NASA investing $500m in commercial space.

I know that I've mentioned this in another thread but we've had a website reorganisation and more details have come out so I thought I'd start a specific thread to discuss what NASA might want to do with the money and what projects they are likely to sponsor.

NASA is looking to spend $500m over the next 5 years to encourage the commercialism of space, it is particularly interested in off-loading its cargo and possibly crew rotation responsibilities to the ISS after the shuttle retires in 2010.

Griffen is also talking about private crew accomodation on the moon and orbital refuelling stations. All this seems well above the competitions posted in the centennial program, I wonder if we can expect some really exciting cometitions announced soon or will NASA run separate projects to fund individual things it wants to accomplish?

The attached articles give some details of what it wants but doesn't really say how it will accomplish it.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/space/3463963

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051116/ap_ ... xploration

More in this article by Administrator Mike.

From the article:


I have to say, I think this is EXACTLY what needs to be done. By the time I got to the bottom of this article, I actually started to feel kind of inspired.

Together with Mike Griffin's appointment, this may be the best NASA related news in many years, the most important part of which may be this -:

So we all compfident nasa will deliver what they tell us? wow that is news! haha

I'm not sure I'd say confident, but we can always hope....

I was just wondering, has NASA even considered purchasing parabolic flights from www.nogravity.com instead of operating their own aircraft?

I thought I read last year that they had decommissioned their own vomit comet and had not scheduled a replacement... and considering that they are in talks to allow commercial zero-g flight operations from the strip at the Cape, I would guess that the use of said resources was already under consideration.

...all speculation, though, as I don't specifically recall that there was an anouncement of their intent.

Yes, they did, on October 31, 2004. http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/ground/ ... story.html
Ah, but they have a replacement. A C-9 (Military version of the DC-9) acquired August 9, 2003. http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/ground/c9_history.html

Since the aircraft is also used for other purposes and most likely would not be retired even if it wasn't used for the parabolic flights, I suppose it could be cheaper for NASA overall not to contract out the zero gravity training flights.

NASA has just put this announcement out for commercial orbital transport services;

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=18891

It looks like they will be willing to fund, at least in part, demonstrators to do various service tasks to the ISS. Seems like a smart move to find out which companies can actually make something and which only have nice powerpoint presentations or impressive CGI movies.