SpaceX’s failure to win space station NASA contract reveals where the company is weak
Jeff Foust of Space News today has a detailed article detailing NASA’s decision-making process that led to its awarding Blue Origin, Northrop Grummann, and Nanoracks development contracts for their proposed commercial and private space station.
The article not only describes NASA’s analysis of each winning bid, it also describes the analysis of some of the eight bids that lost. Most interesting were the strengths and weaknesses NASA saw from SpaceX’s bid.
The company won strengths based on its technical maturity linked to HLS proposal (the Starship lunar lander) and a “strong approach” to communications that appeared to be associated with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. However, NASA assessed several weaknesses because of a lack of details about its concept, including how it will accommodate payloads and scale up an environmental control system for long-duration missions. [emphasis mine]
While SpaceX so far has proven itself to be a brilliant rocket and engineering company — achieving things that everyone else said couldn’t be done and doing so so quickly it takes your breath away — the company has so far appeared to have little understanding or knowledge about the complexities of building an interplanetary manned vessel. This NASA analysis, as noted by the highlighted phrases in the quote above, underlines that impression.
None of this precludes SpaceX from gaining that knowledge and applying it to the engineering of future Starship designs. This information however shows that the company still lacks this knowledge. It apparently has still not tackled the job of designing the insides of Starship, only its rocketry for getting into orbit.
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Jeff Foust of Space News today has a detailed article detailing NASA’s decision-making process that led to its awarding Blue Origin, Northrop Grummann, and Nanoracks development contracts for their proposed commercial and private space station.
The article not only describes NASA’s analysis of each winning bid, it also describes the analysis of some of the eight bids that lost. Most interesting were the strengths and weaknesses NASA saw from SpaceX’s bid.
The company won strengths based on its technical maturity linked to HLS proposal (the Starship lunar lander) and a “strong approach” to communications that appeared to be associated with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. However, NASA assessed several weaknesses because of a lack of details about its concept, including how it will accommodate payloads and scale up an environmental control system for long-duration missions. [emphasis mine]
While SpaceX so far has proven itself to be a brilliant rocket and engineering company — achieving things that everyone else said couldn’t be done and doing so so quickly it takes your breath away — the company has so far appeared to have little understanding or knowledge about the complexities of building an interplanetary manned vessel. This NASA analysis, as noted by the highlighted phrases in the quote above, underlines that impression.
None of this precludes SpaceX from gaining that knowledge and applying it to the engineering of future Starship designs. This information however shows that the company still lacks this knowledge. It apparently has still not tackled the job of designing the insides of Starship, only its rocketry for getting into orbit.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
In Everyday Astronaut’s 2-part interview of Elon Musk at Starbase last year, Mr. Musk stated that they work on the problems at hand, and will work on future problems when the needs actually arise.
If you can’t make what you currently have work, why waste your time trying to make something you might have in the future work today?
GaryMike, exactly right. We can’t seriously design interplanetary ships until we can launch the things to build such in a time frame that makes economic and logistical sense. NASA thinks in terms of one-off type things big government spending pays for.
I would respectfully disagree. Boeing and Airbus are fantastic at designing and building transportation. No need to get involved with the cargo.
Let loser companies like Blue Origin, etc. pour $$$$ into developing new space stations. Maybe they will be good at it? Maybe not! The future will tell. But, mark my words, it will not be crappy sub-orbital rockets getting there. Falcon with Dragon and later Starship ORBITAL capable vehicles will still be the ones to get people into orbit and to any ISS replacements.
It is just as well, as phys.org has 3 blurbs: ‘Scientists engineer new material that can absorb and release enormous amounts of energy’ and.
‘Two dimentional polymer helps create a lightweight material that is stronger than steel’ and.
‘Researchers report game changing technology to remove 99 percent of CO2 from air’.
These can be incorporated later,..with Rubbia’s tech for Starship.
Gateway is good enough now.
From the article:
This is hardly surprising. Developing the low Earth orbit (LEO) economy is NASA’s goal, not SpaceX’s.
SpaceX will need to test its Starship for the ability to keep a crew alive for the duration of a Mars mission, and the best place for that is LEO. I expect that in the next two or three years SpaceX will put a manned Starship into LEO for an extended period of time. From that experience, SpaceX may use the same Starship or configure another for use as a space station that can be used as a destination for Dragons or other Starships for use as a source of revenue.
A possible feature of using Starship as a space station is its ability to reenter and land in order to be maintained, upgraded, or overhauled. This ability also allows it to be used similarly to the Space Shuttle, in which experiments or manufacturing supplies are switched out on landing and another launch provides another mission. The ISS numbers its missions, incrementing mission numbers with the swapping out of crews, so Starship space station missions could also be distinguished by Starship launches, landings, and refittings.
Starship has a multitude of possible business strategies, and SpaceX is not in much need of funding through NASA. Turning a manned Starship into some form of space station is relatively trivial, compared to building a dedicated space station, but it may not make for the most efficient space station.
I do not expect SpaceX to be in the space station business for long, if it chooses to be in that business at all. Once other companies have their space stations in LEO, then SpaceX likely will use them for destinations and concentrate on Mars missions rather than distracting itself with space station operations.
Starship is being designed with many tradeoffs and compromises, but some of these are needed in order to make it flexible in its uses (payload, tanker, manned, lunar/Mars lander, etc.). These compromises open opportunities for other companies to make specific hardware more suited to specific uses, perhaps costing less than a Starship in the long run.
It appears to me that either SpaceX was not serious about this space station bid or that the company had wanted to win a contract so that NASA would pay for the development of the life support and some of the other features that Starship will need on a Mars mission. If SpaceX paid attention, they have learned a lesson for bidding on future NASA projects.
GaryMike’s point is important. SpaceX may not be putting as much emphasis on future designs as we may expect of them. They have not said much about what they believe they need for settling Mars or that they are working on satisfying those needs. GaryMike is probably correct that SpaceX concentrates on the more immediate needs rather than the needs years of the future. This could explain why they were caught unprepared for launching a Starship last summer, despite stating, a year ago, an eagerness to do so. Their success with landings seems to have gone much faster than expected, as evidenced by the skipping of so many planned test units.
However, the reason to work on what you need in the future is so that you have it in a timely manner. Had SpaceX worked on their launch pad and environmental report sooner then they may have been ready in time to launch sometime last year rather than this year.
Edward,
Instead of saying in my original post “…why waste your time…”, I should have worded it “…why waste your money…”.
A pedant’s point, maybe, but truer to my original intent.
Time is not the same kind of budget line item as is money.
e.g: The US’s economy still isn’t enough to do all the things we “coulda, shoulda, woulda” if we’re seeing the past from the future.
My second career was owning/operating a business used by other businesses as a resource to help guide their respective financial operations. It’s all guess work.
Never in that 25-year period did I consider myself an expert. I considered myself lucky to have a certain intuition not shared by my clients, and lucky none of them accused me of being a charlatan.
Musk has intuitions not shared by most of us. Just look at the EU/ESA Ariane program, Volkswagen, and all the others.. The future snuck up on them while they weren’t looking. :)
GaryMike,
Money and time are subsets of resources. You could have worded it “why waste your resources” and covered both. For Musk, time is probably the more valuable resource. If he is to meet his goal of living on Mars, he needs to do so in the next few decades, before age catches up to him. Time is his enemy. This is s major reason for SpaceX to do rapid development.
I think that it is more than just intuition, and I doubt that Elon Musk originates most of the ideas that SpaceX implements. Most likely his employees bring ideas to the table, but it is Musk who authorizes trying some of them to see whether they are good. Sometimes he has to suffer the slings and arrows of naysayers, and sometimes those naysayers are right, but that does not stop him or SpaceX employees. The Falcon 9 showed the world that orbital space can be done differently and more cost effectively. If Starship works as planned for a cost even ten times higher than the prediction, Musk will be this century’s Henry Ford and Starship his Model T, making transportation affordable. As other companies realize that there are additional cost efficiencies to be made, they will begin to compete with SpaceX and Starship.
Those who think Musk does not deserve credit for his company’s (or all his companies’s) successes are incorrect. He bravely allows his employees to try things that caused others to cower. He has done an excellent job of engineering management, and succeeded financially where others, such as Kistler, have failed.
Elon Musk / Akira the Don
“Among the Stars” ??
(2018)
https://youtu.be/9qWyfOaYWtU
5:16
Ed,
We’re all winging it.
Yep. Musk seems to have a knack for tweeking the simulation to his/our advantage.
A guy with lift.