As for the Orion being a boondoggle, there are a half a dozen or more DOD projects that make Orion look like chump change. I would cite a few that really do make Orion look incredibly cost effective in comparison but Dr. Spudis does not like me going in that direction on his blog.

Orion is meant for cislunar space missions and features a very powerful Launch Abort System. This is important because any missions Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO) will require nuclear propulsion.

Chemical propulsion is useless for any human interplanetary missions.

The SLS/Orion-LAS is the best way to transport fissionable material directly to the Moon. If you think the toxic dragon is going anywhere…. it has so many bad design features I will not even attempt to start listing them. I doubt it will ever carry a human being.

Nobody is going to invest a dime in a private space station because there is no way they will ever see a return.

At some point the entire wonderful fantasy that 200 miles up is outer space will begin to unravel and the voters will find out it is a scam. Hopefully the next administration will change direction and defuse this ticking bomb before it does permanent damage to the space agency.

The SLS, on the other hand, may be one of the best bargains America’s space program ever developed!

Marcel

The point being the story that NASA and “old space” companies are horrifically wasteful and inept while “NewSpace” is doing it right and also miraculously cheap is not reality. It is marketing. The hobby rocket blew up and ULA rockets have not and the story the public seems to accept is not what is real.
There is no cheap.

Not really. Trying to go cheap is their problem. In my view the defining moment of the Apollo program was the Apollo 1 fire. After that event everything about the space program changed- it was a sea change, a paradigm shift- whatever term you like. It taught the aerospace industry that Human Space Flight was going to be hard money and they were not going to get rich as long as NASA required spacecraft that did not kill astronauts before they ever left the ground. The draconian oversights imposed were eventually removed for a Shuttle program seeking “cheap and routine” and fatalities were squared.

North American also built the second stage of the Saturn V which is credited by Mr. Brown as being the key enabler of Apollo’s success. The epic story of developing that second stage is a little known yet essential explanation of why we landed on the Moon.
There is no cheap.

Taking a look at these historical details it appears that basing an entire business plan on “cheap lift” and then having a second stage blow up in flight will probably be viewed as the defining moment in the short history of NewSpace. The space age ended in 1972 and as long as the public is hoodwinked into believing “the dream is alive” the U.S. will stay trapped, going in endless circles at very high altitude, going nowhere.
LEO is not even really space.

One of my most enlightening experiences in the military was when the Coast Guard “adopted” Total Quality Management in the 90’s. I spend an hour or so a day reading and always have since I was a kid. I read all kinds of stuff. I knew we were having mandatory training on TQM coming up so while at the library I checked out a stack of books on it. When I research a new subject I usually start that way- and set most of the books aside after scanning them to see if they are worth studying. I quickly realized why somebody in the hierarchy decided on TQM. It works. I won’t go into arguing this except to say if you go into the lobby of Toyota’s headquarters in Tokyo you will see 3 portraits on the wall; two small ones of the companies first and present CEO’s and in the center a much larger picture. That portrait is of W. Edwards Deming- the father of TQM. The highest award for engineering in Japan is the Deming award.

I was excited but when the training started it quickly dawned on me that what the Coast Guard had adopted was not TQM- it was someones or more likely some committee’s morphed and mutated idea of what TQM should be. I pointed this out in class repeatedly as violations of Deming’s 14 points were presented and was finally ordered to remain silent- and was counseled later about my disruptive behavior.

Very few people who have worked within the NASA System would disagree with you that it has become an overly complicated bureaucracy. That situation began to develop at the end of the Apollo Program (when the NASA budget was cut in half, but the field centers all stayed open; setting the stage for the development of the current “warring empires”) and is long overdue for reform.

That, however, is not the question. The question is about the efficiency of the current “commercial” approach.

SpaceX CRS contract calls for the delivery of 20 Metric Tons Cargo to the ISS for $1.6 B. That is $80,000/kg.

I worked in shuttle cargo integration for a while and there were detailed analysis of the costs of MPLM payload delivery (even taking out the mass of any packing material) on a standard utilization flight. The figure was around $70,000/kg.

SpaceX CRS is, therefore, 14% more expensive than Shuttle to operate.

Using the “commercial” approach we spent years and $100’s of millions of dollars to develop a cargo delivery system that is substantially more expensive to use than the one it replaced.

You say:

“I am not certain why anyone would think that all systems development costs about the same and that “newspace” does not provide capabilities at more reasonable prices than the legacy companies like Boeing and Lockheed.”

The above explains why “anyone” would doubt that “newspace” is an overall bargain.

You are very eloquent in presenting your viewpoint, but like Dave Huntsman, you have ignored the main points of my post.

I am not arguing against Boeing or SpaceX developing spacecraft — I am saying that commercial vehicles should be developed commercially. I have no problem with any company coming to NASA, offering a working spacecraft system for crew transport to ISS, and then being paid appropriately for that service. What we have instead is another federal crony capitalist program for companies to develop spacecraft and capability with taxpayer money, after which taxpayers will then obtain the privilege of purchasing their services at significant additional cost. I don’t care how you cut it, that is not “commercial” space activity — it’s government contracting. If the (continually increasing) amounts of money provided to CCDev companies for spacecraft development are inadequate, those companies should make up the difference with their own internal R&D funds, provided to them by their shareholders.

I have no disagreement with you that federal programs are an inefficient and expensive way to do things – but they are a way to get things done (or at least, they used to be). I fully concur that multiple layers of management in NASA projects have been counter-productive and have ranted at length on these issues. But today’s agency has problems much deeper than managerial sclerosis — it is directionless and clueless. That problem dwarfs the issue of how we contract for new space hardware.

Comparing development issues for Orion and CCDev is apples and oranges. Yes, the promotion of Orion as a “Mars spacecraft” is overdone hype, but cislunar is a notch above LEO and poses correspondingly different technical issues.

The 100s of millions of dollars per year reflected in the table you provide, shows very clearly that NASA is getting a lot for relatively little money

So far, they have spent over $1.5 billion and have gotten zilch in return. Unless you count the New Space propaganda as “a lot.”

Boeing with its CST-100 seems to be doing things right, as they intended Atlas V to be human rated. Of course, who knows if that will happen?

I see SpaceX’s big problem (and I know people here will point out many) is that they’re trying to make a human rated rocket AND a spacecraft.
Even worse is how much time and money they must be pouring into making Falcon 9 reusable rather than getting their spacecraft ready to carry humans. Not smart, IMHO.

I’m often amazed on how many people have this mentality of just how much better “commercial” spaceflight is compared to “government funded” counterparts.
I imagine many here have seen the hype. I’ve even seen one person that ought to know better (but I imagine has fallen too deep into the hype) that it would be better to spend the money used on SLS and Orion on CCDev.

Perhaps if NASA had actual plans for meaningful missions for the SLS, people wouldn’t feel so opposed to just. But that’s merely speculation.