FYI,

"NASA Approves Partial Privatization of the Space Program"
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519609,00.html

: NASA's critics have long asked: Why does the space agency need to
: design and build its own rockets and spacecraft?

: When the Justice Department or the Centers for Disease Control want
: to send employees somewhere, they don't specify the aircraft types,
: let alone design the airframes, engines and avionics. They just buy
: plane tickets.

: Even the military finds it cheaper to use civilian aircraft for
: certain missions. So why should space transportation be any
: different?

: NASA's beginning to agree. For the first time, after nearly a half
: century of building its own rockets and orbiters, it has approved
: the outsourcing of some of the equipment that enables its manned
: space missions to private contractors.

: Last week, acting NASA Administrator Chris Scolese told a
: congressional subcommittee that the agency plans to give
: $150 million in stimulus-package money to private companies that
: design, build and service their own rockets and crew capsules
: — spacecraft that could put astronauts in orbit while NASA finishes
: building the space shuttle's replacements.

: On Thursday, the White House ordered a top-to-bottom review of the
: entire manned space program, one that will be led by former
: Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, long considered a friend of
: private space ventures.

: Both developments show that the once-reluctant space agency and the
: Obama administration are ready to support commercial human
: spaceflight.

: It's a dramatic change, one that could reduce America's dependency
: on Russia for the next half-decade after the space shuttle program
: ends, and one that could kick-start a space program that some see
: as having stalled for 40 years.

: "Our government space program has become over-burdened with too
: many objectives, and not enough cash," says William Watson,
: executive director of the Space Frontier Foundation, a
: Houston-based group promoting commercial space activities. Watson
: said that allowing private companies to handle routine orbital
: duties could free up NASA to focus on returning to the moon and
: going to Mars.

: Scolese said that $80 million of the stimulus money will be awarded
: to the company that demonstrates the best "crewed launch demo" — a
: prototype, based on existing cargo-capsule designs, modified for
: humans. The agency was careful to note that the competition will be
: an open one.

: Two well-positioned spaceflight companies, SpaceX and Orbital
: Sciences, are seen as the leading contenders. Each already has a
: full line of rockets and cargo capsules ready to go, and each
: company's capsules can be converted to transport astronauts.

: Both firms were tight-lipped about their suddenly increased
: opportunities. Orbital Sciences didn't respond to queries; SpaceX
: said only that it was "encouraged by NASA's commercial crewed
: services initiative."

: But NASA's savings in cost and time could be significant.

: The two leading contractors are building their launch vehicles from
: scratch. Their designs emphasize very efficient business models and
: low manufacturing costs. And they operate with at most a few dozen
: employees at their launch sites, as opposed to the space shuttle
: program's standing army of almost 15,000 workers.

: NASA's hostility toward other American space ventures goes back at
: least to the early 1990s, when Lockheed Martin developed the DC-X
: suborbital experimental rocket, financed by the Pentagon's
: Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO).

: The goal was to get payloads into orbit with a reusable craft that
: was not the space shuttle, which the Defense Department saw as
: unreliable and costly.

: NASA was hardly enthusiastic about this approach. It believed that
: it would be many years before such Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLVs)
: would be ready to fly, and some inside the agency saw it as a
: threat to its monopoly on human space flight.

: In 2000, NASA even objected to the cash-strapped Russian space
: agency's $20 million deal to send up the first "space tourist,"
: American billionaire Dennis Tito.

: But three things happened.

: -- The February 2003 Columbia space-shuttle disaster, in which
: seven astronauts died, forced NASA to rethink its way of doing
: business. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board's final report
: "found a NASA blinded by a 'Can Do' attitude, a cultural artifact
: of the Apollo era that was inappropriate in a Space Shuttle program
: so strapped by schedule pressures and shortages that space parts
: had to be cannibalized from one vehicle to launch another."

: NASA's tight relationship with a small number of major contractors
: and its persistent problems integrating political and legal demands
: with the need to maintain engineering excellence had stressed the
: agency to the breaking point, the report said.

: -- In January 2004, President George W. Bush decided to "reboot"
: the space program, announcing his "Vision for Space Exploration" to
: go back to the moon and to eventually send humans to Mars.

: -- And in October 2004, engineer Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne won the
: $10 million Ansari X Prize. The rocket was the first privately
: built flying machine ever to reach space.

: There was a catch to the Bush plan: As part of the ambitious new
: program, the 30-year-old space-shuttle program will end next year,
: saving NASA $3 billion a year to spend on new spacecraft, the first
: of which is scheduled to fly in late 2015.

: But that has created a gap in America's ability to launch
: astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). For
: at least five years, NASA will depend primarily on Russia to get
: Americans into space, which doesn't sit well with many space
: experts and politicians.

: As a result, NASA quickly became much friendlier to commercial
: ventures. In late 2005, then-agency Administrator Michael Griffin
: announced that NASA was considering buying crew and cargo
: transportation services to the ISS from private industry.

: "We believe," he said, "that when we engage the engine of
: competition, these services will be provided in a more
: cost-effective fashion than when the government has to do it,"
: Griffin said.

: In 2006, the first round of the Commercial Orbital Transportation
: Services (COTS) contracts was won by SpaceX corporation of
: Hawthorne, Calif., which received a contract worth $278 million,
: and by Rocketplane Kistler of Oklahoma City, which was supposed to
: get $207 million.

: Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX for short,
: founded by PayPal entrepreneur Elon Musk, was already hard at work
: on its Falcon series of rockets.

: It also had done preliminary design work on a multipurpose capsule
: called the Dragon, which could be adapted to carry either crew or
: cargo to the ISS on a Falcon 9.

: SpaceX was funded mostly by Musk's personal fortune, but also had a
: small number of contracts to launch satellites for the Defense
: Department and from overseas.

: Rocketplane Kistler, on the other hand, was an innovative but
: underfunded enterprise. It promised to build on an earlier RLV
: program that had failed to get off the ground after a promising
: start in the late 1990s.

: In October 2007, Rocketplane Kistler's NASA contact was terminated
: due to its failure to meet the agreed-upon financial milestones.

: The remaining $170 million from the Rocketplane Kistler
: disbursement was awarded to Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles,
: Va., for its Taurus 2 launcher and Cygnus capsule combination.

: Orbital, one of the few entrepreneurial space firms that have
: successfully gone from start-up to billion-dollar status, not only
: builds the Pegasus and Taurus launchers, but also has established a
: decent reputation building small-to-medium-sized commercial and
: scientific satellites and space probes.

: Most importantly, both SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are well-funded
: and commercially viable, a crucial factor to NASA.

: If a private company shows it's ready to invest its own funds,
: that's a lot better than people who want to "help spend NASA's
: money," as Griffin once put it in a different context.

: But not everyone in NASA's old guard is pleased with this approach.

: "In order to preserve U.S. leadership in space, it would be better
: to invest in a lifting body lander, a spaceplane that would land on
: a runway like the Shuttle does now," Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz
: Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, told FoxNews.com .
:: "There is a [NASA] design called the HL-20 that could be launched
: on an existing reliable rocket and could be ready for a
: demonstration flight in 2013."

: But to the Space Frontier Foundation's Watson, the sky's the limit.

: "Let's have an American competition in space — to create good jobs,
: fuel innovation and close the [spaceflight] gap more quickly," he
: said. "With private funds matching government investment, we can
: dramatically leverage taxpayer dollars to produce breakthroughs in
: a new American industry — commercial orbital human spaceflight."

Mark Reiff