Re: Bigelow Aerospace to offer $760 million for spaceship

Jeff Findley wrote:
"Derek Lyons" <fairwater@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:47286f93.3346500@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Jeff Findley" <jeff.findley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
Sounds like poor business planning to me.

Some of their business plan did assume cheap access to space. Unfortunately, things like NASA's COTS program aren't going well. This is partly due to the fact that NASA is developing Ares I/Orion, which could easily take over the COTS role. It's hard to raise private funds for developing a COTS vehicle when NASA is hedging its bets before the COTS program even gets off the drawing board.

"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.
Wasn't this what America's Space Prize was supposed to accomplish?

True, but this looks a lot like a firm commitment for 3/4 of a billion dollars in launch contracts, which is a lot more money than the America's Space Prize. I see this latest announcement as confirmation that Bigelow Aerospace is serious about its space station business plan. It also looks like a public admission that Soyuz isn't going to be affordable.

If they were really serious, they wouldn't have let this issue slide for how many years now? Mr. Big needs some serious advice at the very top. Either that, or Mr. Big has been getting some real bad advice up there.
.

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