The Story of How NASA Went From Space Shuttles To SpaceX & Commercial Rockets

although it's got manly here last week we saw Bob and Doug fly to the space station on the dragon to a long-awaited return to flight for us human launch capabilities and the first flight of humans to orbit on a privately built booster but this was merely the end of a long journey that involved many people who would shape us space policy so I want to ask how did we get here and to understand this you have to go back to the tragic loss of the space shuttle Columbia and her crew in 2003 at that time a committee of experts were appointed to investigate they were named the Columbia accident investigation board and for some of them the more they found out about the space shuttle the last safe it seemed to be some of them on the accident investigation board actually wanted it grounded permanently one problem they highlighted was that the retirement date had been set by NASA based upon when they expected a successor to be available in 2001 when the x-33 was canceled the date of retirement was pushed back from 2012 to 2020 the final board reports suggest that the space shuttles could be kept flying up until 2010 with the prospect of inspection and refurbishment to extend their life the shuttles were old in years but they were young in terms of the flight time they'd been Belfour they had expected weekly or monthly flights back when they were originally designed but they couldn't build replacements at least not affordably the last time a shuttle had been built was endeavour and that was cobbled together over two spare parts so restarting production would have been about as expensive as developing an entirely new launch vehicle in 2004 the president announced the way forward with the his vision for space exploration shuttle was to be set for retirement in 2010 likely based upon the conclusions that the Accident Investigation Board had delivered in the same speech he also talks about a new generation of crew exploration vehicle no new development money was immediately available however there were a number of projects already in development NASA which might fit the bill a year later NASA began something called the commercial orbital transportation services program it had long been a dream of many to make commercial space services a reality NASA wanted to generate demand by asking private companies to deliver cargo to the international space station and there was a lot of resistance from two people to the idea but the cargo delivery was seen as lower risk than other options because the rural turret off'cer cargo delivery from Japan Europe and Russia and that could fill in if things went wrong or were delayed so the program was to be managed by the Commercial Crew and cargo program office also known as c-3po and with approval of their President and Congress 500 million dollars was set aside to fund initial development of technologies required for commercial services so instead of strict requirements there were guidelines on what was needed such as the ability to launch 8.4 tons of cargo to the international space station every year with no specification on the number of flights required or any stipulations on how the vehicle should be designed unlike the space shuttle NASA wouldn't own the launch vehicles are the spacecraft it would simply be buying rides on them the intellectual property would remain with the developer also the program stipulated that the development money awarded had to be matched by private investors to prevent companies being purely reliant on NASA money the first request for proposals began in January 2006 and twenty-one proposals were delivered before the March sixth deadline and these came from a range of companies including existing NASA suppliers like Lockheed Boeing through the new space startups that we knew today's such as SpaceX and at least according to one account somebody who was going to build a rocket engine in their garage after the selection process the two finalists chosen were SpaceX who had pitched a larger version of their Falcon 1 rocket the Falcon 9 and Rocketplane Kistler with their k1 reused rocket running on high-performance Russian engines at this point SpaceX had tried one launch of its Falcon one rocket which had failed and in 2006 was the year then that the constellation program got her name bits of it had been in development since 2001 but this brought them all together under one roof it was an ambitious program using shuttle-derived hardware for the area's 1 and Ares 5 rockets which would launch a new crew exploration vehicle which we now know as a Ryan the crew exploration vehicle had been conceived in the 1990s with official planning beginning in 2004 and the contract being awarded to Lockheed in 2006 and as you know it's still not really ready anyway the constellation program was pitched as being the replacement for the space shuttle and the program that would take astronauts back to the moon the Ares 1 would use a single solid say a five segment rocket booster derived from the shuttle design which only has four segments it would have an upper stage that was powered by a g2x engine develop a burning hydrogen and oxygen now the Ares 5 on the other hand was a monster heavy lift vehicle a bit like the SLS but bigger and able to put 188 tons into low-earth orbit in 2007 the agreement with Kistler was then terminated because they had been unable to raise the private funds needed to match the NASA money and another rental proposals were were made NASA chose instead orbital sciences corporation with their Cygnus cargo vehicle and the Taurus 2 rocket which is now known as the Antares meanwhile SpaceX was in trouble the Falcon 1 rocket launchers were failing to reach orbit the first three flights were all failures and Elon Musk often mentions how SpaceX would have shut down if the fourth flight had not succeeded and you'll be on surprised to hear that in 2008 they succeeded their first launch of a falcon 1 rocket paving the way for their one only commercial launch of the Falcon one in 2009 2009 would also see a new president and one of the first space policy decisions he made was to create a committee to study the current state of affairs officially known as the review of United States human space flight plans committee better known as the Augustine Commission after the chairman and Norman Augustine had actually chaired a similar Commission 20 years earlier and so he had a lot of respect at doing this kind of thing so the Commission did their work and there was two important things that I want to highlight in their report the first was that they found the commercial services development were exceeding expectations and they immediately recommended more funding for this I think they got two hundred million dollars extra almost right away but they also find the constellation program had never been funded at the levels required to hit its targets and at the current funding levels they estimated it would be as late as 2020 before it was able to launch a single crew to the International Space Station and so in response to this space policy changed the president drove a stronger commitment to commercial space services not only approving the commercial resupply services program that paid SpaceX and Orbital Sciences for delivering cargo to the ISS but in 2010 the Commercial Crew development program started it was expected that Commercial Crew providers would be able to develop the capability and deliver to the ISS as early as 2015 constellation was essentially defunded and many politicians in Congress were unhappy that with this partly because they didn't really have control over the allocation of contracts to the commercial programs so this really represented a loss of control and a loss of money to their states in the end the parts of constellation that had been developed including the Orion spacecraft and the five segment boosters and the rl10 engines upgrades those all became part of the SLS program meanwhile huge parts of constellation weren't useful much of it was still on the drawing board and the singular launch that they made was the Ares 1x which took a regular four segment shuttle booster it added an extension to make it look like a five segment booster they added a boilerplate upper stage and even that single launch with half the equipment was almost as expensive as the entire Commercial Crew development program to that point it was about four hundred million dollars SLS was less capable than the Ares 5 but it was much more likely to deliver on a reasonable timescale also the Ares one was considered to be much more dangerous than any other human launch options proposed there was a great paper on how dangerous this would have been in 2010 also saw the first flight of SpaceX's Falcon 9 in fact it's 10 years ago tomorrow on Thursday that the first Falcon 9 launched carrying a boilerplate upper stage Samuel a simulation of the Dragon capsule the 1.0 version of Falcon 9 is quite different from what we know today the main engines are arranged in a grid instead of an octa web the stages are shorter and of course there's no landing legs or grid fins SpaceX did however include parachutes to test recovery they didn't get any success with that and in all of this the most important decision was the commitment to Commercial Crew commercial cargo hadn't even been demonstrated to committing to privately funded crew launches requires a lot of faith in private industry being able to deliver something completely new in a timeline faster than the existing government development process so 2011 will that saw the last flight of the space shuttle it actually been extended by one year to allow completion of the International Space Station 2011 also saw SpaceX is first award from NASA to develop a crew capable version of their dragon cargo capsule in May of 2012 SpaceX became the first private company to successfully dock spacecraft to the International Space Station in Dragon demo flight 2 and later that year they began their semi regular commercial resupply services missions to the station 2013 brought us the Falcon 9 1.1 with the extended tanks and the silhouette that we today and also the first attempts at using rocket engines to land the boosters in the early years of the Commercial Crew program there were also ongoing efforts to overturn those presidential funding requests every few months there'll be hearings with the NASA Administrator going to Congress to ask for the program to be properly funded this would of course be delay development the proposals they had expected you know launches as early as 2015 but the continual underfunding made those untenable and of course such rosy timelines didn't factor into the extra development time needed to deal with the problems with the parachutes for example 2014 also saw the actual contracts being awarded for Commercial Crew services with two finalists boy could expect to receive up to 4.2 billion while SpaceX is contract could earn it 2.6 billion now this isn't money that was paid out this is the flights so far have all been funded through the development program 2015 had the first actual test flight on the Commercial Crew program with SpaceX demonstrating the Dragon to pad abort capability however in June the CRS 7 mission failed due to the second stage oxygen tank rupturing after a helium cylinder broke phillipe free Falcon 9 would be grounded during the investigation and it returned to flight in December this was a new variant called The Fool thrust this used a deep chilled densified propellant to get more performance from the same size of fuel tanks this mission would also be the first to successfully land and recover the first stage booster at the launch site and this booster is the one that's on display at SpaceX headquarters by 2016 most of the funding flights over fights over Commercial Crew were over there did continue to be a steady stream of diehards looking for any excuse to redirect Commercial Crew funds elsewhere spacex continued developing as booster recovery they landed several boosters over the year on land and on their drone ships however in september spacex suffered another dramatic failure on the pad when they were loading propellants to test-fire the engines there would be no more flights for the year while it was being investigated in 2017 there was a new president in the why but NASA funding for commercial space operations remained essentially untouched by the new administration Falcon 9 returned to flight and in March it performed the first three flight of a booster 2017 also saw the debut of the block for booster design with its upgraded engines 2018 debuted the Falcon Heavy and while many of you remember the red roadster carrying star man off on the cruise into deep space it wasn't hugely relevant to the Commercial Crew program but later in that year the introduction of the block 5 version of a falcon 9 was now black 5 was supposed to represent the final evolution of the ball Falcon 9 any stable state that could be approved to fly crew in August of 2018 the astronauts who would fly the first missions and commercial crew were announced of course at that point they were still expecting the astronauts would fly in 2019 and 2019 did see the first flight of a crew Dragon in March it launched safely and traveled to the space station carrying Ripley the test dummy and plushy earth and some extra cargo the capsule returned to Earth and was expected to be recovered and refurbished and used for an in-flight abort test but in April a ground test destroyed the capsule in a fiery explosion the investigation would take months and ultimately require a redesign of the propellant system for their bar thrusters at the end of 2019 Bowen also performed a test flight of their Starliner spacecraft and while the launch was perfect the capsule had many problems once in space largely blamed on poorly tested software the capsule never made his planned rendezvous with the station and there were enough questions raised about the flight that Boeing is planning a second test flight later this year 2019 also saw the launch of the Artemis program which is expected to use a lot more Commercial Crew capabilities or commercial launch capabilities than the original backers of the SLS predicted in 2010 and so we get to 2020 it's been a long ride but the year kicked off in spectacular style with the in-flight abort test of the Dragon 2 capsule on an old Falcon name booster literally exploiting the rocket booster in the name of science and that paved it away for the first crude launch of Dragon bringing to an end the gap in spaceflight that resulted from decisions made almost twenty years ago I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

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Id: HGICHa1IZKo

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020