Hnnnng...it's more than the last allotment, but I'm wiped out mentally; how much does this realistically affect SpX?
Kneejerk, exhausted takeaways with an "Og KNOW how make club! Why tell Og how make club better!?":
Subcommittee chairman Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, said NASA’s topline budget of $18.3 billion in the Senate funding plan preserves a “balanced space program” with extra funding for the Space Launch System and Orion crew capsule, a huge mega-rocket and spacecraft rated to send astronauts into deep space.
Balanced, my ass - is there actually anything in the pipeline to go on SLS? Parallel development? ANYTHING?!
I mean, I get it and agree and people having jobs that aren't in friggin' Siberia is great...but turning the heat up to 720 degrees ain't gonna cook the meat better and faster. Funding for this seems much the same.
NASA officials blame earlier budget shortfalls for delays that pushed back the first flight of a commercial crew spacecraft from 2015 to 2017.
I can actually understand pushback on this one - least from folk that would yell at a mechanic about "just needing their brakes fixed" with a strut tower snapped off and a muffler dragging on their car.
Specifically - Boeing has the money, SpX has the business - so let them do R&D on their own like anyone else...maybe a kick in the ass for Boeing and "Here's more money, SpX - you already have the thing built, so finish it"...Dunno 'bout the Twitter conspiracies.
NASA signed “firm fixed price” cost-sharing contracts with Boeing and SpaceX, and industry officials said a work slowdown due to insufficient NASA funding could come with higher costs to the commercial crew program.
In other words, Shotwell et al told them - you want rapid development - give us enough money to do it independently so we can stay in the green; otherwise...you get it on our schedule. We're not going to operate in the red for ya.
Boeing said: "We'll take our toys and go home!" Lockheed went: "The fuck? We're doing military systems galore now, why mess with rockets?"
Either way, it's likely that Glorious Elon will get a Dragon 2 in space on his own - even if it takes a while, and the industry officials in question weren't likely to be them.
Reinvestment is entertaining like that. :)
The space agency pays Boeing and SpaceX as they achieve key development milestones on the human-rated CST-100 and Crew Dragon spaceships.
Heh. Paper milestones mean paper money, bitches! We gon' make bank! (Jesse Pinkman, et al, before their conversion) - it's gotta weigh on a few people's minds that SpX is shooting hardware up, over, and too shortly into Florida coastlines - not really phoning it in there.
So - will ULA/Boeing have a solid, safe capsule? Maybe. They can pay enough for the best engineers.
I wasn't too impressed with the captive splash test-thing or whatnot, though...modeling didn't stop the thing from flipping over and staying that way.
And blowing an airbag. And...well, it's so deep into their system that writing that approach off is probably nigh-impossible.
He described the 2016 budget as the “high water mark” for commercial crew spending, which was expected to decline in following years as development of the spacecraft ends and operational crew rotation missions are paid out of the International Space Station’s transportation account, a separate funding line.
Little tired of the magic accounting, but I guess it's how things like ISS survive.
That said, I'm a fan of just giving NASA a big piggybank, going "I'm good at satisfying constituents on an 11% basis! Up there with Honest Abe's Car Repair, Cellphone Procurement, and Landscaping Services, I am!" and letting NASA figure it out.
Hey, our space programs start looking like shit, step back in...but I don't yell at the local nuke plant about how they do things every quarter because the price of electricity went up.
All in all, I'm pretty disappointed in my friendly, neighborhood politicians. (Anyone want to clue me into what Santana did? I can go throw fries at him!)
Foremost - we want this done right friggin' MEOW - and it's not gonna happen that way. Just keep pushing.
Maybe send people like Bigelow an e-hug while he spends down his fortunes.
Headache inducing, I'll tells ya.