Five, four, three,
two, one, zero. Ignition, liftoff of the Falcon
9 and Crew Dragon! Go NASA! Go SpaceX!
Godspeed, Bob and Doug. In May, millions tuned in to
watch NASA and SpaceX make history. And so rises a
new era of American space flight, and with it the
ambitions of a new generation continuing the dream. The
launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule to the
International Space Station, marked the first time that
NASA astronauts took off from U.S. soil since 2011. The event also represented
the first time a commercially designed and
built spacecraft carried astronauts, an achievement that
SpaceX and Boeing had vied for for years
under NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The program was
structured as a multi-tiered competition. The goal was
to get private sector companies to produce
the most cost-effective, innovative and safe way to
get astronauts to the International Space Station,
under specific parameters set forth by NASA. In the
end, SpaceX and Boeing beat out Sierra Nevada Corporation
for the job. The traditional aerospace
industry, of course, questioned startup companies
like SpaceX. A very senior executive of
one of the competitors told me that SpaceX
will never fly. Their rockets are put together
with sealing wax and chewing gum. We really had
a very healthy competition. For nearly a decade, SpaceX
and Boeing have been neck and neck building and
testing their crew transportation systems. But SpaceX's successful launch in
May, marked a major milestone for the company,
leaving Boeing to play catch-up. The launch on May
30th is technically the last test flight before NASA
can certify Crew Dragon for consistent, operational missions
to the space station. The test is scheduled
to end on August 2nd with the return of
NASA's astronauts to Earth. On the other hand, Boeing
has yet to complete a successful uncrewed test flight
after it encountered some issues last year. I'm really quite overcome with
emotion on this day. So it's kind of
hard to talk, frankly. It's been 18 years working
towards this goal, so it's just hard to believe
that it's happened. The Commercial Crew Program was
born out of a prior initiative called the
Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Program,
or known more affectionately within NASA
as COTS. COTS began in about the mid-2000s,
and it was simply a push to see if
private companies could develop spacecraft and deliver cargo
to the International Space Station. Two commercial
partners were tapped for the job: SpaceX and Orbital
ATK, a company now owned by Northrop Grumman. COTS was
a success and gave NASA the confidence that it needed
to expand the commercial partnerships beyond ferrying
cargo to ferrying astronauts. This became a
particularly pressing need after NASA ended the
shuttle program in 2011. The program was initiated in
order to reduce the cost of spaceflight and to
make it more routine. And it was not doing that
for the first couple of years, only reaching four or five
flights a year, at a huge overhead of three
to four billion dollars. The shuttle program also
suffered two tragic accidents, the first in 1986, when
the Challenger exploded just over a minute into its
flight, killing all seven crew members. From mission
control, s ilence. Then the bland, chilling report,
'w e have a report from the flight dynamics officer
that the vehicle has exploded. Flight director confirms
that we are looking at checking with the recovery
forces to see what can be done at this point.' The
second in 2003, when the shuttle Columbia broke apart
upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere, once again killing
all seven astronauts on board. After the shuttle
program ended, you essentially had a gap in
the US capability to launch its own astronauts. And the only other entity in
the world that had an operating spacecraft capable of
doing that was Russia. Their Soyuz spacecraft became
the cornerstone of our ability to launch astronauts
to the International Space Station. And it
was becoming an increasingly expensive service. Originally, those seats were
around $20 million per seat and now we're paying
over $90 million per seat. So over the last nine years,
it has gotten very, very expensive. And we're in a
position now to say, look, we want to continue
the partnership on the International Space
Station. But what we don't want
to have is dependency. And so what Commercial Crew
gives us is an opportunity to end the dependency and
continue the partnership on the International
Space Station. Under NASA's Commercial Crew
Program, companies bid for a fixed-price contract to build
a vehicle to fly astronauts to and from
the space station. Boeing and SpaceX won and
were awarded $4.2 billion and $2.6
billion, respectively. This type of contract requires
the companies to cover any additional costs they
incur during development. But it also means that
the companies retain the rights to all of their
intellectual property and are therefore free to use it
as they please after their NASA contract ends. Think of it like a space
Uber or a space taxi. The idea being, we're going
to buy services, but we expect those launch providers to
go get customers that are not NASA, which
drives down our costs. And we expect those
launch providers to compete against each other on cost
and innovation and safety. We did not want to have just
one bidder for a number of reasons. We know the
competition really drives innovation and one could
also have a problem. And you don't want to
leave yourself with just one source like we have
throughout NASA's history. So this is a way to
make the program more robust. Though SpaceX and Boeing both got
the job, the race was on to see who could
put astronauts on the space station first. SpaceX used the
money to develop the Crew Dragon capsule and Boeing
used it to develop the Starliner capsule. Both capsules are designed to
be reusable, with SpaceX even recycling its rocket, the
Falcon 9, which it uses to launch Crew Dragon. A report issued last year
by NASA's Office of Inspector General found that NASA expects
to pay SpaceX an average of about $55 million
per seat and Boeing about $90 million per seat for
the six round-trip missions to the ISS. But Boeing and NASA both
refuted the OIG numbers. In a statement, Boeing said
that the company will fly the equivalent of a fifth
passenger in cargo for NASA. So the per seat pricing
should be considered based on five seats, rather than
the report's four seat calculation. Cristina Chaplain is
a former Director at the Government Accountability Office
and was in charge of auditing the Commercial
Crew Program for Congress. Boeing had the advantage of
having a long history of working with NASA, a long
history with the shuttle program and knowing how to
do these kinds of spacecraft. SpaceX was new to
the game, and I think their advantage was their
flexibility, their speed, their culture, that they
could work in this fixed-price, more
commercial-like environment. SpaceX also had the advantage of
being able to apply a lot of what it learned
from building its cargo capsule for NASA's COTS program
to its Crew Capsule. By the time it received
its Crew Program Contract from NASA in 2014, SpaceX had
been ferrying cargo to the space station for
two years. The Commercial Crew Program
was initially slated to launch astronauts to the
International Space Station in 2017, but early funding cuts
and a number of failed tests made that impossible. One such setback for SpaceX
happened in 2019, when its Crew Dragon capsule blew up
during a test of the in-flight abort system. SpaceX had also previously lost
two Falcon 9 rockets, one during a space station
resupply mission in 2015. Stunning explosion over the
skies of Cape Canaveral today. An unmanned rocket
bringing supplies to the International Space Station blew
up just two minutes into its flight. It's another
setback for NASA and for SpaceX, the company that will
one day carry astronauts into orbit. And another in
2016, that was supposed to launch Facebook's $200 million
satellite into orbit. Boeing also struggled. In 2018, a propellent leak was
found in the engine of the Starliner capsule during
a launch abort test. Then in 2019, the company hit
a major speed bump with its orbital flight test,
an important milestone to safely carry astronauts. It didn't have any people on
board, but what it was supposed to do was launch,
get to the space station, spend a few days there
and then come back. Well, shortly after launching,
they discovered an anomaly with part of the
timing system inside the spacecraft itself and the engines
fired at the wrong time, putting it in
the wrong orbit. So they weren't able to
reach the International Space Station, falling short of the
main priority of the flight test. The incident
changed how NASA viewed Boeing. The agency even
admitted that their prior history with Boeing may have
led them to give the company more leeway in
terms of oversight. I would say in the
software area, from a NASA perspective, we may have been
focused a little more on SpaceX because they use a
bit of a nontraditional approach to their
software development. We had maybe more familiarity
with the Boeing process from those that had worked
on the International Space Station. Many of the team
that did the software for the International Space Station
that was actually working on the Starliner. And so we maybe we just
didn't quite take the time that we needed to. NASA
is now recommending that Boeing make 80 changes to
the Starliner before it's re-tested later this year. Just in general, the government
is kind of waking up across the space sector
in terms of software. It's very tricky. And the government's not
very successful in doing software for space
at this time. SpaceX is in a really
strong position to deliver for NASA. They have a much
faster timeline, I think that they stick to reiterating
on their technology because Elon Musk came from
the software side, right. So Elon Musk, he was one
of the founders of PayPal. He's had Tesla. He's had experience working
in different industries where he's not used to
sitting, waiting around for, you know, the federal
government budgets, thinking about milestones that could be
impacted just based off of politics. Though Commercial
Crew missions have not yet started, NASA, SpaceX
and Boeing are already seeing the benefits
of such partnerships. NASA estimates that this
process saved the agency somewhere between $20 billion
and $30 billion of taxpayer money because the
method of contracting and the efficiency of the companies
to meet the milestones that they were setting out to
achieve was so much more efficient than
historically possible. While NASA benefits from lower
costs, SpaceX and Boeing benefit from having a government
agency foot the bill for the building and development
of systems that they can use for other projects. There was a day in the
United States of America after the space shuttles retired, where
we had exactly zero percent of the global
launch for commercial satellites. And of course,
because NASA made these investments into SpaceX and the
Falcon 9 rocket, now all of a sudden we've got
about 70 percent of the global commercial
launch market. If you look at SpaceX's
revenue on the whole, NASA makes up a significant portion
of that because of the development contracts they have
awarded the company over the years. While the
bread and butter of their business is their
launch business, launching satellites for companies, for
the US military and others, this is a very large
chunk, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars
a year that comes from NASA. But SpaceX is
looking to expand. The company has already signed
a contract to fly three tourists to the International
Space Station using its crew Dragon Capsule and
Falcon 9 rocket. Space currently makes up only
about five percent of Boeing's revenue, but with
the company losing billions due to the grounding of its
737 Max plane and its stock price plunging due
to the lackluster travel demand among coronavirus,
that could change. There's going to be a lot
more incentive for Boeing to really deliver for NASA. In the past, i f you
think about what is the biggest revenue generator for Boeing, I
would doubt that NASA provides a huge, huge contribution
to their top line. But now, as they ground more
of the aircrafts and they have to rethink their approach
to the whole airline industry, space is definitely
a bigger opportunity for them. And the opportunities to
work with NASA will certainly continue. Right now, in space, w
e've got commercial resupply. We've got commercial crew
now and eventually we're going to have commercial
space stations themselves. We want to be one customer
of many customers and we want our providers competing
on cost and innovation and safety. NASA's already
partnering with the private sector for another venture, getting
people to the moon by 2024. In April, the
agency awarded contracts to SpaceX, Blue Origin and
Dynetics to begin development of lunar landers. Boeing also bid, but was
not awarded a contract. We're going to blaze the
trail, always with the intent to eventually commercialize as
quickly as possible. Once that's done at the moon,
then we go to Mars.
A good video, but it didn't address the 'How' of how SpaceX won.
The race between SpaceX and Boeing seemed to be quite close; it was anyone's guess who would win, at least until the serious testing programs started (and then both companies stumbled.) I think the real story is how Boeing lost the race to SpaceX, and I think the aftermath of that loss is very interesting. I think we are now seeing a real appreciation for SpaceX in NASA, an appreciation that is almost becoming its own form of partnership. I also think we're starting to see some of the politics that created an artificial reality around America's space program start to erode. More people in government are waking up to the real truths about the newcomers in our space program, they are seeing SpaceX for what it is (a valid supplier of quality aerospace hardware with an economically reasonable price), and they are seeing some of the exploitation in the old methods of high-cost contracting for space equipment.
If SpaceX has saved NASA 20 to 30 billion dollars, then we are obviously undervaluing Elon Musk.
Thanks for sharing our video!
Interesting comment from Jim Bridenstine near the end: "Want to commercialize [moon] as quickly as possible." No doubt lunar polar resources will be key - that and ability to transport hundreds of tonnes of material...
Gotta say it gives me a big schadenfreude to think of that exec of that said "SpaceX will never fly, their rockets are put together by ceiling wax and chewing gum." While he was busy making snide remarks, SpaceX was working and concentrating on engineering.
Was there some video with the Boeing guys having an actual physical fight over the failure?
Sorry to interject but I was thinking about this and wondering if it’s a false memory, in my memory it’s from a long distance thru a flir camera
Who can’t beat Boeing now!?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by request
10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 128 acronyms.
[Thread #6303 for this sub, first seen 30th Jul 2020, 15:12] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I think the success of SpaceX also goes a way to helping the credibility of other ‘new players’ like Virgin and Blue Origin. NASA seem to be really embracing the fact that the established main players (Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop) won’t offer them the flexibility and innovation we’re seeing from these newer ones.
Was todays return so important simply because it was a private company that completed the mission?