ask them if they had run it on Challenger or Columbia’s last mission …problem is that they have replaced understanding risk with MC analysis.

Risk always has to be balanced against reward …driving is safe it is…but I dont like to drive when there is bad weather (because of how other people drive) and in Houston particularly snow…the odds go up enormously in things you cannot control…so the rewards have to be good. It is not likely even in snow that I’ll be in a fatal but the odds go up so the reward needs to be “great”.

I think that the Mars people will likely achieve a nice mix on that…but the risk will still be high…they are pushing the limit.

Finally this morning we followed the usual routine and before the sun came up our Daughter came into our bedroom and spent her “tent time” with us…well she is very athletic very strong and has started to do some “tumbling” with her body…she has even done back rollovers from a standing sit…today just sitting on the bed, she did one and rolled right off the bed….my wife and I both lunged for her but she was very fast and went right over and landed on the floor on her feet.

there is always risk in life…as you say “they’ve designed them to be resilient to failure”

LOL RGO

In order I think its solar radiation (ie the sun just throws off a big one…what was that movie/book oh yeah “Space” and there is simply inadequate “stuff” to mitigate); a life support issue; some sort of space “debris” issue (a larger version of what hit Mariner IV at end of life), and finally some sort of just “random chance operating against them” something like a propulsion failure, TPS issue on reentry etc…

Otherwise…you know commercial comsats whose “stuff” works for multiple decades so a just blatant systems failure seems unlikely; but those things above are hard to mitigate against on “the cheap”…but the interesting thing is that to mitigate them to a reasonable level of safety is probably a massive chunk of change.

They could probably spend another 1/2 billion and up the odds a tad…for instance a little bit more money and they might carry a little more “bottled life support” this gives them time to solve more issues…

but that takes some more mass so they would need a little more propulsion…it flimbs fast.

but I doubt that they could for any reasonable amount of money get it better then 70 percent…and that is probably about what the Mayflower folks had going for them…or in the early days climbing Everest or the US submarine fleet pre WW2…

and that is one of the reasons I think it will generate a lot of PR and also some good results…There is a certain amount of risk with immature technology UNLESS you either dont push the technology or spend a lot of money.

NASA in my view spends far to much money to run up to the last 9 in the reliability range…all the while negating that with bad management decisions. They are almost (with SLS and Orion) coming to the notion of “never go to sea”…

It is about like flying on the Falcon9 now… RGO