Claim: Commercial Crew is going to be a train-wreck in slow motion...

[Nomadd]

 I wouldn't worry too much about the demand for manned spaceflight drying up. The real spur for the US in early days wasn't Von Braun or Webb or Kennedy. It was Gagarin.
 And now we have some new competition. A country of over a billion that's very interested in manned flight, space stations and establishing a real presence in all forms. A country with trillions in foreign reserves to spend.
 If there's one thing that will generate mandates and funding in the US, it's competition. It's not likely that one congressman in ten knows an LAS from a doughnut or can name a single component or experiment on the ISS. But they do understand looking bad.

[aquanaut99]

Commercial Crew is probably going to be a train-wreck for precisely the aforementioned reasons: Not enough demand to get competition working, very high initial investment required, first one to fly will have a huge advantage and a quasi-monopoly position with NASA as the sole customer who can't afford to switch because that will result in a large gap...

On the other hand, a NASA-operated crew delivery would suffer from the same problems, plus bureaucratic inefficiency and pork-barrel spending.

Which is worse?

Ah, one positive point to finish: Even if NASA finds itself at the hands of a SpaceX (or other provider) monopoly in the US, there still is at least one valid alternate provider: Russia. After all, NASA is by now used to sending astronauts up on Soyuz. SpaceX (and any other commercial provider) cannot charge very much more per seat than Russia, because otherwise we might as well stick with them...

The real test will come once ISS shuts down. If there is no credible mission or objective for US astronauts at that time, then, the Economist is right and the Space Age ends, at least for the USA:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=25755.0

[DGH]

I see several flaws in this argument.

First:

1)   We have been launching 4 shuttles carrying 7 people a year.
2)   NASA has said they want 4 crew per mission not 7.

So this leads to 7 flights of 4 crew a year not 2 flights a year to replace the shuttle flights.
 

Second there are cargo missions as well.
All the crew vehicles can carry cargo as well as crew.
Several of which has interesting capabilities such as the Dragon trunk and the CST-100 ability to carry fuel. The total for both could reach 16-24 launches a year for full use by 2020.

Third we have a total of 5 crew and cargo vehicles in development not all these vehicles will succeed.

[yg1968]

I see several flaws in this argument.

First:

1)   We have been launching 4 shuttles carrying 7 people a year.
2)   NASA has said they want 4 crew per mission not 7.

So this leads to 7 flights of 4 crew a year not 2 flights a year to replace the shuttle flights.
 

Second there are cargo missions as well.
All the crew vehicles can carry cargo as well as crew.
Several of which has interesting capabilities such as the Dragon trunk and the CST-100 ability to carry fuel. The total for both could reach 16-24 launches a year for full use by 2020.

Third we have a total of 5 crew and cargo vehicles in development not all these vehicles will succeed.

Astronauts will only be sent to the ISS for 6 months stays. There will no longer be any need to send astronauts on short term flights to assemble the ISS. NASA anticipates buying 2 or 3 flights per year with 4 astronauts on each flight. 

[Patchouli]

How can a program that is providing three maybe four crew vehicles including one similar to the Shuttle all for a cost not much more then a single flagship space probe mission be a train wreck?

For the first time in history NASA will have redundant access to LEO that does not depend on a foreign country's vehicles.

If there is a problem with one of the vehicles take it off line and fix it.
With multiple vehicles they can ground a problematic vehicle even if the event that did not result in loss of crew such as it going into a ballistic reentry.

[pathfinder_01]

Astronauts will only be sent to the ISS for 6 months stays. There will no longer be any need to send astronauts on short term flights to assemble the ISS. NASA anticipates buying 2 or 3 flights per year with 4 astronauts on each flight. 

Yeap, that being said that leaves 3 seats per flight that can be sold and there could possibly be lifeboat duties for one craft(left unmanned for 6 months instead of rotated manned). There could also be short term flights by NASA, ESA, JAXA or other agency.

[SpacexULA]

IMHO Commercial Crew will not be a train wreck, because it's not an all or nothing system like the Shuttle.

The launchers that would be used for commercial crew, Atlas, Delta, Falcon, and possibly Taurus 2 all have plenty of payloads to not need a demand from NASA to maintain the assembly line.

On the capsules, Both CTS-100 and Dragon have the ablity to deliver cargo, and I have a feeling CTS-100 will get a cargo contract at some point in the future.  But as it stands NASA has way more demand for cargo than any provider can deliver.

On commercial crew Space Adventures has long said they have more demand for seats than Russia can provide, and are open to using the American Commercial crew capacities.  Space Adventures is a proven demand, let's not even talk about Bigelow.  If commercial crew becomes 2 people in a capsule surrounded by supplies I don't think anyone would complain.

So as it stands CTS-100, Cignus, and Dragon all have more demand than they could supply JUST in ISS, with zero expansion on the ISS part.  Atlas, Delta, and Falcon all could easily function without any demand for Commercial Crew, and Oribital, SpaceX, and ULA are not in need of commercial crew to make their business case.

There is a launcher out there, that requires government HSF payloads to justify it's existence, is completely dependent on the goodwill of Congress and the competency of NASA to ever get built, and no international interest in it's use.  I will give you a hint, it's not a ULA, SpaceX or Orbital product.

[vt_hokie]

IMHO Commercial Crew will not be a train wreck, because it's not an all or nothing system like the Shuttle.

The biggest risk I see is that commercial crew is dependent upon ISS to supply the initial demand, even as we put ISS at greater risk by retiring the shuttle.  Even under the best of circumstances, assuming that commercial crew doesn't suffer significant delays, the overlap between the first CCDEV flights and ISS retirement is only a few years.  That overlap could disappear quickly.

[Ben the Space Brit]

Remember that ISS crewing has never been about six crew every six months to date.  There have been mid-expedition crew swaps by shuttle or Soyuz as well as exteded utilisation periods with a shuttle supporting extra crew.  There is no reason why CC might not easily be as much as four launches/year (comparable to shuttle).

Whilst I agree that the government-only market is a bit shallow for two redundant providers, the question about how much a market exists for non-government crew launches is still pretty 'TBD', especially with prices still in flux.  I think that, whilst Grigori's OP is a pretty good summation of the worst-case scenario, it is a pretty statistically extreme outcome.  We should be able to speculate based on more data after Bigelow starts offering places on his first modules and we can see what level of uptake he has.

[SpacexULA]

The biggest risk I see is that commercial crew is dependent upon ISS to supply the initial demand, even as we put ISS at greater risk by retiring the shuttle.  Even under the best of circumstances, assuming that commercial crew doesn't suffer significant delays, the overlap between the first CCDEV flights and ISS retirement is only a few years.  That overlap could disappear quickly.

I don't think the demand for commercial crew ends with ISS.

Let's go back in time a bit.  What if the Apollo capsule had been sized to launch on Saturn 5, and the Airforce Atlas or Delta?

What if Boeing had owned the Apollo capsule, and NASA had signed a contract to pay for them to be in active reserve, how would life had been different for NASA?

We would not have lost Skylab, (Apollo would have just transitioned over to Atlas/Delta).  Instead of needing a Launch on demand Shuttle, we could have just had the ability to bump a payload on Atlas or Delta in the event of an emergency.  During the 2 shuttle shutdowns NASA could have been able to transition over to Atlas and Delta till Shuttle was back online.  Even right now, 40+ years later, we sure could use that capsule.

We made that very small mistake decades ago.  I hope NASA is smart enough not to do it again.  A launch on demand Ares 5 is not going to be an option if something happens when we go back to the moon.  But we might have the ability to turn to SpaceX, Orbital, or Boeing and ask who can have a capsule up to rescue our crew the quickest.

[mr. mark]

It really depends on what you mean by USA. If the USA is it's citizens and business is the extension of it's citizens then space travel will not end entirely even if NASA (Government) withdraws from directly launching astronauts which, I personally doubt will happen. NASA is much more than building rockets and spacecraft. There is a research and and operations angle which could continue to supply private providers. Spacex just recently purchased the use of the Delta 2 facility at the cape for additional space as an example. Personally,  I think we are starting on a new golden age in space exploration. I think people forget that in about 5 years there could start to be multiple commercial stations in space. It may be short sighted to just see the ISS as the only destination. Of course, I expect some will see the other side of the coin on this.

[Gregori]

1.  That low amount can barely support one provider never mind two or three! This will not result in a competitive market and will likely end up having one provider for the capability.

2.   This combination of few missions and few providers will make it very expensive per flight, possibly as high as shuttle.

3.   Commercial Cargo under COTS was not cheap, so I doubt human spaceflight is going to be significantly cheaper, esp since the vehicles are far more complex than the cargo ships like Dragon and Cygnus.

1.  So what?

2.  No, it won't be "very" expensive or even close to the shuttle

3.  How is it "not cheap"?

1) When there is a monopoly on crew transport, people will not be saying "so what" as the company involved jacks up the prices. The Russians are doing it, so there is no reason to believe a US company won't do the same.

The supposed selling point of commercial is that companies will compete with each other to lower the price of access to the government, and that their is redundancy, so if one is charging too much or is unreliable, its easy to switch providers.

2) That remains to be seen, since none of the vehicles have flown yet. EELV prices have done nothing but go up and crewed capsules are going to be more expensive than cargo containers. With a low flight rate and a possible monopoly, this will just make things worse. Mere faith that it won't end up being as expensive as Shuttle because its "commercial" is not a good thing to go by.


3) Well, the actual numbers. Between $1.6 and $1.9 Billion for the delivery of 20 tonnes of cargo to ISS. That's not a radical improvement. I've no reason to believe crew transport is going to be radically cheaper either.

[vt_hokie]

I think people forget that in about 5 years there could start to be multiple commercial stations in space.

Until I see evidence to the contrary, I put pie in the sky visions of Bigelow tourist stations in the same category as flying cars and SSTO spaceplanes on the near-term likelihood scale.

[Gregori]

NASA will be locked into paying whatever these companies charge for the service.

Again, so what?  It will be cheaper than a NASA managed system

Again, this is just a childish "well its better than NASA..." argument to throw attention away from the problems of commercial. I haven't been talking about the merits of NASA or whether that's better. I am not actually that interested in taking sides on that and have not specifically mentioned anything about it. For what its worth, SLS and Orion are probably also going to be train-wrecks in slow motion.

Companies having a monopoly on a service were NASA can't easily change providers is obviously not a good idea and could end up being very costly for the tax payer. Its not a desirable situation by any measure.

[Gregori]

Robert Bigelow, Elon Musk, and others have sunk *quite* a bit of their own wealth assuming that there will in fact be a multitude of other customers, along with crew and cargo to ISS supporting their business case a good deal. You might want to check out the NASA study on markets for crew and cargo which deals with much of this.

Yes. This could be a terrible assumption. It won't be the first time millions was wasted on overly optimistic assumptions. Nobody seems to be questioning, what if this stuff doesn't pan out? What people desire to happen most is not actually the most likely outcome.

I'd be quite interested in seeing the evidence for your claim that commercial cargo is "not cheap", as all the data I've seen has it providing upmass at prices far lower than almost any other competitor. If you're referring to a certain document issued during a Congressional hearing, jongoff posted a nice rebuttal of its numbers, which appear to be couched in fantasy more than anything else.

Just look at the numbers. They're evidence enough. I am not referring to congressional reports.

[Diagoras]

I'll repeat this again, for emphasis: everyone on this thread needs to read the following PDF document. I know some of the regular posters already have, but it should help clear up many of the misconceptions present here.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/543572main_Section%20403(b)%20Commercial%20Market%20Assessment%20Report%20Final.pdf

[Diagoras]

Robert Bigelow, Elon Musk, and others have sunk *quite* a bit of their own wealth assuming that there will in fact be a multitude of other customers, along with crew and cargo to ISS supporting their business case a good deal. You might want to check out the NASA study on markets for crew and cargo which deals with much of this.

Yes. This could be a terrible assumption. It won't be the first time millions was wasted on overly optimistic assumptions. Nobody seems to be questioning, what if this stuff doesn't pan out? What people desire to happen most is not actually the most likely outcome.

Commercial crew will probably be downselected to two providers, who will also handle cargo services. Considering low-end projected demand is about 50 passengers to LEO and at least 7,500 lbs of cargo over a ten year period, this should be easy enough to sustain.

I'd be quite interested in seeing the evidence for your claim that commercial cargo is "not cheap", as all the data I've seen has it providing upmass at prices far lower than almost any other competitor. If you're referring to a certain document issued during a Congressional hearing, jongoff posted a nice rebuttal of its numbers, which appear to be couched in fantasy more than anything else.

Just look at the numbers. They're evidence enough. I am not referring to congressional reports.

I have been looking at the numbers, have you? See my previous post for the currently assessed numbers.

[Diagoras]

And apologies for the triple post, but Gregori claimed that Dragon/Falcon 9 would take a billion dollars to make it able to transport crew. As I recall, that is a misreported figure by a rather confused reporter, and the real number is more like a max of 350 million. Can anyone chime in with the confirmed cost of turning SpaceX into a crew provider?

[Garrett]

I think people forget that in about 5 years there could start to be multiple commercial stations in space.

Until I see evidence to the contrary, I put pie in the sky visions of Bigelow tourist stations in the same category as flying cars and SSTO spaceplanes on the near-term likelihood scale.

Lurker here, but just thought I'd point out that that's a really bad comparison.
It's also a bit of a straw man argument, as Bigelow are not initially focusing on tourists, but rather on small nations who want better access to space.

[mr. mark]

Whether it's going to work or not US private space is the wave of the future at witnessed at the Orlando International Airport. I guess this is being posted all over the place.