{"id":34412,"date":"2011-04-24T15:44:24","date_gmt":"2011-04-24T15:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/orbital-may-wind-down-its-commercial-crew-effort\/"},"modified":"2011-04-24T15:44:24","modified_gmt":"2011-04-24T15:44:24","slug":"orbital-may-wind-down-its-commercial-crew-effort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/space-flight\/orbital-may-wind-down-its-commercial-crew-effort.php","title":{"rendered":"Orbital may wind down its commercial crew effort"},"content":{"rendered":"

Orbital Sciences was one of the companies that submitted CCDev-2 proposals but did not get funded, raising the question of whether they will stay involved in the larger commercial crew effort<\/a>. On Thursday, company officials indicated they would likely not pursue further work in this area.<\/p>\n

“It was disappointing that we weren’t selected” for a CCDev-2 award, Orbital CEO Dave Thompson said in a conference call with financial analysts to discuss the company’s first quarter financial results<\/a>. “I don’t, at this time, anticipate that we’ll continue to pursue our own project in that race. We’ll watch it and if an opportunity develops we may reconsider. But at this point, I would not anticipate a lot of activity on our part in the commercial crew market.”<\/p>\n

Thompson, though, was supportive in general of the commercial crew effort. “NASA is on a good track to turn over astronaut transportation to commercial operators, and I think ultimately the agency will be successful at doing that,” he said.<\/p>\n

So why did Orbital not get a CCDev-2 award? From the source selection statement about the awards<\/a>, it appears that Orbital did not stack up as well as Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), another company that proposed a lifting body concept. “SNC scored higher in business considerations and demonstrated a strong commitment to the public-private partnership associated with the Commercial Crew Program,” the statement reads. Also, SNC’s Dream Chaser could carry more people than Orbital’s Prometheus (seven versus four) and also required a “more modest Atlas V variant”, giving it more margin should the spacecraft’s mass increase. SNC’s proposal did have a flaw in terms of its launch abort capabilities, something NASA believes that the company hadn’t adequately understood, but given the proposal’s other strengths it got a higher rating than Orbital’s, enough for SNC to win a CCDev-2 award and Orbital to be shut out—perhaps for good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Orbital Sciences was one of the companies that submitted CCDev-2 proposals but did not get funded, raising the question of whether they will stay involved in the larger commercial crew effort. On Thursday, company officials indicated they would likely not … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-flight"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34412"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34412\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}