We in America need more men and women like this man, Senator Ted Cruz. He does take a strong outward stand for the needs of our Space Program, and for sure he clearly supports the specific need for a U.S. launch vehicle for "low Earth orbit"! And he says directly, "We need to reclaim our leadership role in space exploration!!
Some very interesting comments! Certainly, Ted Cruz is likely to be a candidate in the race for President in the 2016 elections, so at the least we can now know where he stands on this very significant area of interests here at TheLivingmoon!! :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp3iLDyfWhE
Well let's hope this happens because we literally are relying on Russia for the public space program
The secret space program is fine but we don't know about that one :P And I am sure he cannot tell us about it :D
Maybe Pegasus should openly support this guy :D
sorry grabbed the wrong one.. skip down to the second one :-[
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pentagon%e2%80%99s-mystery-plane-is-secret-but-its-dollar55-billion-cost-isn%e2%80%99t/ar-BBi9Aus
The Washington Post
7 hrs ago
Pentagon's mystery plane is secret, but its $55 billion cost isn't
(http://img.s-msn.com/tenant/amp/entityid/BBi9Ixx.img?h=407&w=728&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=400&y=290)
The closest it's come to a public debut was a prime-time tease during a Super Bowl ad that showed its svelte outline veiled beneath a sheet, but revealed not a glimpse of the Pentagon's most mysterious plane.
Highly classified, the program is one of the Air Force's top priorities — and its most expensive. The service estimates it will cost $55 billion to build as many as 100 of what it calls the Long Range Strike Bomber, which is designed to fly deep into enemy territory undetected until the mushroom cloud begins to bloom.
In the coming months, the Air Force is expected to award a contract for the next-generation bomber, which would begin flying in the mid-2020s, have the potential to fly manned or unmanned and give the military the ability to hit any target "at any point on the globe."
But that's about all the Air Force will say about the program, which has been cloaked in a veil of secrecy rivaling the jet's stealthy ability to creep past enemy lines.
With so little known about it, there is growing concern about the system's cost. And given the Pentagon's vast history of cost overruns on major weapons systems, experts worry that even though a contract has yet to be awarded, it is already facing the same troubling problems that have plagued other programs.
The Air Force has estimated each new bomber will cost $550 million apiece, but that figure was set in 2010 without counting for inflation and is already five years outdated. It's also significantly less than the cost of its predecessor, the B-2 bomber, and not that much more than some high-end commercial jets. Coming in at such a low price will be difficult, if not impossible, analysts said.
"I'm afraid they're heading down a path here where they have set themselves up politically to not succeed," said Todd Harrison, the director of defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "They've come out with these cost estimates that are surprisingly low, and they seem to be doubling down on the idea that they can build this bomber cheaper than the last one."
The contract comes amid tightening budgets that are forcing the Defense Department to change the way it does business. In an effort to keep costs down, it has worked to increase competition and incite new companies typically averse to the headaches of government bureaucracy, to bid on contracts.
But while technology has disrupted industries from taxi service to the media and retail, the exceedingly complex combat aircraft industry has been immune from new players forcing change and efficiencies. There is no Uber for the Pentagon; Amazon.com has yet to record its first fighter jet sale.
Even space has seen startling innovation, driven in large part by a new class of young and feisty start-ups led by billionaire entrepreneurs. Elon Musk's SpaceX, for example, has upended the space market, winning lucrative contracts to ferry cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. It's also fighting to compete to launch military satellites , which has been a virtual monopoly held by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of defense industry titans Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Given the steep barriers to entry, it is not surprising that no one has disrupted the combat aircraft market, Harrison said. Unlike the space launch industry, which also flies commercial satellites, the market for combat aircraft is dominated by a single customer: the U.S. government.
The technical challenges are great, the costs high, the industry highly regulated. And barriers to exit are low: Lose one major contract and you could be out of an industry forever. All of which is why many companies have left the business but "nobody has entered the business of building aircraft since 1969 to any meaningful degree," said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group.
And so while Silicon Valley innovation and verve upends industry after industry, the companies vying for the bomber contract are the same stalwarts that have dominated military aviation for decades.
Northrop Grumman is facing off against Boeing, which has teamed up with Lockheed Martin for a competition that will involve three of the world's largest defense contractors with decades-long legacies of building planes for the Pentagon, including Northrop's B-2 bomber, Lockheed's F-35 and F-22 and Boeing's F/A-18 Super Hornet.
The new bomber will no doubt be a more advanced iteration of its predecessors — Pentagon officials have talked vaguely about how it is actually part of a "system," indicating the program could involve more than just single aircraft.
But while the plane would be a step up, the process through which the Pentagon is buying them is virtually unchanged. And the Defense Department's recent record of buying expensive, complicated weapons systems has been abysmal.
When it initially conceived of the B-2 bomber, the stealthy Batman-like plane, it planned on buying 132. Instead, with costs skyrocketing and the Cold War ending, it bought 21 for about $2 billion each.
The F-22 program was cut after 187 of the panes were built — far fewer than originally planned. And after costs doubled and President Obama called it "an example of the procurement process gone amok," the Pentagon killed the Marine One program, after spending $3.2 billion with no usable helicopters to show for it.
To those who have seen one troubled procurement program after another, it is a familiar script that begins with a promise of savings, rosy pledges of streamlined efficiency, of valuing modest improvements over radical redesign.
And then: "The money goes in and nothing comes out," said John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, who calculated that the B-2 literally cost its weight in gold before the Pentagon slashed the program. "Everybody gets a promotion. The program implodes, and you have to start over."
One of the few aspects of the bomber program the Air Force will talk about, however, is how it plans to keep the cost of the program down.
The service has "set affordable, achievable, realistic requirements balanced by cost considerations," it said in a statement. It has pledged to guard against what's known as "requirements creep," where planners continue to add more bells and whistles to the program: The bomber, it said, "does not have to do everything."
But many who closely monitor the Pentagon's purchases aren't buying it.
The estimated costs "are as close to meaningless numbers can be," Pike said.
"I would go to Las Vegas and bet on cost overruns for this system," said Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists.
The true costs of the program may be unknown. Some analysts believe the Pentagon has secretly pushed development further along than it has acknowledged, funding the bomber through its clandestine "black budget."
Last summer, Jeremiah Gertler, a well-regarded military aviation expert with the Congressional Research Service, released a report that showed how funding for the program would increase more than 10-fold in a few years. That, he said, indicated that, "significant development has already been completed, presumably in classified budgets."
With such a highly sensitive project, it is not unusual that the Pentagon would keep the new bomber so tightly under wraps, "making it harder for enemies to prepare and counter it," said Loren Thompson, a defense consultant with the Lexington Institute.
But there's another consequence as well: "It's also harder for Congress to practice oversight," he said. "And I wouldn't discount the greater freedom from congressional oversight afforded by secrecy as a secondary motive."
Still, the intense lobbying efforts by the companies has started to seep into public view.
Northrop offered a high-profile tease of its design with the Super Bowl ad that ran in Washington and Dayton (home to the Air Force contracting command). Lockheed executives recently told reporters that their experience making the F-35 makes them very well suited for the contract.
"That's about all I can say about it," Marillyn Hewson, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, told investors recently after not really saying anything about it.
Whoever wins, the contract has the potential to reshuffle the industry. A loss for Northrop would mean it would no longer be the lead contractor on any military airplanes, and investors could try to force it to sell its military aviation business to Boeing, said Aboulafia, the aerospace consultant. A win would solidify its status as the premier bomber manufacturer, but that could also make it an attractive acquisition for Boeing, which then would be pushed out of the game.
Beyond the bomber, the industry's prospects are hazy. The competition for the next fighter jet will not come for at least 20 years, but the players are likely to be the same. Possibly, minus one.
Read More:
Inside one of the most intense, and unusual, Pentagon contracting wars
Grounded: Left behind in the contracting race to restore Americans to space
The Pentagon's electromagnetic "rail gun" makes its public debut
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sorry meant to post this onehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/loser-left-behind-in-the-contracting-race-to-restore-america-to-space/2015/02/13/d65800d4-a264-11e4-b146-577832eafcb4_story.html
This animation shows what Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Dream Chaser shuttle would look like launching, docking with the space station and landing on a runway. (Sierra Nevada Corporation)
By Christian Davenport February 13 ?
They had been waiting for this moment for the better part of a decade — the announcement from NASA on who would build the next spaceship to take astronauts to the International Space Station.
Sierra Nevada Corp., a more than 3,000-person outfit headquartered in Nevada, was a distinct underdog. Its competitors were Boeing, which traces its space legacy to the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury programs, and SpaceX, the brash upstart founded by billionaire Elon Musk that became the first private company to resupply the space station.
But the executives at the Sierra Nevada had built something they considered ground-breaking: a sporty space plane called the Dream Chaser that looked like a miniature version of the shuttle and gave them confidence they would win the contract, potentially worth billions of dollars.
It was also a chance to make history by restoring America's ability to launch its own astronauts from U.S. soil, ending reliance on Russia, to which the United States has paid $1.2 billion for trips to the space station since the shuttle was retired in 2011.
On the day of the contract announcement, Mark Sirangelo, director of the company's space program, took the call at his desk. It was not good news. "Like a death in the family," he would later say.
And so Sierra Nevada entered a realm particular to the world of government contracting: that of the big-time corporate loser.
Ford will survive if someone decides to buy a Chevrolet, and it won't break Denny's if you eat breakfast at IHOP. But the stakes are higher for contractors who put everything on the line in a marketplace dominated by a single customer: the federal government.
The loser's locker room is a scene of despair, anger, calls for litigious revenge. There is lost revenue, sometimes layoffs, even bankruptcy. In Sierra Nevada's case, it had a spaceship suddenly in search of a mission and now even more pressure to find a customer to fly it.
As federal procurement spending has been cut dramatically — by almost $100 billion between 2010 and last year — the stakes have only climbed. Having to absorb defeat with less business to fall back on is driving a wave of industry consolidation, and many contractors are looking to foreign governments and the commercial sector to help offset the losses.
"It's a zero-sum game," said David Versel, a research associate at George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis. "Since there's so much less funding than there used to be, it's harder and harder to stay in business."
The consequences are more pronounced in the landmark, and increasingly rare, multibillion-dollar opportunities such as the one Sierra Nevada was pursuing. Winners can be guaranteed a stream of orders that last years, if not decades. Lose, and you could be shut out of an industry for good.
But even in the day-to-day scrum of midlevel government contracting, a loss can be agonizing.
'Still a little chapped'
When Jared Shepard's team at Reston-based Intelligent Waves went after a $500 million information technology contract for the military a few years ago, about a dozen employees worked on the 300-page proposal for more than six months. Sometimes toiling until 1 or 2 in the morning. Shepard, the company's chief executive, canceled a three-week honeymoon to Australia and took a week in the Caribbean instead. Even then, he was on his laptop daily — grateful for his forgiving bride.
The company's bid was 30 percent lower than the incumbent contractor, and Shepard felt good about his company's chances.
When they lost, he called his attorney, ready to fight.
"They immediately call me angry," said the attorney, Lee Dougherty. "They spent months and months, full time devoted to a proposal. So when they call me they are usually very emotional. They're just perplexed because they were so sure they would win."
On those initial calls, he is more therapist than legal adviser, a listener and a voice of reason that, more often than not, says: You lost, and it's probably not worth filing a protest, which is often costly and unsuccessful.
Even when they are successful, it doesn't mean you get the work. Shepard won the protest, and the competition was reopened. But his company lost again, and three years later it still hurts.
"I guess part of me is still a little chapped by that one," he said.
For Chris Dunn's small company, Applied Network Solutions, based in Columbia, Md., the five-year IT contract for an intelligence agency was a bit of a stretch. But he decided to go for it, thinking, "If you don't swing, you don't hit."
If they won, the contract could have doubled the size of the company, which could have helped open the door to other lucrative contracts. Dunn had a good feeling: "Everybody believed we were the team to beat," he said.
He received the bad news on his cellphone in a parking lot.
"I hung up the phone and sat there and said, 'Well, now what?'?" he said.
A mission falls short
At Sierra Nevada, some employees had worked on the Dream Chaser program since its inception more than a decade earlier. The company had invested millions in it. And even though it was not as well-known as its rivals, Sierra Nevada fared well in the early rounds of a competition designed not just to build a spaceship that could take astronauts to the space station but also to help develop the burgeoning commercial space industry.
In the first round, it won $20 million, more than even industry giants such as Boeing and the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. In the second round, it won more than $100 million. By the final round, NASA had invested more than $363 million on Sierra Nevada's program.
At the end, it came down to three finalists: Sierra Nevada, Boeing and SpaceX.
Boeing and SpaceX offered capsules. Sierra Nevada had something different: the Dream Chaser, a quarter the size of the space shuttle, it looked like a Mini Cooper next to an 18-wheeler. But even though it's a compact "space plane," it can carry as many passengers — seven — as the shuttle. And unlike its predecessor, and the capsules that splash down in the ocean, the Dream Chaser can land on commercial runways, meaning the cargo and crew could be almost immediately accessible. And then it could fly again.
And the American space program could fly astronauts again, too. Since the retirement of the shuttle, it was in an uncomfortable, even embarrassing, position: having to hitch rides on Russian Soyuz rockets to the space station.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden wrote in a blog post that "it is unacceptable that we don't currently have an American capability to launch our own astronauts." And costly: NASA paid more than $70 million a seat for the rides.
The winner of the "commercial crew" contract would be able to add an American flag next to the corporate logo on its rocket and demonstrate how far commercial space flight has come.
The contracts also marked a shift for NASA. Instead of owning and operating the rockets, NASA would essentially hire them in an arrangement not unlike a rental-car agreement, allowing the agency to focus on its main target: Mars.
For Boeing, a win would represent another notch in a well-marked belt. For SpaceX, it would cement the once spunky outlier as a legitimate, mainstream player — another coup, after becoming the first commercial company to resupply the space station with a contract worth $1.7 billion.
For Sierra Nevada, it would be a breakthrough that could, in an instant, hoist it to the top tier of space companies. A decade in the making, the company wanted this win. Bad.
Last September, the call came. NASA announced that Boeing and SpaceX would share the $6.8 billion award, Sirangelo would tell his team that this was their Apollo 13 mission. Like the astronauts who had to abort landing on the moon because of an oxygen tank explosion, the company had come so close to its goal — but fell short.
About 100 people would lose their jobs. Denial gave way to depression — and anger. "We all did our grieving," Sirangelo said. The team "was fairly devastated by the loss."
To the dreamers, the vastness of space has long represented opened-ended possibility. Sierra Nevada had built a ship to cross the threshold, and it was not about to give up now. It filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office, saying that its proposal could have saved NASA money. When that was denied last month, it pressed on, saying that it "firmly believes that the Dream Chaser will play a central role in shaping the future of space transportation."
The statement embodied the optimist of an explorer, straddling the fine line between faith and delusion, persistence and masochism. Just because NASA snubbed it didn't mean the space agencies of other countries would.
Sirangelo, a sincere and soft-spoken man, and his team hit the road to work with foreign governments, hoping to sell them on the spacecraft.
This month, his company announced the completion of a study that could pave the way for the German Aerospace Center to use the Dream Chaser to take European astronauts to the space station.
There is also the possibility that, one day, it could take to rich space tourists to low Earth orbit.
Even though the Dream Chaser was designed to carry people, Sierra Nevada, running out of options, bid on another contract to take cargo to the space station.
With proposals due in early December, they had to hustle. They worked through Thanksgiving, cramming at least six months of work into three. Members of the team decided that "we've come too far," Sirangelo said. "We believe in this product and our effort too much. It's going to be hell for three months, but we're going to do everything we can."
Still, the competition for the cargo contract is stiff. And Sirangelo is well aware of the risky downside.
"Maybe we'd lose again," he said. "But we weren't going to sit there and cry all night. We're not made up that way."
NASA is expected to announce the winners of that competition in June. Sierra Nevada will be waiting anxiously, wondering if it will once again be forced to answer the question: Well, now what?
Christian Davenport covers federal contracting for The Post's Financial desk. He joined The Post in 2000 and has served as an editor on the Metro desk and as a reporter covering military affairs. He is the author of "As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard."