High-Profile Players In The Commercial Space Race

msnbc.com:

When NASA's space shuttle fleet retires in 2011, the space agency will have to rely on Russian spacecraft and the private sector to taxi cargo and humans to and from the International Space Station, even as it turns its focus to the technologies required to send humans beyond low-Earth orbit. [...] Some companies are also talking about offering out-of-this-world rides for researchers as well as tourists with deep pockets and a serious case of star lust. Click ahead to check out 10 of the top players in the race to commercialize space.

Read the whole story: msnbc.com

Comments

[skantea]

11:09 PM on 09/24/2010

How much does it cost to get tothe moon and why can't we just make it an International effort?

[blurredmolly]

03:54 PM on 09/26/2010

Greed.

[jsarets]

02:14 AM on 09/24/2010

One important detail left out the mainstream media debate over the proposed NASA budget is that NASA astronauts have been flying to the International Space Station on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for the entire history of the station.  

The commander of ISS Expedition 1, NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd, flew to the ISS on Soyuz, and the majority of the NASA astronauts who have served on the ISS crew have flown on Soyuz.  The Space Shuttle fleet handled only a minority of the ISS crew traffic.  

The ISS has been completely dependent on Soyuz for its entire history.  In a serious emergency, the crew would evacuate the ISS in Soyuz vehicles.  Without two Soyuz spacecraft docked to the ISS at all times, the station could not be safely manned.

Shuttle has been indispensable for ISS assembly.  Of the 36 flights that Shuttle will have made to the ISS, 26 were dedicated to hauling modules and installing them on the station.  The other ten carried cargo and the occasional crew rotation.  

With assembly wrapping up, the case for continuing Shuttle operations is thin.  Even those who truly love these machines are at a loss for what they might carry.  The completed station would need no more than one Shuttle flight per year to satisfy its cargo needs, and it doesn't make sense to do that.

Shuttle was never the right vehicle for ISS crew rotation.  It can't stay docked at the station for more than twelve days at a time, and only three of its seven astronauts can be delivered to the station, because four are needed to man the vehicle during reentry and landing.

Furthermore, Shuttle is designed to carry fifteen tons of cargo per flight, but the ISS needs less than three tons of cargo per three-astronaut crew rotation.  The payload bay is way too big for this application, and Soyuz can deliver three astronauts per flight with a rocket one-tenth the size of the Shuttle stack.

If NASA wanted to avoid the situation in which they currently find themselves, then they were have commissioned their own version of Soyuz a long time ago.  But they didn't.  

Instead, NASA effectively ceded the playing field to commercial ventures like SpaceX, which is developing a remarkably Soyuz-like system cast in modern technology.

NASA commissioned a series are failed Shuttle replacement projects, including NLS, SLI, X-33, X-34, OSP, and most recently Ares I.  All they have to show for it is a massive archive of PowerPoint.

So let's give the private sector an opportunity to deliver -- if for no other reason, because it would be difficult to fail as badly and as consistently as NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

[dsws]

04:37 PM on 09/24/2010

Agreed. I hate to see the government-can't-do-anything-right crowd have something to gloat over, but there you go. For one thing, it's been just too much of a political football for them to bring any version to completion. Best to get it over with and kick this one into the private sector.

[AtheistUS]

12:37 AM on 09/26/2010

Let's not forget that Russian space program, quite successful, was a government program.
It is just issue of correct and priorities.