Not to detract one iota from this amazing achievement, but what definition of sustainable are you thinking of? This was still paid for by the government.
Yes, the government paid to develop crew dragon. And they buy launch services which is another source of revenue.
The government paid for Apollo. And once they decided they no longer wanted it, it became impossible to use Apollo parts, technology, or any of the engineers or technicians to put people into orbit. The capability "vanished."
If the government never bought another ticket to space, Crew Dragon could be made available to people who want to go into space and are willing to pay for a ticket. So even if NASA got defunded completely tomorrow, the ability to go into space would still be there. Because the market for space, when served in an economic way, is self sustaining.
This has never been true before, and now it is. That is my definition of sustainable.
If Crew Dragon is only making money from the government, how would it still be there tomorrow if the government weren't paying? Do you really imagine that there will be a market for this as it stands today? How much training and medical evaluation have the astronauts gone through to ensure they could survive the trip and know how to operate?
I think your parent poster's point was that previously the IP was owned by NASA. The companies contracted to build Apollo or the Space Shuttle was unable to reuse the IP to sell rides to another company or fly private citizens, nor could they bundle and sell the IP.
SpaceX owns the Crew Dragon IP and tooling, and they can sell flights to private citizens - in fact I believe they said today that they are contracted with Space Ventures to fly 4 people next year. Previously Space Ventures could only buy from the Russians.
You still can't launch a rocket on US soil without a permit from the FAA, and for launches from outside of the US, I'm pretty sure that SpaceX's rocket technology is quite export controlled. But yes, it's now a bit more independent from Congress's financial mood.
My point is that there's still large government involvement. The permits are just one example. Another one would be the military contracts that require contractor employees to maintain clearance levels and create financial dependence, or the government owned launch pads they lease.
All of this combined means that SpaceX is still highly dependent from the goodwill of the US government.
I can't imagine the thought process that feels that the IP being owned by a private company who answers to no one and has no accountability to anyone is 'more sustainable' than it being owned by the public through a non-military organization (NASA)...
Because NASA isn't just free do things with that knowledge even if somebody could pay. You live in a total fantasyland when you believe that NASA just having some IP does any good for anybody.
You need manufacturing base and a business model to sustain commercial operation. NASA is a government agency that gets its priority sets by a congress that is not very interested in space flight, and putting the budget wherever they want at any given time. So NASA could have lots of IP about 4 different vehicles that gets into LEO but no amount of money could actually get you there.
They can give the IP to a 3rd company of course, but because they way it was designed it would not really have any commercial use, and likely it only works connected together with other government IP/hardware that you also easily get.
Now you have a private company, who has a very clear business intensive, to get the greatest possible use out of that IP, it only uses other commercially available tools and has synergy with other parts of their business that also has other commercial uses. The industrial base and teams are sustained, and not removed when congress lowers budget for a year.
So the Dragon 2 works with Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX always operates Falcon 9 launch pads and they have plenty of rockets to fly and a manufacturing base that makes more of them. So now you have a much easier time to get the whole system together for an actual 3rd party flight, as the rocket, launch pad, infrastructure is already there and commercially operated.
You make a lot of good points, but it's not quite as grim as the picture you have drawn.
NASA had a great deal of knowledge from previous projects which they shared liberally with SpaceX from very early on in their development. Engines such as the Merlin are heavily influenced from NASA IP.
So in essence NASA still is a clearing house of knowledge, and much of the info learned by NASA and SpaceX to date continues to be shared with other providers to the benefit of all.
I do agree however with the sentiment that SpaceX can sell seats or rocket flights in a way that NASA was never set up to do.
The human spaceflight ability of NASA trended sharply to zero in the last 50 years, with space travel getting more expensive, more dangerous and far less capable than before, going from moon transfer to LEO only to no human spaceflight whatsoever. If you prefer to abolish human spaceflight, then you can be happy with NASA, if not, then you have to present rather strong evidence why the status quo will magically yield better outcomes.
Isn't the output of the US government in the public domain? I think the issue was more about the manufacturing and launching of rockets being highly regulated for obvious reasons.
There are 4 unnamed tourists set to fly next year. Tom Cruise is also in negotiations to film in space using Crewed Dragon, which would presumably involve at minimum Mr. Cruise plus a cameraman.
SpaceX is selling Crew Dragon to others. There are already bought flights brokered for space tourists, and Tom Cruise is going to be filming a movie in space too.
The sheer cost of launches is much lower on a Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon versus the Shuttle. Amortized per-launch cost for the Shuttle was about $1.5B [0]. The cost of the Demo-2 mission today with 2 astronauts costs $110M [1].
It get even more exciting when you consider that $110M is the cost to NASA. The cost to SpaceX could quickly reach an order of magnitude lower as it becomes more frequent and reused. As a bonus, the increased profits pay for the next ship, dropping costs even further.
An order of magnitude is a stretch, I think. But a 25% savings is probably pretty doable, which drops the cost to $82.5M. Consider that Richard Garriott allegedly paid $30M for his trip to the ISS, so if you have three passengers and one crew, you're turning a profit of $7.5M
Nope, way less than that. A single expendable rocket may have that margin, although I'd expect even better. Accounting for 5 flight of a si glen booster and capsule, that cost drops precipitously to at least 60-70% percent savings.
They're also only using two of the four seats. And that's on top of taking out seats they originally had planned (maybe they could put them back in at some point?)
From what I have read NASA has opted for the 4 seat version only, and then placed cargo under them where the other 3 seats would be. SpaceX has designed the capsule to carry 7 if you want an all passenger config but it will need to be heading to a destination fairly quickly as it doesn't leave much space left over. That said, even at 7 it looks like it would still be roomier than a Soyuz at 3 people.
Propulsive landing is really hard, see the failure montage from Spacex as they iteratively worked on it. SpaceX also had a very strong incentive to develop the tech, since they are a commercial launch provider and could make more money. All the engineering was certainly not free, and the vehicle has to make some compromises in terms of lift capacity and such to make it work. Propulsive landing only looks easy now, but it is a supreme feat of engineering.
How does something being paid for by the government relate to it being sustainable? Our roads are paid for by the government too - and those are sustainable. So are lots of other things, like basic science research, healthcare in most countries, etc, all of which is sustainable in being paid by government.
Didn’t shuttle have a larger payload? Up to 8 people and larger cargo.
NASA gave a $55million estimate on cost per seat on crew dragon, which would be about $440 million to launch 8 people.
Not sure that is factoring in reusability once they are willing to use that for crew missions (or offset price reusing crew boosters on non crewed missions).
Another issue with shuttle was reliability though. It may take hundreds of flights to know how much it is improved with crew dragon, but it seems to have better launch abort capabilities etc.
Yeah there's definitely a capability gap. The issue is many of the capabilities weren't necessary or used on every flight.
Stuff like spacelab missions can probably be done using the ISS. Some of the military capabilities are moved to X-37.
Certain of the satellite launching capabilities of the shuttle were hampered by safety concerns post challenger/columbia.
The ability to retrieve and return large cargo is still missing, but it doesn't appear many people are clamoring for it. It'd be nice if we could continue to service Hubble going forward, but that's mostly nostalgia talking.
The Shuttle was supposed to do everything for everyone and it met with predictable results. The promised economies and launch rates were never realized. The safety issues inherent with the design made its continuation nearly impossible.
Having cheaper, mostly reusable launchers that have capabilities that people actually use is way more valuable.
The cost would not increase linearly for 8 people. Dragon 2 was originally designed for 7, NASA requested it be configured for 4. If they wanted to go to 7, my guess is it would be a pretty marginal increase in cost.
The shuttle didn't have any real abort capabilities (other than very late in the flight, when they were already in space, just not in the correct orbit). It had some crazy schemes for earlier stages of flight, but they were never tested, and no one actually thought they would work.
2 people in the shuttle crew were pilots trained to land the shuttle. That was their primary job. Surely they were capable to do other things, but they could not be sent into the space for months and keep their skills intact. So the real number of seats was like 6.
The shuttle had a payload to LEO capacity of 27 tons, but Falcon Heavy can lift over 60 tons. The problem with the Shuttle was the orbiter itself was enormously heavy.
Bear in mind SpaceX is working hard on making Falcon and Dragon obsolete. Starship will have a larger payload than the shuttle and drop costs quite a bit more.
They'll have to stop blowing them up, but at two prototypes per month I think they'll make rapid progress.