One of the cool things about having a blog is having readers who know more than you do. (Or, conversely, maybe the frustrating thing about reading TLF is that we often don’t know what we’re talking about) Anyway, reader Jim Lippard notes some problems with my recent space posts:
NASA hasn’t been doing a whole lot of commercial space business for the last few years–there were no shuttle flights from the destruction of Columbia on February 1, 2003 until the launch of Discovery on July 26, 2005 (STS-114). It had some of the same issues as Columbia, so there wasn’t another flight until July 4, 2006 (STS-121). STS-115 launched on September 9, 2006, STS-116 launched on December 9, 2006. STS-117 is scheduled for mid-March 2007.
Of recent years’ shuttle launches, only STS-116 launched satellites, and it was the first to do so since STS-113 (launched November 24, 2002).
If you need a satellite launched in a hurry, NASA is not the place to go… you’re better off going with Sea Launch, a consortium managed by Boeing, that is the company that puts satellites into orbit for XM, EchoStar, and DirecTV.
So far as I can see, NASA is the U.S. Postal Service of satellite launches, while Sea Launch is the FedEx. It doesn’t look to me like NASA is inhibiting private space companies at all.
I stand corrected. I would be very interested in knowing more about how Sea Launch and NASA’s launch costs compare.
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