A bit of a surprise in a small segment of Charlie Bolton's online chat today. In response to one question about the return to Capsules, he included this small bit:
"We expect that for low Earth orbit operations such as transportation to the ISS, at least two of the prospective competitors, Orbital Sciences and Sierra Nevada, have proposed winged vehicles for their designs."
perhaps Promethius is not as dead as I'd thought.
A bit of a surprise in a small segment of Charlie Bolton's online chat today. In response to one question about the return to Capsules, he included this small bit:
"We expect that for low Earth orbit operations such as transportation to the ISS, at least two of the prospective competitors, Orbital Sciences and Sierra Nevada, have proposed winged vehicles for their designs."
perhaps Promethius is not as dead as I'd thought.
Well, Orbital will be able to compete with Prometheus in next year's contest. They're still prospective competitors. I don't see how the quote changes anything we knew.
A bit of a surprise in a small segment of Charlie Bolton's online chat today. In response to one question about the return to Capsules, he included this small bit:
"We expect that for low Earth orbit operations such as transportation to the ISS, at least two of the prospective competitors, Orbital Sciences and Sierra Nevada, have proposed winged vehicles for their designs."
perhaps Prometheus is not as dead as I'd thought.
Kind of a similar situation to COTS and CRS. Planetspace lost the second COTS program but still submitted their design for CRS consideration. So if Orbital wants to their is not a reason Prometheus would be excluded fromm consideration for CCDev 3/4 and the commercial crew contracts (although their competitors will still have significant advantage with the design maturity offered from previous CCDev projects)
The real question is whether Orbital will modify the Prometheus proposal, throw it out and start again, or forgo offering anything at all (put the order in most likely to happen)
Or, for that matter, recall that SpaceX was excluded from CCDEV-1, and Orbital from COTS-1, despite both later receiving funding from those programs.
The selection statement for CRS-2 stated that Prometheus was a better design than DreamChaser, but that SNC had a better business case. Both designs will improve by the time of CRS-3, so it will really be down to (another) non-technical decision...
Thinking about the orbital proposal, and think I might have a different idea. Rather than going with a new space plane design, how about a Cygnus propulsion bus with a TKS capsule on an Atlas V? Would be more simple as a capsule, and the Cygnus bus and TKS will have already flown.
The selection statement for CRS-2 stated that Prometheus was a better design than DreamChaser, but that SNC had a better business case. Both designs will improve by the time of CRS-3, so it will really be down to (another) non-technical decision...
The business case
is a really important part of CCDev as far as I can tell. Funds allocated to CCDev are in short supply, and NASA want to make sure that the maximum benefit is obtained from them, both in the short and long term. Investing in a project that displays only technical excellence, only for the company to go bankrupt and for the capability to be abandoned, would not be responsible.
Investing in a project that displays only technical excellence, only for the company to go bankrupt and for the capability to be abandoned, would not be responsible.
True, but OSC is not about to go bankrupt, and can point to a much longer record of on-budget complex projects (as opposed to SNC, which has only ever done subcomponents). I've gotta think it was deeper than that...
Investing in a project that displays only technical excellence, only for the company to go bankrupt and for the capability to be abandoned, would not be responsible.
True, but OSC is not about to go bankrupt, and can point to a much longer record of on-budget complex projects (as opposed to SNC, which has only ever done subcomponents). I've gotta think it was deeper than that...
I was giving an extreme example of why business case was an important consideration. If the business case for a project fails, in the commercial world that project will be abandoned, no matter how technically capable or interesting it is.
