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Around 2006, NASA decided to experiment with a new contracting approach in which it specified the solution it was seeking without specifying the details of the system to be used"Get xkilograms of cargo to the Space Station," for instance. The approach, where the selected contractors received payment only on completion of verifiable milestones, worked: two companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation (now Northrup Grumman Innovation Systems) developed rockets and capsules to carry cargo to the ISS, with the government paying well under a billion dollarsa bargain, comparativelyfor the development.

Today, NASA owns no vehicles to transport cargo to the ISS, and instead pays these companies a per-use transportation fee. The experiment was so successful that NASA has added a third company to the list of providers, and NASA studies note that SpaceX can carry one kilogram of cargo to the ISS at a third the cost of the Space Shuttle.

Buoyed by the cargo program's emerging success, in 2010, as the Space Shuttle was entering its final retirement phase, NASA initiated a similar program to launch astronauts. The agency inked agreements in 2014 with two companies, Boeing and SpaceX, to develop crew transportation to and from the ISS. The SpaceX launch last week was a successful milestone of NASA's Commercial Crew Program. Once Boeing completes work on its Starliner capsule (the status of which is currently unclear, with an uncrewed test flight failing to reach the ISS in December 2019), NASA's program would result in two options for transporting astronauts to the ISS, at a total cost to the government of about $5 billion to $6 billion. According to NASA officials, had they used the traditional development approach, the agency would have spent $20 billion to $30 billion more than this amount. Going forward, NASA will own no systems to go to the ISS and instead will pay SpaceX about $55 million per astronaut per trip.

SpaceX intends to take not only NASA astronauts to the ISS but also private spaceflight participants, leveraging government investment to commercialize its now-proven launch services.

Returning to the question I posed initially: what does this milestone say about the future of spaceflight, especially given the growing venture capital investments in space start-ups, which at least until COVID-19 hit were at record high levelsalmost $6 billion in 2019 alone? I posit that the commercial cargo and crew programs are signs of two major changes in the space sector. First, these programs' successes showed that "solutions-oriented" contracting approaches can reduce the total cost of development: with a goal-oriented contract rather than a cost-plus contract, the incentive is to engineer systems that are cheaper to produce and operate in order to generate greater profits. This approach also reduces cost to government as the private sector takes over some of the burden of developing, maintaining, and operating space infrastructure: the government need not own any space technology systems and can simply purchase tickets to a destination, just like it does for earthbound civil servant business travel.

Second, and more important, because private entities have made investments in and now own space systems and the underlying technologies and intellectual property, they are motivated to find customers other than the government, as well as to develop new and lower-cost applications of these products and services. Traditional aerospace contractors typically do not have such inducements: they are incentivized to fulfill government contracts, and not even on time or on budget, since in many cases there is no major penalty for missing deadlines. Ultimately, these new incentives within the private sector will likely push the boundary of the art-of-the-possible in space beyond what government managers can envision, and the footprint of space activities will grow apace.

There is some evidence that as a result of privately led activities, the US space footprint is indeed expanding, and not just in the launch sector. The "smallsat" revolution (and the use of small satellites for previously unheard-of applications such as near real-time simultaneous imaging of the entire Earth) was one the government missed; it was instead initiated and led by private entities, including universities. Examples of private-sector ingenuity abound. Some private entities, no doubt leveraging government investment, are developing affordable on-orbit services for satellites, such as the ability to inspect them if they stop functioning, repair them if they break, or refuel them if they run out of propellant. A private company recently attached what is essentially a power pack to a communications satellite nearing the end of its life, giving the satellite new life and its owner the potential to make hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue.

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TexAgs91 said:

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When will Elon Musk get a well deserved ride into space?

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Centerpole90 said:

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Calm winds & Severe Clear.

Light the fuse....

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Brad06ag said:

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stolen from the reddit guys... Multistream views to watch the spacex activities. I hadn't seen these before. You can still control the individual feeds. pretty cool to see all the streams together.

https://multistream.co/p/6Y4WaPY2ZcU/Starship_SN9_-_2021-02-02

https://multistream.co/p/9-l9D0NR5Ck/Starship_SN9_High_Altitude_Flight_Test_10Km_Sentinel_Stream

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