Private Space Taxis Race to the Launch Pad

From Wall Street Journal: Private Space Taxis Race to the Launch Pad
Private spacecraft will begin docking with the International Space Station before the end of the year, months sooner than planned, after NASA gave the green light for the first cargo delivery by such a capsule.

Space Exploration Technology Corp. said the U.S. space agency has given tentative approval for it to conduct the late November flight. The launch will accelerate the shift to private ventures for future manned missions.

The flight will feature the initial effort to dock the company's Dragon capsule—the pioneer commercial spacecraft— with the space station, orbiting more than 200 miles above the earth.

In accelerating by at least several months the timetable for linking up with the station, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will provide the company and other private space outfits a symbolic and potentially important financial boost. Closely held SpaceX, as it is known, is based in Hawthorne, Calif., and was founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk.

The technical sign-off by NASA is expected to be followed shortly by final agency approval. And it marks a transition for the U.S. manned-exploration program, which previously relied entirely on government-funded and federally operated boosters and space vehicles to take both astronauts and cargo into space.

The latest schedule shift, according to some industry officials, also appears intended to deflect criticism that commercial space-transportation providers may find it difficult to quickly replace NASA's recently retired space shuttles.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, slated to blast the capsule into orbit, is nearly three years behind the company's ambitious early projections. SpaceX originally envisioned as many as four test flights in 2010 to show that the booster and the capsule would be ready for service.

Until a few months ago, NASA officials were still expecting a pair of demonstration flights of the Dragon capsule in 2011 to ensure the safety and reliability of its systems. According to that scenario, SpaceX would have had to demonstrate rendezvous and berthing capabilities in separate flights.

Monday, SpaceX said the agency "has agreed in principle" to combine separate software and hardware tests into a single mission, slated to blast off at the end of November on a Falcon 9 rocket and dock with the station about a week later.

As a result, SpaceX expects to use the upcoming flight to deliver the first few hundred pounds of crew supplies to orbit. If all goes well, that will be at least several months faster than was projected under previous NASA schedules.

In its Monday release, SpaceX said that by combining government and private funding, it hopes to increase the reliability, safety and frequency of space travel. Depending on demand, the company said it has manufacturing plans that could turn out up to six Dragon capsules annually. A spokeswoman for the company, which signed more than a dozen launch contracts in the past year, said the late 2011 mission "kicks off what will be a rapid increase in the frequency" of operations.

Last December, SpaceX became the first company to successfully launch and recover a capsule from Earth orbit.

The pear-shaped Dragon capsules are slated to begin regular cargo-delivery missions for NASA in 2012, under a $1.6 billion commercial contract structured to pay the company based on the total amount of material shipped to the space station.Such performance-based payouts weren't part of traditional NASA contracts, which often relied on features that assured contractor profits regardless of delays or budget overruns.

Seeking to cut costs and revitalize NASA for deep-space exploration, President Barack Obama wants to use private space taxis to support the space station. NASA has provided seed money to SpaceX and a number of other companies to work on projects capable of transporting astronauts to and from the station by the second half of this decade.

Simultaneously, SpaceX and other commercial-space groups are vying to provide larger rockets and more-capable capsules, required for longer-term manned missions to venture deeper into the solar system.

NASA officials have said they are pleased with the progress made by SpaceX but also intend to continue to pursue other options, including a rival commercial rocket-capsule combination that has its own contracts to deliver cargo to orbit.

Between the fall of 2006 and spring of 2011, congressional auditors determined that NASA paid SpaceX more than $290 million for certain work to develop and test the company's cargo-transportation system. According to the same report, the company achieved more than three-quarters of 40 pre-determined milestones on schedule.

The accelerated cargo-delivery schedule comes as NASA and congressional leaders continue to spar over the cost and schedule of a proposed NASA heavy-lift rocket eventually intended to take astronauts to an asteroid and beyond.

NASA officials have said they are refining final cost estimates for a heavy-lift rocket able to blast 130 tons into space. It would emphasize space-shuttle designs and, at least initially, rely on solid rocket-motor technology. In later versions, NASA experts envision shifting more to liquid propellants and in-orbit refueling options.

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Space Exploration Technology CEO Elon Musk
.NASA's proposed next-generation rocket would fly just twice in the next 10 years and, along with a manned capsule dubbed Orion, could carry a price tag as high as $38 billion, according to industry officials and lawmakers. Inside and outside NASA, critics of the heavy-lift alternative have said those cost and schedule projections compare unfavorably with projects being pursued by SpaceX and its peers.

NASA has also been hit by bipartisan criticism it hasn't adequately complied with congressional mandates to use shuttle-derived technologies for its proposed heavy-lift rocket. These critics fault its long-range exploration plans for improperly favoring commercially developed manned systems.

To try to resolve that dispute, some lawmakers have taken the extraordinary step of voting to issue congressional subpoenas to obtain internal NASA documents detailing agency decision-making. Such critics have accused agency officials of trying to sabotage the heavy-lift rocket concept, by giving Congress allegedly inflated cost figures and unrealistically long development timetables for that launcher system.