Re: Bigelow Aerospace to offer $760 million for spaceship

Craig Fink wrote:
kT wrote:

Jeff Findley wrote:
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12836-bigelow-aerospace-to-offer-760-million-for-spaceship.html
Here are the interesting bits:

The company plans to break ground in less than a year on a factory
to mass-produce its inflatable space stations, but they are worried
that without an affordable commercial crew launch vehicle, none of
its potential customers will be able to pay to get to these space
stations, Bigelow said.

"We could find ourselves with a nice new facility, a number of
modules on the floor ready to launch, and nowhere in sight is an
affordable or even existing transportation vehicle - a capsule and
a lifting vehicle that make economic sense," he said.

"It's becoming much more of a crisis to us, so we probably are
going to be announcing fairly soon that we're going to offer a
contract - to whomever - where we will state how much we're willing
to pay per seat or per launch," he said.

The contract or purchase agreement would be worth $760 million in
total for eight launches. To show that Bigelow Aerospace is serious,
it will deposit $100 million in an escrow bank account up front if
the plan goes forward.

The potential offer tops the $500 million NASA has budgeted for its
Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) programme, which
is part of the agency's own effort to spur development of commercial
orbital crew launch capabilities.
NASA and Mr. Big sure do seem a little uptight about launch services.

Who do they think they're going to shake out of the woodwork in 30 days?

Aren't these guys thinking things through at all? They could put a
SpaceX Merlin powered upper stage on top of an Atlas V common core, and
call it a day. That's one alternative launch vehicle architecture.

I've got many more. Will somebody please have Mr. Big give me a call.

Looks like a bargain for only $750 Million for a Space Station, I imagine
the price will only go up after the first one. Kind of like the price on a
Soyuz is heading up, is $25 Million now, or is it $30 Million.

I thought it was 65 million heading to 80 million.

Maybe NASA will buy the first one for storage at the Space Station. Of
course, Mr. Bigelow will have to charge them another $750 Million for the
paperwork that NASA will want.

750 million for eight launches. These are 100 million dollar launches any way you look at them, EELV, Falcon 9, Soyuz, or mix and match.

I'm still sticking with the SSME on the Ares/Orion upper stage (SSTO).

I'll still need all the other launchers, so nobody loses here.

The only thing that fails to meet the cut here is the Stick.
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