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Comparison of CRS2 Vehicles

I've been wanting to do this post for awhile - actually ever since SNC successfully did their drop test of the Dream Chaser a while back (2017-11-11) and there was a Faceboook discussion on the costs of all the CRS2 vehicles and their capabilities. Let's do a breakdown. CRS2 Vehicles The Commerical Resupply Services 2 contract from NASA was awarded to three companies: SpaceX, OrbitalATK, and Sierra Nevada Corporation. The total value of all contracts awarded were close to $14 billion. Each company was awarded a minimum of six launches each. This is for missions from 2019-2024. I thumbed around the internet to put the following table together. Most sources came from here . Dream Chaser's weight was taken from here , although I'm guessing this is for the Crew version. Here's a general chart for you of the above. Apologies for the poor formatting, I'm not great with trying to embed Google Spreadsheets into Blogger.  Let's go over some addit
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Interview with Scott Pace in SciAm

There was an interesting interview done with NSC member Scott Pace that I thought gives some better ideas on what the US and in particular the NSC (National Space Council) is trying to facilitate. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/q-a-plotting-u-s-space-policy-with-white-house-adviser-scott-pace/
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Draft Letter to the Vice President

Note: This post has been edited. I've been kicking around the idea of writing members of the National Space Council after hearing all the commentary from the last meeting. I've been busy but this morning I finally took a moment to draft a letter to the Vice President . I haven't sent this yet as I think I could do better. I'm trying to keep it to one page as I'm sure their office gets a ton of letters. Once I'm done I'll print it out and sign it and mail it in. Do I think that this will actually have any effect? I doubt it, but I always want to have the view in the future that at least I said something. EDIT: I sent the below letter to the office of the Vice President earlier this week. I've also written letters to other agencies on the NSC; I've included a copy of that letter as well following the one to the Vice President. That letter is basically the same minus some word changes. ------------------------- [ DRAFT ] To: The White H
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Space Legislative Blitz, February 2018

During the last Planetary Radio space policy podcast it was mentioned that in February 2018 there would be a legislative blitz in Washington DC to reach out to Congress to increase awareness for space related activities. I went Googling and found the link here . The dates are February 25th - 27th, 2018. That's Sunday through Tuesday of the last week of February. While I don't know if I'll have the time to actually travel down to DC, I wanted to share the information in case others are interested. As mentioned at the link above, there will be a training session beforehand to go over talking points before going from Congress person office to office to talk and raise awareness about increasing and maintaining our space programs. The full link above has all the details.
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Why pay NASA?

I've found myself repeating this in a few places, so I figured I would just write this one more time and then moving forward I'll just link to this post in the future. I listen to The Planetary Society 's podcast Planetary Radio and in the most recent episode they've mentioned that NASA's budget is due up in Congress. They've started a petition to resolve some conflicting budget proposals from the Senate and the House, which I'll link to here . In short though; the general idea is to make sure that we keep money flowing to planetary science and overall increase NASA's budget. If you have a few moments, please take some time to sign the petition and click the send button . It will auto resolve your Senator and Representatives based on your information that you enter so you don't have to figure that out for yourself. Also, the letter is editable, so if you have some additional comments to share regarding NASA, you can add those comments in. As
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Space Books So Far, October 2017

I wanted to put my list of books I've got on Kindle that are space related so far in case others are looking for something to read. Non-Fiction Biographical Astronauts " Endurance " - Scott Kelly's account of his year in space " An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth " - Chris Hadfield's book Other " Von Braun " - the man who helped America in spaceflight (the other notable name being Goddard) " Failure Is Not An Option " Gene Kranz book over his time being flight director at NASA " Elon Musk " - tangentially related to space, obviously " The Right Kind Of Crazy " - engineer Adam Steltzner at NASA Planning For Space Spaceflight, Humans In Space " The Case For Mars " - Robert Zubrin's plan to get people to Mars " Packing For Mars " - A look at the various things humans would have to account for in a mission to Mars. It can get pretty hilarious at times.
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