NASA just had a press conference to announc contracts with several companies, including:

– Boeing, for a 7-person capsule to be launched on a medium-class launch vehicle (likely either Atlas V or Delta IV), teaming with Bigelow Aerospace

– Sierra Nevada for 7-person DreamChaser spacecraft, based on NASA’s 1990’s HL-20 lifting body, to be launched on Atlas V

– Paragon, for a plug-and-play life support system applicable to all manned spacecraft designs

- United Launch Alliance, for advanced Emergency Detection System for both Atlas V and Delta IV, making them safer for manned spacecraft (and improving reliability for unmanned missions.)

– Blue Origin, for “pusher” type Launch Abort System (escape rocket)

When Apollo was cancelled (it died in the summer of 1967 when LBJ ended production of Saturn V beyond the original 15 ordered, when Nixon arrived in 1969 it was cost-prohibitive to restart production.) NASA’s budget declined. There was no manned spacecraft except for Shuttle that was expected to fly in 1978, and there was absolutely no talk of travel beyond Earth orbit.

Now Project Constellation has been cancelled, but NASA’s budget is actually increasing. There is still a manned spacecraft in service, the International Space Station, which is about 75% American. The Station is an existing, ready-made destination for startup commercial spacecraft. NASA does not have to operate in a vacuum (no pun intended) as it did with Shuttle (which was designed and built with nothing to Shuttle to, thus forcing it to become an all-purpose launch vehicle… a jack of all trades, master of none.)
And the President and NASA Administrator both say exploration is not dead, it is just reorganized, a true paradigm shift in the way NASA does business.

There are already contracts with two commercial providers to supply cargo to the Space Station. One of them (SpaceX) has its first rocket at the launch site as we speak, the other (OSC) expects first flight in mid 2011. Other companies, such as Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada, have been working on designs for suborbital tourist flights and claim their technology is easily scalable to orbital service if they had the capitol to do it. The President’s budget provides that capitol.

And then there is SpaceShipTwo. Sure, it doesn’t go into orbit, but it will reach space, probably this year, and meets the strict definition of ‘manned spaceflight’. Virgin Galactic is already designing SpaceShipThree for transoceanic hops and hopes a SpaceShipFour can be orbital. Now that there is a clear market for commercial spacecraft, the ability for companies like Virgin and Blue Origin to raise capitol investment becomes much easier. Potential investors can no longer laugh it off as a space flight of fancy… there’s real money to be made now. There’s a real market, to a real Space Station.

Bigelow Aerospace has already launched two prototype space habitats into orbit (Genesis 1 and 2). Until now, there was no way to get tourists to it (although Sierra Nevada’s Dreamchaser and others were being designed with that goal in mind.). Now that private companies will be building their own manned spacecraft (to support ISS) they can leverage that business into supporting Bigelow’s space hotels. The risk to Bigelow and its partners goes down, because the same systems can support both ISS and Bigelow.

These are very interesting times.

I’m sorry to say I’ve been through all this before. It’s just never been this bad before. Manned Space flight is done.

For “unprecedented”, I was referring to a Demcratic President increasing NASA’s budget. The last one to do that was LBJ in the 1966. Carter and Clinton slashed NASA funding with wild abandon.

By the way, General Bolden (NASA Administrator) today specifically cited Propellant Depots, Ion Engines, and the VASIMIR plasma engine as things that we’ll be doing instead of Constellation. These are called “enabling technologies”. All three are exciting. A propellant depot obviates the need for a NASA megarocket while at the same time creating a very big market for new low-cost commercial rockets (if one blows up now and then, it doesn’t matter much… fuel is cheap and easily replaced.) If the market for propellant gets large enough (the depot can also support space tugs for satellites going to geosynchronous orbit) then we will soon reach the critical mass in flight rates where a true reusable launch vehicle becomes practical. And a true RLV will change EVERYTHING.

By the way, loved your use of the word “unprecedented” in your first post. I know someone else who likes the use that word a lot to make it look like they are doing incredible things every day in unprecedented times of turmoil. The really funny thing is that nothing they have done is unprecedented, except for creating a debt that is 75% of the GDP. Now thats unprecedented!

Nonsense. If you really want to send humans on long-duration missions into deep space, we need ISS.

How do we learn to build an ultra-reliable closed-loop life support system without having “life” on the station to support? The Russians have a simple one, but it still depends on constant resupply from their Progres freighters and water delivered by the Shuttle. The US now has one, but it is just getting started and is still not fully operational.

How can we learn to prevent severe bone calcium loss in zero-g without having astronauts in zero-g? How do we protected people from radiation?

Those are just the fundamentals. We also need to learn how to keep a spacecraft operating for years without a constant supply of spare parts being sent up from Earth. ISS will teach us what works and what doesn’t (it has already taught us an enormous amount about how to build large space vehicles, which a future manned Mars mission undoubtedly will be.

The ISS is a joke. Anything done there can be done cheaper by unmanned probes. Indeed at this point I am in favor of killing all fundiing to the ISS. If the current administration is so myopic as to turn tail and run from the high frontier, then we need to end this shame of a program entirely. Looks like the Europeans, the Indians, and the Chinese will all push futher out into the solar system while the US sits on it’s arse.

Can you imagine that the US after the end of this year will have no man rated rocket in it’s inventory! Private enterprise will never push out into the final frontier, they will exploit what they can nearer to home.

Lets talk in Trek terms. Starfleet was not created by private buisness, it was a government run military organization. So is that out future? No civilian space exploration, but the military will have unlimited access to the heavens?

Sorry, the more I see of BHO the more of a disaster I see in the making. We as a nation have met a challenge, the conquest of the heavens, and we have failed in meeting it. The Moon is not the issue, the rest of the solar system is. Cancel Aries fine, announce a push for Mars would de fantastic. Instead we are going to go into low Earth orbit with robots and explore via telepresence. What a freaking sad end to a noble pursuit.

On the other hand: if we DO give in to “gloom & doom” &panic, if we do give in to the false economies of “can’t do” & “can’t afford it”, we will slip in to another dark age like the previous ones of history. And it will be centuries before anyone will read words on a computer sceen again, like this.
As far as the money question is concerned (”where will the dough come from?” question), The old “greenback” party of the 1870’s understood the answer; the members of the social credit movement in the UK/Canada/NZ/Australia understands; Richard C. Cook with his “credit-as-a-public-utility” essays understands; Steven Zarlenga of the AMI understands; economist John Hoefle of the EIR understands; & the global private central banking cabal also understands (and is the deadly enemy to these groups previously mentioned).
You don’t need gold. WHAT is the Nat’l Treasure??? PEOPLE. It is creative minds of our scientists, engineers, technicians, tool &die techs, machinists, etc…ALONG with a gov’t of dedicated public servants around a VITAL CORE of visionary statesmen/women that brings in a GOLDEN AGE in any era (the merchant/entrepeneur occupies a necessary, but actually much more humble position in this arrangement— which has been the problem of the past 30 years & WHY we’ve been slipping so badly).

Re: 91 – Thanks for digging down and finding the silver lining, Thorny.

Re: 89 – Like you, I’d love to have a robust manned space program; maybe it’ll happen within our lifetimes. Keep the faith.

Scott B. out.

Mr. Obama made a more drastic change than even last week’s reports suggested, gone are both the Ares rockets and the Orion spacecraft. and exploration is totally off the table (for now.) But what he has proposed instead is actually very interesting. His budget funds quite a bit of new technology development. Mr. Obama also hugely increases money for research aboard the International Space Station, which has had its science budget slaughtered over the last ten years to pay for hardware overruns. That piddling amount of time and money so far spent on actual science at ISS has already led to a potential vaccine for salmonella. Imaging what it will do with a serious budget for experiments. The NASA Administrator spoke of radically changing the way we travel the solar system, using new engines. That sounds to me like the VASIMIR plasma drive engine is about to get a lot of money for full-scale development.

Lost in the noise today was the announcement of contracts to five or six “commercial space” operators to develop new manned spacecraft, among them is SpaceDev (Now “Sierra Nevada Corp”) for its DreamChaser spacecraft (based on NASA’s 1990’s HL-20.) And these are just the first small contract awards, the President’s budget allocates $6 billion more to develop commercial spacecraft and $7.8 billion over the next few years to develop US automatic docking capability, fuel-transfer on-orbit, and improved closed-loop life support systems. Sounds to me like the President still has manned deep-space exploration in mind, but instead of unaffordable new super-rockets, he wants to use the Orbital Fuel Depot concept (tended by commercial spacecraft) instead. A lot of space geeks have been saying that’s the way NASA should have been planning it all along if NASA really wanted to open the space frontier to everyone.

Okay, we’ve lost the moon goal, the big new Orion, and big new rockets for the foreseeable future, but this is still the most ambitious, and best funded space technology development effort the US has undertaken since the Shuttle in 1972. This is far from gloom-and-doom. Doom would have been President Obama cancelling Constellation and shifting that money from NASA to the Department of Education or off to more banks.