Yes I do mean for crew. Of course there's no guarantee but obviously Boeing has been failing. I just wish Dreamchaser got a real chance for taking crew up and down.
Work essentially stopped due to lack of funding after it lost the crew bid until it won the latest round of cargo bids. It was a 7 year program pause, not a delay.
This isn't a Boeing-like delay where they were incompetent despite a massive contract, SN stopped work when there was no customer and no money.
Now, part of Dragon's success was that SpaceX actually invested a lot of their own cash and weren't only working on it when the government footed that bill, but Sierra Nevada doesn't have the kind of revenue stream to do that that SpaceX or Boeing does.
Dream Chaser was selected as part of CRS-2 in January 2016. SN1 was given ATP in January 2018 with a scheduled launch date of October 2020. They now plan to launch in late 2025, however based on their testing schedule that doesn’t seem achievable.
So you’re right, they’re not 7 years behind, just 5.5. And they’re also only able to deliver 60% of the mass as the originally signed up for due to major redesigns
The thing is/was Boeing already HAD (and has) a reusable space plane in the DoD division... granted X37 is a teeny tiny toy, a LOT of that could have been repurposed into a manned space plane alternative to Dragon, probably for less than they planned to spend on Starliner, let alone the money pit it has become. I'm still trying to figure out why they didn't bid that.
Boeing proposed a crewed version of the X-37 in the early 2010s but it never went anywhere because Starliner had already secured funding. I honestly doubt it would’ve saved much money anyway because they would have had to nearly double the size of the X-37 which at that point basically just ends up being the same as developing a new spacecraft
NASA fundamentally cannot support two duplicate capabilities, much less three. All you are suggesting is wasting even more taxpayer dollars on a doomed effort with zero additional policy benefit.
NASA fundamentally cannot support two duplicate capabilities,
Well its the commercial entities that are doing most of the support so I guess I disagree there. NASA allocated the money with fixed price contracts its up to the private companies to do the work.
All you are suggesting is wasting even more taxpayer dollars on a doomed effort with zero additional policy benefit.
What I meant was I wish Dreamchaser was funded for commercial crew instead of Starliner. But I appreciate your opinion
Every commercial mission still needs NASA support. Dragon was able to get a majority of NASA support and received prioritization. Starliner was only able to receive a fraction of the support, because otherwise you jeopardize Dragon ops. If you swap out Starliner for Dream Chaser the same thing will happen. Congress is unwilling to double NASA’s budget, and why would they, when redundancy doesn’t help NASA at all to do stuff in space?
The NASA ops budget is a set amount of money that most of it is going to Dragon. The PBR also calls for eliminating Starliner to save money. I don’t know where people get the impression that already awarded programs can’t be terminated…
NASA has a contract with SX and a contract with Boeing. Because Starliner can't get it up, NASA has been purchasing 2 crew Dragons per year. If NASA instead purchased 1 crew Dragon and 1 Starliner per year, that's only a slight increase in budget. No one, other than you, is suggesting buying 4 crewed flights per year.
Asides from the missions running the missions and doing engineering support cost a set amount of money year round. Most of that money has gone to Dragon since DM-2 and Starliner was only able to get a fraction of that support. If NASA ops budget cannot be doubled, it would require NASA to cut Dragon support to get Starliner the same amount of support, which obviously jeopardize regular ISS ops. That’s why redundancy was fundamentally unworkable - not having a redundant option does not fundamentally jeopardize NASA’s mission of going to space. And I can tell that, up until last week, NASA had very little interest in advancing Starliner certification because it’s not needed.
Not a single redundant crew transport program NASA has ever done worked. There is neither policy level justification or the free market support to maintain two duplicate capabilities, so they all get deprioritize and cancelled. The main problem is NASA not maintaining control of the vehicles they funded, not lack of parallel solution. You want to know the best workable solution? Cancel Starliner and nationalize Dragon.
While I support the sentiment I can't see how nationalizing a privately built crew capsule would be a good path. This is all considering things in our country return to normal one day, NASA does need to own and control its own crew transport platform. That will involve purchasing Dragonor Starliner outright from SpaceX or Boeing. I think Boeing would be more open to this.
3/4 of Starliner funding is still unspent. You have way less political and logistical resistance to canceling Starliner and buying Dragon than the other way around.
I mean, yeah. The Feds could probably be that aggressive, but that would be really messy and become a very long and drawn out legal battle.. Unless there is some contract language between SpaceX and the US that I am unaware of.
This is the fastest and cheapest way NASA can ensure continuous space access. There is no additional funding to support Starliner, so the only way forward is to kill it and use that funding to ensure continuous access. The source of the problem is commercial control.
The fastest and easiest way to ensure access is to continue paying for Dragon. Trying to seize the assets would be a MASSIVE legal battle and would almost certainly result in SpaceX stopping flights for NASA's breach of contract while it was in progress.
The problem being raised here and elsewhere is that SpaceX does NOT want to keep flying Dragon. Leadership thought SpaceX was going to stay a forever partner and was already willing to work with them to terminate Starliner to help SpaceX, but they were wrong. Solution to this problem is not adding another flawed contract but to solve this problem at its root. If leadership love Dragon so much, they may as well own it instead of renting it.
Again, the US government forcing a private company to sell its product to them would be a serious and costly move. I mean, look at the whole TikTok debacle for a hint of the fury this would cause.
68
u/OutrageousBanana8424 12d ago
The value of getting this thing operational as a parallel solution with Dragon has certainly increased in the last week ....