CCDev - NASA Commercial Crew Development

[instml]

Сенатор Микульски думает что если деньги на Союзы отдать свободным предпринимателям то они сделают трансферы-спасшлюпки на три года быстрее? Или она хочет просто дать им побольше денег? Или злится что деньги расходуются неэффективно?
Хотя до 2028 частники еще налеются вдоволь.

http://www.novosti-kosmonavtiki.ru/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=916744#916744

[ronatu]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VdhZ2r6lvs&feature=related

На кресле в космос... :wink:

[ronatu]

Сенатор Микульски думает что если деньги на Союзы отдать свободным предпринимателям то они сделают трансферы-спасшлюпки на три года быстрее? Или она хочет просто дать им побольше денег? Или злится что деньги расходуются неэффективно?
Хотя до 2028 частники еще налеются вдоволь.

http://www.novosti-kosmonavtiki.ru/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=916744#916744

Архив телескопа "Хаббл" получил имя американского сенатора

МОСКВА, 6 апр - РИА Новости. Астрономическая база данных американского Института космического телескопа (Space Telescope Science Institute - STScI), куда поступают все данные с орбитального телескопа "Хаббл", получила собственное имя - она названа в честь сенатора от штата Мэриленд Барбары Микульски (Barbara Mikulski), которая последовательно выступает в поддержку астрофизических проектов и, в частности, научных проектов НАСА.

"Решение института назвать свою базу данных в честь сенатора Микульски - это честь, которую она в высшей степени заслуживает. Она выдающийся защитник интересов науки, НАСА и астрофизического сообщества", - говорится в заявлении научного руководителя НАСА Валида Абдалати (Waleed Abdalati).

Теперь архив института будет носить название MAST (Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes). Помимо данных "Хаббла", в нем содержится информация, полученная телескопами GALEX, XMM-Newton, "Кеплер", Copernicus и ряда других.

Барбара Микульски является членом американского парламента с 1977 года и занимает пост сенатора дольше всех женщин-сенаторов в истории США. Она, в частности, добивалась принятия решения о продолжении финансирования космических телескопов "Джеймс Вебб" и "Хаббл", выступала в поддержку инициатив, направленных на развитие инноваций и поддержку научных исследований.

http://ria.ru/science/20120406/619486563.html

[Salo]

Viewpoint: Commercial Space Will Renew NASA[/size]
 Apr 9, 2012

  By Michael Lopez-Alegria

Decisions by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to retire NASA's space shuttle and cancel the Constellation program were both received with much—and varied—emotion among my fellow astronauts, the NASA family and others nationwide. Regardless of those sentiments, these choices have brushed in broad strokes the landscape on which our future as a spacefaring nation must be painted. That backdrop reveals a stark reality: As of Atlantis's final flight last July, our nation has no means to launch humans into Earth orbit from U.S. soil. Period.

Whether considered from a geopolitical, economic or technological perspective, recovering that capability should be a national strategic priority. NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP) represents the fastest and most cost-effective path to that end.

That program and its cargo-carrying precursor, called COTS, for Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, are NASA initiatives to reduce costs and invigorate the American space industry. To do that, they use competitive, fixed-priced, milestone-based agreements to develop spacecraft and launch vehicle systems, rather than the traditional cost-plus-fee structure. This effort should be lauded. A recent government study using the NASA-Air Force Cost Model concluded that design, development, test and evaluation of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket would cost about $925 million (in fiscal 2010 dollars) under the conventional approach, compared to just $300 million under a firm, fixed-price contract.

Whence all the savings? Stable design requirements, leaner management and less government oversight all contribute. This last factor has made some wonder aloud whether this could mean a decrease in safety. Specifically, they cite NASA's perceived inability to include safety requirements in Space Act agreements, the contract vehicle used for the first three phases of the CCP.

In fact, NASA did write such specifications into Space Act agreements under COTS. More significantly, last year NASA published standards by which commercial crew competitors will be judged, regardless of acquisition strategy. NASA will not select a system that does not meet its safety requirements, and each of the competing teams is keenly aware that the degree to which they meet them will directly affect whether they win NASA's business. Furthermore, some of NASA's best and brightest—former astronauts and mission-operations and launch personnel—have joined these companies in program management and safety roles. My former colleagues are among the nation's premier space operators. Safety is their highest priority, and I would trust my life to them now, just as I did before.

A different and somewhat contradictory criticism was revealed at recent congressional hearings. This time, the complaint was that SpaceX and Orbital Sciences' upcoming COTS launches are well behind their original schedules. History is littered with examples of complex systems that were late, including every first launch of a manned vehicle by NASA and almost every major weapon system. That's just a fact. But there is a big difference under COTS: The providers must bear the costs of delays, because NASA's contribution is fixed. In fact, the government can even save money by recovering performance penalties.

When industry does launch COTS flights, it should hope for the best but be ready for less. The SpaceX mission will be an aggressive combination of two planned test flights, with a long list of objectives. Accomplishing all would be a home run, but a base hit is still a success. Like in any test flight, SpaceX will be wringing out its systems, to ferret out potential problems.

What is more, COTS and the commercial crew effort are better structured to absorb technical glitches than traditional, single-string procurements. With multiple competitors in each program, no system design or approach is exactly duplicated. Redundancy, specifically dissimilar redundancy, is a hallmark of safety and reliability. NASA has appropriately resisted recent attempts to mandate a premature down-selection in the "integrated capability" phase of the Commercial Crew Program. Its evaluation team, from rocket scientists to financial analysts, is uniquely positioned to assess the recently received proposals and make selections to ensure program success given the budgetary framework.

That framework—the level of NASA funding for CCP—will directly affect the speed with which we restore U.S. independent human access to Earth orbit. This capability is not only a national strategic imperative. It is crucial to protecting our $100 billion investment in the International Space Station. The commercial program meets this objective sooner than any other approach, cost-effectively while keeping safety paramount. Congress should join the administration in leaning forward to ensure the U.S. preserves its human-spaceflight leadership[/size].

[LG]

Боливар не выдержит двоих... :shock:
Орион
СпейсХ
Боинг

[Петр Зайцев]

Боливар не выдержит двоих... :shock:
Орион
СпейсХ
Боинг

Зря не верите в SNC. Компания покрупнее SpaceX. Вот погодите, они еще пересидят Рэйтеон в перетягивании легкого штурмовика...

[LG]

Боливар не выдержит двоих... :shock:
Орион
СпейсХ
Боинг

Зря не верите в SNC. Компания покрупнее SpaceX. Вот погодите, они еще пересидят Рэйтеон в перетягивании легкого штурмовика...

Я-то верю и считаю что все достойны.

[Salo]

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2012/04/10/ula-forms-human-launch-services-organization/

ULA Forms Human Launch Services Organization[/size]
Posted by Doug Messier
on April 10, 2012, at 11:50 am


United Launch Alliance's configurations for launch commercial crew vehicles on Delta IV and Atlas V vehicles. (Credit: United Launch Alliance)

CENTENNIAL, Colo., April 9, 2012 (ULA PR) –United Launch Alliance (ULA) today announced the formation of a new organization that will focus exclusively on NASA's human spaceflight programs.

ULA's Human Launch Services organization will be dedicated to supporting NASA and its partners in the development of capabilities to deliver U.S. astronauts to Low Earth Orbit and human exploration beyond Earth orbit.

"NASA is making tremendous progress towards closing the U.S. human spaceflight gap and we are committed to supporting them with our flight-proven Atlas V and Delta IV launch vehicles and technologies," said Michael Gass, ULA president and CEO. "ULA understands that human spaceflight requires the utmost attention to safety and reliability and the new organization will focus our energy and attention towards those crucial goals."

ULA's Human Launch Services Organization will be led by Dr. George Sowers. Prior to this position, Sowers headed ULA's Business Development and Advanced Programs team and brings with him more than 25 years of launch systems design, development and integration expertise.

"ULA is extremely proud of our heritage in human spaceflight beginning 50 years ago with the Mercury/Atlas launch delivering John Glenn to orbit," said Sowers. "We look forward to working with NASA and our commercial crew customers to leverage our unprecedented success record with Atlas V and Delta IV to meet the nation's need for assured access and crew safety for missions to the International Space Station and other destinations."

The ULA Human Launch Services Organization will be based in Denver, and will have resident support at key NASA Centers. The organization will draw upon the same engineering, production and operations expertise currently supporting ULA's national security and NASA science customers.

"The new organization will draw upon the same processes and people that have made our launch vehicles the most reliable in the world," said Sowers. "The intent is to leverage our successful heritage while providing our human spaceflight customers with an organization focused exclusively on their needs."

ULA program management, engineering, test and mission support functions are headquartered in Denver, Colo. Manufacturing, assembly and integration operations are located at Decatur, Ala., and Harlingen, Texas. Launch operations are located at Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla., and Vandenberg AFB, Calif.

For more information on ULA, visit the ULA Web site at www.ulalaunch.com, or call the ULA Launch Hotline at 1-877-ULA-4321 (852-4321). Join the conversation at www.facebook.com/ulalaunch and twitter.com/ulalaunch.[/size]

[Salo]

Об окупаемости коммерческого космоса:

AW&ST: How Commercial Space Is Paying Off Now[/size]

Apr 16, 2012
 
By Frank Morring, Jr.
Washington

It's still a "Field of Dreams" proposition—"if you build it, they will come." Even so, NASA's as-yet-unrealized efforts to offload routine human space access onto the private sector is beginning to ripple across the U.S. launch industry in ways that could go well beyond transporting people and their stuff into space.

Brash entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who openly declares his intention to take over the worldwide launch industry with lower-cost launchers than the competition's, are exerting downward price pressure on traditional launch-vehicle manufacturers. And the possibility of an off-planet economy in low Earth orbit (LEO) has triggered a new round of innovative launcher designs, not all of them "paper rockets" and some of them quite different from traditional vehicles.

"We've selected the Atlas V for our test flights through the Commercial Crew Program," says John Mulholland, vice president and manager of Commercial Programs for Boeing Space Exploration. "But we will continue to maintain our design to be compatible with multiple launch vehicles so that we can competitively procure launch vehicles in the future, which is important for us to maintain best value, obviously. The launch vehicle is such a huge portion of our offer."

Mulholland's group has just completed the preliminary design review on the CST-100, Boeing's entry into the NASA-run commercial crew development competition. Two other teams have baselined the Atlas V to launch their space taxis, but Atlas-builder United Launch Alliance (ULA) is not resting on its laurels. The Boeing/Lockheed Martin joint venture is scrambling to cut costs of its Atlas V and Delta IV launcher lines to meet the anticipated competition from Musk and other startups, while stressing the demonstrated reliability of their products and working to improve them (see p. 44).

And as ULA goes after the nascent human space-flight market with the Atlas V it uses to launch big government satellites and space probes, new entrants in the commercial cargo and crew game are not pinning their hopes on the human market alone. If a launcher is reliable enough to send astronauts aloft, the argument goes, it certainly is reliable enough to handle high-value satellites and other spacecraft, and perhaps open up new space businesses such as satellite servicing and orbital tourism.

If it all works out—and that remains a pretty large "if"—NASA's commercial approach to carrying astronauts to low Earth orbit could lower the cost of space access to the point that the business cases for new LEO applications can close.

Beginning with the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program initiated by then-Administrator Michael Griffin, NASA has invested about $925 million of taxpayer seed money to help create a private human spaceflight industry. That money has attracted significant private investment, and the agency is optimistic that this can generate one or more new ways to get humans and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) for less money than traditional government procurements.

The COTS program could start to pay off as early as next month, provided Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Inc. (SpaceX) succeeds in getting its next Dragon capsule off the ground with its Falcon 9 rocket and berthed at the ISS for the first time, carrying 1,000 lb. of food and other relatively low-value cargo. Orbital Sciences Corp., NASA's other COTS partner, also hopes to reach the station this year with its Cygnus cargo vehicle riding the company's new Antares liquid-fueled launcher.

That could be just the beginning. With the space shuttle fleet retired, NASA is paying Russia more than $60 million a seat to train and fly astronauts to the ISS in Soyuz capsules. Starting with $50 million in federal economic stimulus package funding in fiscal 2009, NASA has been seeding development of commercial space taxis under its Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) and Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiatives.

The latter has attracted several different proposals for full-scale systems that would ferry ISS crews to orbit beginning as early as 2017. Funding commercial crew is contentious in Washington, and the first human flights already have been delayed a year because Congress does not want NASA to put all of its eggs in the commercial crew basket (AW&ST Dec. 19, 2011, p. 20).

At the heart of the commercial crew thrust is a change in the basic approach to spaceflight safety. Instead of costly efforts to install launch system redundancy for fail-safe reliability, the new commercial crew vehicles will rely on sophisticated escape systems to safely get away from a failing rocket.

That requires quick-response health-monitoring software in the rocket to trigger an abort. And it is driving development of cost-saving escape-propulsion systems that—unlike the escape towers NASA used in the 1960s—retain their propellant after a successful launch for orbital maneuvering. ULA won $6.7 million in the first round of CCDev awards to start developing an emergency detection system (EDS) for the Atlas V. And the company has continued testing and qualification on its own dime, in partnership with NASA, via an unfunded Space Act agreement.

"There will be a certain category of failures where you're not going to want to have any men in the loop at all," says George Sowers, ULA'S vice president of business development and advanced programs. "Failure is so imminent and the consequences are so fast that you just want the computer to make the decision and pop it off. Some warning light will come on and the astronauts will have time to clench their guts and away they go."

Other failures may develop more slowly, giving range safety officers, the ULA launch control room and even the crew itself time to decide whether to abort, based on information they will be receiving from the EDS. Essentially a software package, the system will draw on data from about 80 instruments already flying on the Atlas V—from engine rpms to tank pressure to acceleration rates and directions.

Even without the added layer of safety for crews that the EDS provides, reliability played a big role in the choice of Atlas V as a crew-launch vehicle by Blue Origin, Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corp. "They've had 29 launches on this version of the Atlas V, a 100% success rate, so for a crew transportation launch vehicle that was a clear choice for now," says Boeing's Mulholland.

Sowers says the EDS will improve Atlas V reliability for all of its payloads—manned and unmanned—because of the added insight into the rocket's performance that it affords even without hardware upgrades. As part of its unfunded commercial crew work, ULA assessed how well Atlas V stacked up against NASA's human-ratings requirements.

"We've completed that, and we don't believe there are any design modifications we have to do to the Atlas rocket to meet those requirements," he says. "We're not certified yet, and complete certification won't come until the next phase of the commercial crew program, but we did that hand-in-hand with NASA, and we feel really good about the ability of the Atlas rocket—with the addition of the emergency detection system—to meet the NASA requirements."

At SpaceX, Musk says, the company's Falcon 9 rocket was built from the ground up to meet NASA's human-rating requirements, and will be ready to carry crew to the ISS as soon as Dragon's pusher-type abort system the company is developing with CCDev-2 funding is completed. NASA astronauts have been spending a lot of time in the company's Hawthorne, Calif., plant familiarizing themselves with the Dragon capsule's systems, which Musk expects their colleagues to be operating in space as early as next month. Company engineers have been working overtime to meet NASA's stringent requirements for getting close enough to the ISS for the station crew to grapple the Dragon with a robotic arm, berth it and open it to the station environment (AW&ST Feb. 13, p. 27). The first flight will combine two milestone missions to close out the company's COTS work, and Musk says he hopes to fly at least two Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) missions before the end of this year if NASA needs the supplies they can carry.

The Dragon capsule is designed to take 6,000 kg (13,200 lb.) to the ISS and return 3,000 kg to Earth. Musk is quick to point out that the down-mass capability is not shared by its COTS competitor, Orbital Sciences. "Orbital gets almost twice as much as we do per flight, but they don't bring anything back," he says. "It's about twice the value for half the money."

Under its initial CRS contract, SpaceX will be paid $1.6 billion for 12 cargo flights to the ISS, and Orbital $1.9 billion for eight flights. The fixed-price, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts each have a maximum potential value of $3.1 billion, although based on "known requirements," NASA expects to spend a total of $3.5 billion on the commercial cargo missions combined.

Ultimately, the Dragon capsule and its Falcon 9 launcher are intended to be human-rated. While the company is working under a Space Act agreement with its cargo variant, it will go to the more rigorous Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) oversight when it comes to gaining NASA's approval to fly humans.

"Eventually we will begin a certification effort that will look fairly conventional in terms of what NASA will do to ensure that we have a level of safety and mission assurance needed to fly to ISS," says Brent Jett, a two-time shuttle commander who serves as deputy manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program.

That approach will extend to any improvements in crew vehicle designs or launch vehicle changes. SpaceX plans to change engines after its first three commercial cargo flights, and Musk has high hopes for lowering his costs and customer prices with first- and second-stage upgrades by the time he intends to begin flying crews.

"We are aware that SpaceX does have an upgrade coming to the Falcon 9 that they intend to use for crew," Jett says. "f they win CCiCap, we would see in their certification plan . . . [just] how they would get comfortable certifying that vehicle. They're going to tell us how they would certify it, and then we'll balance that against how we would certify it, and be able to understand that delta of what we would be able to do under that certification contract [which is] going to come sometime in the future."

This is an approach that will extend to all potential commercial crew transport providers. NASA is evaluating proposals it received last month under the CCiCap phase of the program, in which potential suppliers describe their overall systems, including launch vehicles, and tell NASA how they plan to meet its human-rating requirements. The agency hopes to award at least two Space Act agreements late in the summer, with a 21-month base period to push system design toward—if not past—critical design review, and to include "serious risk reduction," with no promises after that.

"The whole idea there is we have a base period and then we have an optional period," says Ed Mango, the Commercial Crew Program manager. "NASA will then decide if we want to continue on with the partners in that optional period, and that is at our discretion based on how they are performing during the base period, and also how we are doing at that point to deal with certification of a vehicle toward our requirements."

Also in the mix with the SpaceX Dragon/Falcon 9 are the Atlas-launched vehicles under development by Boeing and Blue Origin, and a lifting body in development by Sierra Nevada. Blue Origins, a secretive operation bankrolled by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, builds on hydrogen-fueled vertical-takeoff-and-landing technology that NASA studied in the 1990s.

The Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser is based on NASA's old HL-20 lifting-body test vehicle, and adds a pair of hybrid rocket motors burning nitrous oxide and hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) fuel—basically a kind of rubber—for abort or in-space operations. Either way, it returns to a runway landing, and that makes it reusable even with the expendable Atlas V as its lift to space, according to Mark Sirangelo, Sierra Nevada's space systems chief.

"We expect to be less expensive than the cost of the Russians right now, per seat," he says. "The other benefit in the Atlas is that if the two choices . . . made here are both Atlases, [the more Atlases produced], the lower . . . the cost."

Particularly when combined with U.S. Air Force use of the Atlas V, the commercial crew business could lower the cost of access to LEO for all comers. But Mango stresses that competition is key, particularly early on. And that will be difficult, as Congress questions the expense of keeping at least potential operators in the running while NASA slows it internal SLS development (AW&ST March 12, p. 36).

"Our overall program approach is that we are going to need more than one company in this next phase, because we are not meeting, and I quote, 'NASA's requirements,' per se, so how do you get industry to try to get close," says Mango. "You do that by having a competition. And that competition not only keeps the price down, but it also says 'hey, the other competitor is willing to meet or try to meet more of their customer needs.'"

The same would hold true during the safety certification phase, and in the actual contracting for services," Mango adds. "That will be another FAR contract kind of acquisition approach. It is similar to something like what the launch services program uses" [for unmanned NASA launches].

Even if NASA winds up with only one commercial crew contractor, it could still gain competitive prices in launch services for its robotic space probes and Earth-observation satellites. With the Delta II out of production, Orbital Sciences, SpaceX and perhaps some of the other new launch systems in the works may go head-to-head for launch contracts on that class of vehicle.

Orbital decided not to compete in the commercial crew arena after losing out in its bid for CCDev-2 funding, but it hopes to gain the same economies of scale for unmanned launches with its Antares rocket—a kerosene-fueled vehicle that can deliver 6,120 kg to LEO from its new launch facility on Wallops Island, Va. (AW&ST Feb. 27, p. 35).

For its part, NASA is seeking $830 million in fiscal 2013 to invest in commercial crew. That is comparable to the $850 million it requested for the current fiscal year. When Congress whittled that figure down to $406 million, the agency was forced to delay its estimated start of commercial flights to the ISS to 2017 from 2016.

So far, it remains to be seen if the commercial approach actually will hold down costs once NASA begins buying crew flights. Boeing says its business case closes on the NASA missions alone—essentially two flights a year. But company officials also concede that the price per seat of a ride in the CST-100 would only be "competitive" with Soyuz seats, and not a dramatic drop.

Boeing also has partnerships with Space Adventures, which brokers Soyuz rides to the ISS at a reported $30 million a trip, and with Bigelow Aerospace. Bigelow already has flown prototypes of its planned inflatable space habitats to orbit, and is marking time to see what happens with the NASA effort before it begins seriously marketing its capabilities. Potential customers are industrial users and sovereign nations that lack the wherewithal to develop their own space laboratories.

Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser will not only be reusable, but also reconfigurable for different types of missions, according to Sirangelo. These could include satellite-servicing flights with space-suited astronauts, a capability pioneered on the Hubble Space Telescope and lost with the shuttle's retirement. Like the SpaceX Dragon, the Dream Chaser will be designed to return scientific samples and other cargo from orbit—another potential market. Both vehicles also would have the capability to operate autonomously as unmanned or man-tended commercial laboratories.

But at this stage of the transition to the post-shuttle era, those sorts of commercial activities remain in the "Field of Dreams" realm, and the Dream Chaser and its on-orbit competitors have a long way to go before the customers will come.

Still, even without having flown, the NASA-backed commercial crew vehicles have created a space-launch market that did not exist before.

"Our position is, as these other emerging launch vehicles actually get to demonstrated reliability, necessary to ensure crew safely, we would absolutely consider using them," says Boeing's Mulholland. [/size]

[instml]

Budget bill provides $525 million for commercial crew

WASHINGTON -- Senate appropriators released a draft NASA budget Tuesday, proposing a cut of more than $300 million from the agency's funding request for commercial space transportation, but adding money for development of the Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket and Orion capsule for human exploration of deep space.
 
The Senate appropriations subcommittee for commerce, science and justice, chaired by Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., approved the fiscal year 2013 budget legislation Tuesday. Fiscal year 2013 begins Oct. 1.

The House is expected to produce its own NASA budget later this year.

The White House in February requested $830 million for NASA's commercial crew program, which was chartered to foster private development of rockets and spacecraft to carry astronaut crews to and from the International Space Station. With the space shuttle's retirement, NASA must purchase seats on Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

NASA's request for commercial crew in fiscal 2012 was cut in half by Congress, delaying the scheduled start of crew transportation services by one year until 2017. Officials have warned another significant reduction from next year's $830 million request would cause another delay.

In the budget mark-up released Tuesday, Senate appropriators would provide $525 million for commercial crew.

Some senators, including Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, have accused NASA of robbing the budget for the Space Launch System and Orion programs, which are designed for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit, to pay for commercial crew development.

Hutchison is the ranking member of the Senate appropriations subcommittee for commerce, science and justice.

The SLS and Orion budgets each saw slight cuts in the White House's fiscal 2013 request, which was released Feb. 13.

In testimony before Senate committees, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said the heavy-lift rocket and capsule were making good progress, so the space agency could afford taking some funding away from those programs, highlighting the imperative of keeping pace in the commercial crew effort.

The Senate budget proposal includes $1.2 billion for the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle and $1.5 billion for the Space Launch System. The Obama administration's budget request includes $1 billion for Orion and about $1.3 billion for the SLS program.

The Senate appropriations bill calls for restoring $100 million to NASA's Mars science programs, responding to a cut to robotic exploration of Mars in the White House's budget blueprint. The Senate budget proposal includes $461 million for unmanned Mars research.

Senators also wish to shift $1.6 billion in funding for NOAA's weather satellites to NASA, boosting the space agency's overall budget to $19.4 billion. NASA currently manages acquisition and procurement for weather satellites under a cost reimbursement agreement with NOAA.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1204/18senate/

[Salo]

Дата пуска коммерческих КК уплывает за 2017 год:

"Медленно ракеты уплывают вдаль,
 Встречи с ними ты уже не жди.
 И хотя Америку немного жаль,
 У Европы это впереди."

[Valerij]

Дата пуска коммерческих КК уплывает за 2017 год:

"Медленно ракеты уплывают вдаль,
 Встречи с ними ты уже не жди.
 И хотя Америку немного жаль,
 У Европы это впереди."

Не уверен. На месте Маска я бы сделал, пусть и за свой счет, где-то в 2014 - 2015 году пилотируемый пуск. После этого отмаза "Летаем на Союзах, потому, что своих кораблей нет"  была бы закончена. В 2015 и 2016 годах в Штатах выборы, и Маск в этом случае берет джекпот.....

З.Ы.
Такая возможность очевидна и конкурентам Маска. Стоит запастись попкорном!

[LRV_75]

Не уверен. На месте Маска я бы сделал, пусть и за свой счет, где-то в 2014 - 2015 году пилотируемый пуск

Странные у Вас мечты. Вы грезите мечтой, что бы какой нибудь частник как можно быстрей построил за свой счет свою частную ракету и сбил ей МКС? При чем, Вы желаете, чтобы в боевом блоке непременно сидели люди  :shock: Зачем Вам это?  :shock:

[Valerij]

Странные у Вас мечты. Вы грезите мечтой, что бы какой нибудь частник как можно быстрей построил за свой счет свою частную ракету и сбил ей МКС? При чем, Вы желаете, чтобы в боевом блоке непременно сидели люди  :shock: Зачем Вам это?  :shock:

У РККЭ, формально тоже частной, шансов сбить МКС намного больше. Это ваша мечта?

Я же хочу что бы раньше закончилось безвременье.

[LRV_75]

У РККЭ, формально тоже частной, шансов сбить МКС намного больше. Это ваша мечта?

Я же хочу что бы раньше закончилось безвременье.

Вы хотите сказать, что у космического корабля с показателями надежности под 100% больше шансов сбить МКС чем у космического корабля, который вообще пока не имеет фактической надежности?  :shock:

[Дмитрий В.]

Вы хотите сказать, что у космического корабля с показателями надежности под 100% больше шансов сбить МКС чем у космического корабля, который вообще пока не имеет фактической надежности?  :shock:

Это обычная логика опровергателей, к которым относится Valerij

[SFN]

Определение задач частной космонавтики идет полным ходом. )) Зачем они столько разных КК проектируют? Боятся промахнуться с первого раза?))

[LRV_75]

Определение задач частной космонавтики идет полным ходом. )) Зачем они столько разных КК проектируют? Боятся промахнуться с первого раза?))

Попасть тоже по разному можно  

[Valerij]

Сорри, дубль.

[Valerij]

Вы хотите сказать, что у космического корабля с показателями надежности под 100% больше шансов сбить МКС чем у космического корабля, который вообще пока не имеет фактической надежности?  :shock:

Это обычная логика опровергателей, к которым относится Valerij

Простите, а какие корабли уже сталкивались с ОС "МИР"? Так что у РККЭ уже есть опыт

Ну а сказать я хочу лишь то, что корабли от РККЭ летают к МКС сейчас (и в планах на ближайшие годы) чаще любых других. И попробуйте это опровергнуть.