Posted on 05/22/2012 7:07:20 PM PDT by Kaslin
Free Enterprise: For those worried that America's leadership in spaceflight died with NASA's downsizing, meet SpaceX, a private company that showed Tuesday how capitalism will do what government does and better.
NASA was once the pride of a country fighting a tense Cold War. It planned and executed what is arguably man's greatest achievement. It indeed engineered a giant leap for mankind.
Yet since those lunar landings, the agency has gotten bogged down in politics and bureaucracy, plagued by waste and ambitions that were never reached. Some believe President Obama's decision to cut NASA's budget and the closure of the shuttle program signal the end of manned spaceflight for the U.S. But it doesn't.
In the pre-dawn hours Tuesday, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket that was topped with the company's Dragon capsule. The unmanned Dragon is on course to dock with the International Space Station, where its 674 pounds of food and supplies will be welcomed by the crew on Friday.
On May 31, Dragon will return to Earth loaded with completed science experiments and other gear it will bring back from the space station.
Eventually, SpaceX will put more than hardware and supplies into orbit. It will put men into space.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
Another voice of reason from somebody who "gets it". Thank you.
Have you ever seen anything like this “New Space” cultism in your life? They can’t wait to drink the Kool-Aid.
All true.
NASA doesn't have rocket factories. They never did.
But the tax-payer is paying a hell of a lot less with Space-X than with Lockheed or the others.
The 'big boys' had lots of failures, spectacular public failures on the launch pad, during the cold war with NASA trying to run the show.
/johnny
It is bizarre. Newt says moon colony and gets hammered. IBD says to infinity and beyond and the drones cheer. gulp gulp.
I didn’t say a manned mission just an exploratory. Those have been done far more frequently than your comment. The truth is that things like SpaceX don’t do exploratory or research missions.
Don’t get me wrong the NASA mission has been degraded by Congress and politics and stupid people like Hansen (Yeah I know he is NOAA). There are things that NASA can do that the private sector will never do-—think Kepler for example.
Agreed. My point was that SpaceX is nothing more than another contractor, just like GD or Lock-Mart. This talk of it being a bold new "commercial" world is completely wrong.
NASA doesn't have rocket factories. They never did.
But they designed the machines that flew and then turned over the plans to contractors to fabricate and assemble. Falcon 9 is entirely SpaceX's design. Time will tell if it is robust, reliable and cheap, as Elon constantly proclaims.
You mean Ball Aerospace? The prime contractor for Kepler? Because they made it happen. NASA just speced the program and then got in the way with some of their burro-ocracy.
I'll always go with free-enterprise rather than government. Even on pure research.
Oil companies have found out more about the planet than any government agency program.
/johnny
Not entirely true. In many cases, they just speced equipment and the contractor designed it. Same thing today.
I know for sure that Space-X spent a lot less to orbit a capsule and return it safely than NASA did.
And it did work.
/johnny
You mean Ball Aerospace who took the MONEY that NASA provided???? They sure didn’t pony up anything in the way of money for Kepler. The in fact took the government and were very happy to do so
Some things to keep in mind...
Commercial endeavors didn’t start from scratch.
They leveraged off of what NASA did many decades ago
that cost American blood and treasure.
Commercial is about pursuing profit. Money. The
quarterly report. Good! I champion in.
But think hard that much of that profit will come from for now, government contracts. Still needing government moneys to survive.
But profits are not always cash, that is what NASA should be doing, the truly pioneering missions that push the edge because that is what ends up changing humanity. That is a different sort of profit, and it enables the other in time.
Both paths are critical, one does not negate the other.
I've happily taken money from both government customers and commercial customers. You make money where you can.
/johnny
It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Good post.
Yep, but what ya conveniently left out is and he also contributed to the Republican party and Tea Party people, such as Rubio, among others.
Astronomy magazine lampooned Newt's plans for returning to the moon as unobtainable and praised Elon Musk's plans for going to Mars on the same page.
To leftists, politics is everything. Romney could cure cancer and the headline would be negative.
See #34
Actually, it is new. NASA is buying a service from a company that made all its own decisions concerning hardware (with a lot of expertise from NASA, no doubt). Traditional aerospace has the government selecting a hardware design, funding it, and making every critical decision. We are long past any need for that model.
Obama's vision fails because he ultimately denies SpaceX a market by defunding any real space exploration, as you point out.
Bull hockey.
NASA's budget got robbed out by assorted presidents (Nixon cancelled the last two missions of the Apollo program, Clinton robbed out the space-shuttle program, and Dubya sent Sean O'Keefe from OMB to NASA to "carve out" still more -- even after the Columbiaa accident.
NASA was gutted by pols, and now it's being destroyed by a nasty little, shriveled, hate-filled man because of what it stands for.
NASA is partly at fault for this as well - they sabotaged then killed off SSTO/Delta Clipper, then they spread FUD around about Rotary Rocket and got that private venture killed off, and basically spent most of the past 30 years trying to kill private spaceflight.
Now there’s a bunch of NASA engineers sitting around wondering where they’re going to be working when they get laid off in the next round of cutbacks. Perhaps they should have thought of this before.
There's a big difference between fabricating and flying a prototype (every SpaceX launch to date) and actually creating an operational vehicle. SpaceX hasn't done the latter yet. They revise their launch prices (upward) every year. And they have not yet successfully completed this current mission.
The idolization of Musk and SpaceX is premature and misguided at best.
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