The United States Is Finally Trying to Regain Its Abandoned Human Spacefaring Capability — but Why Did NASA’s “CCtCap” Contract Give (Proven) SpaceX — Substantially Less Money than (Unproven) Boeing?

© 2014 Peter Free

 

22 September 2014

 

 

The United States finally got off its behind, regarding replacing the Space Shuttle Program — but with questionable budget sense

 

When the Space Shuttle Program ended on 31 August 2011, the United States had to rely on Russia’s Soyuz rockets to fly American astronauts to the International Space Station. That is something that bugged me from a national security perspective.

 

Last week, arguably having lollygagged for three years, the United States finally decided to properly fund a replacement for its lost human spacefaring capacity:

 

 

U.S. astronauts once again will travel to and from the International Space Station from the United States on American spacecraft under groundbreaking contracts NASA announced Tuesday.

 

The agency unveiled its selection of Boeing and SpaceX to transport U.S. crews to and from the space station using their CST-100 and Crew Dragon spacecraft, respectively, with a goal of ending the nation’s sole reliance on Russia in 2017.

 

"From day one, the Obama Administration made clear that the greatest nation on Earth should not be dependent on other nations to get into space," NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said . . . .

 

These Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contracts are designed to complete the NASA certification for human space transportation systems capable of carrying people into orbit.

 

Once certification is complete, NASA plans to use these systems to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and return them safely to Earth.

 

The companies selected to provide this transportation capability and the maximum potential value of their FAR-based firm fixed-price contracts are:

 

-- The Boeing Company, Houston, $4.2 billion

 

-- Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Hawthorne, California, $2.6 billion

 

© 2014 Steven Siceloff and Brian Dunbar, NASA Chooses American Companies to Transport U.S. Astronauts to International Space Station, NASA (18 September 2014) (extracts)

 

 

We owe Russian Federation President, Vladimir Putin, for this nudge into national security wakefulness

 

President Putin’s aggressive Crimean and Ukraine pushback against past NATO and European Union encroachment on Russia’s borders appears to be fueling talk of another Cold War. As a result, the Obama Administration may have awakened to the fact that keeping our human flight space program in the doldrums may have been a bad idea.

 

 

But . . .

 

Why, with respect to the Crew Transportation contract awards, did SpaceX’s success in building a cargo capsule to supply the International Space Station take a $1.6 billion back seat to Boeing, which has no capsule at all?

 

 

The moral? — America, slow to wake up and with the same old government-to-lobbyist cronyism

 

Elon Musk, inventor and chief executive officer for SpaceX, graciously congratulated Boeing.

 

But I imagine that his engineering and financial common sense are both at least mildly irritated.