John Kelly: Measuring success of SpaceX's flight to ISS won't be easy

From Florida Today: John Kelly: Measuring success of SpaceX's flight to ISS won't be easy
There is much debate about what would constitute success for Space X’s coming landmark attempt to launch a privately developed spaceship to the International Space Station.

The answer is layered and depends on whose measures of success you’re considering. Technical experts in the aerospace industry, whether they’re from SpaceX, NASA or competing commercial space ventures, will say there are so many parts of this program in “testing,” that pulling off a launch, an orbital flight and close-up rendezvous with the space station would represent major progress.

If SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, on just its second orbital flight and its first trying to chase and meet up with the space station, docks at the orbiting outpost, the achievement could be the catalyst for a technical and political game-changer.

The only other entities to achieve this complex a mission in space are national governments of the world’s wealthiest countries. They spent many more years and many more billions getting it done than the U.S. has had to invest as a “venture capitalist” of sorts on the SpaceX Falcon and Dragon projects.

The United States spent at least $8 billion in the 1970s developing the space shuttle system. If that were measured in today’s dollars, the development cost would surpass $50 billion.

The Russians spent an undisclosed amount of money developing the Soyuz and Progress spacecraft that regularly dock at the space station, over four decades. Flights of a single Soyuz are estimated, by consultants and Russian space program experts, to cost in the $100 million range.

Europe spent about $1.8 billion developing its automated cargo ship. The price for each flight is about $300 million, not counting the cost of the rocket that gets it off the Earth.

Japan invested $680 million developing its transfer vehicle, and each flight costs $220 million (not counting launch).

So far, the U.S. government has spent well under $300 million seeding the development of SpaceX’s new system under a contract in NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation System program. SpaceX bore the rest of the cost in the hopes of landing a follow-on $1.6 billion deal to regularly fly cargo to the space station, which it did, and with an eye toward proving Dragon could someday ferry astronauts.