Orbital.
Well, what we found out today is that the Big Fish won't be playing in the small pond. It hurts to have existing hardware and a working rocket. It sure pays to be a FOM ("friend of Mike"). And we also found out, as expected, what a sham COTS is after all.
Yet another rocket that will miraculously jump off the paper at Wallops to save the day in 2010. Just what this country needs. NOT. And its a replacement rocket for the Delta II that the government has said it can no longer afford. No proposal for crew carrying capabilities. A foreign provided pressurized carrier. Use of DART mission capabilities for prox ops at ISS. Alan, dear friend, did you not read the DART failure reports your very own S&MA groups produced??
While our predictions for COTS have not been very accurate so far, primarily because we believed, no, hoped, a real effort to obtain services commercially would be undertaken with the program. Nevertheless, we'll make another prediction now. You won't be hearing about COTS much come this time two years from now.
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2 comments:
Once again we see that NASA is not really interested in obtaining a true commercial space capability, that would threaten the emporers vision! Instead NASA is going to throw more tax payer money down the drain for a contractor that has never built viable rocket with any real lift capability, has no experience in pressurized vehicle operations in-space and has no solution for cargo return or crew transportation! While Boeing would not be the cheapest, we (the tax payers) would get a vehicle that could deliver the goods (or people and bring them back home) and would not be a major risk to ISS as it approaches. Time for NASA to get out of the way!
SpaceX is going to forge ahead, COTS or no COTS. As I pointed out on my blog, SpaceX has created two new rocket engines and started tests of flight hardware, from a standing start five years ago, for about what NASA spends every eleven days, compared to a lot of vaporware from NASA over the same time period. And, since the Falcon is liquid fueled, they won't be experiencing the resonance issues that Ares-1 would if one is ever built. Stick a fork in NASA, they're done.
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