/sci/ - Science & Math

You know, it would’ve been really cool if the shuttle actually lived up to even its more “modest” goals. What if it was actually cheap? What if it actually flew 52 times a year as planned?
How would the design be different? Stuff like that.

>>11938483
You're shitting me. There is no way that is true.
...r-right?

I played with them because we made them in school. But then after that I never bought more motors so never launched again.
I should get back into it.

>>8552243
SpaceX doesn't have that freedom either, when it's working a NASA contract. They can't make radical changes to Dragon or Falcon 9, for instance, while they're under contract for development and launches with them. If you look at Crew Dragon, they had to build it for routine parachute landing and ocean splashdown (thus requiring a much higher survivability compared to if they were emergency backups only), when they wanted to go straight to rocket landing, but they were able to work within NASA's requirements to include the hardware necessary for propulsive landing, and therefore are free to develop it as an option in software for use outside that contract. They're free to do as they please with ITS as long as there's no NASA contract to fund it.

The way it works with "NASA vehicles" is that they put out a request for proposals, then private companies would send them their concepts, and they'd do a series of downselects and have them make more detailed bids until they chose one. So, at the proposal stage, there is freedom within the specifications.

This used to be a reasonable way of doing things, before the consolidation of the US aerospace industry so only Boeing and Lockheed Martin became credible bidders (except for ATK for solid rockets). A major point of the commercial cargo initiative was to develop some alternative contractors so they'd have some real competition. That's why they didn't take bids from Boeing and LM.

Anyway, it's not that Boeing was constrained by the SLS contract, rather the SLS specification was constrained so only Boeing could win the contract, by their own backroom dealings. MSFC is the tip of a pyramid of corruption.

>>8169550
>Rockets built to fulfill an open to anyone contract
When NASA wanted a manned reusable launch system, they put out a call for proposals, and NASA picked the one they liked, and the result was the space shuttle.

It didn't come out off a NASA drawing board, it came off a North American Rockwell drawing board.

When NASA wanted commercial cargo options with potential for development into crew vehicles, they put out a call for proposals, and NASA picked the ones they liked, and the results were Falcon 9 / Dragon and Antares / Cygnus.

>designed & build entirely by a private entity
Not really... there was a lot of NASA information, advice, and design review. NASA let SpaceX fly Dragon to the ISS because they had NASA employees who were intimately familiar with the workings of Dragon and Falcon 9, and were therefore confident that neither the Dragon nor the F9 upper stage would end up crashing into the ISS, and that the Dragon would function properly while attached to the ISS, etc.

>cost plus contract
This is one of the main differences... and yet, being *ostensibly* non-cost-plus doesn't mean it can't turn into cost-plus in practice. That's what happened with the EELV program, which was very similar to the deal between NASA and SpaceX/Orbital, except it was between the US military and Boeing/LM.

When Boeing and LM couldn't recover their costs under the terms of the EELV program, they basically told the government to give them more money or they'd stop launching the rockets they got government money to develop. The result was ULA and its "capability maintenance" payments from the government, negotiated and renegotiated on the basis of... cost.

So what happens with SpaceX if the development funds plus the firm fixed-price launch contract isn't enough to cover their costs, and they stop selling commercial launches? If they stop launching, NASA loses upwards of a billion dollars invested with no capability to show for it... so they renegotiate.