This week was a big one in the Space Industry, the biggest we've had in years, with the Tuesday announcements. The big two announcements were putting the Lunar Gateway (AKA lunar space station) on hold and shifting the emphasis to creating a permanent presence on the moon with more direct flights. Most of the major shifts this week were well received: a Moon base, a focus on less talk and more action, and working with industry to streamline regulations so increased innovation can propel the United States further into space.
As far back as 2018, then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine was sounding the alarm about the need to find a replacement for the space station if the United States wanted to maintain an ongoing human presence in low-Earth orbit.
One aspect of this event has begun to run into serious turbulence. It involves NASA’s attempt to navigate a difficult issue with no clear solution: finding a commercial replacement for the aging International Space Station. We've covered the private space station efforts of Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Vast, Nanoracks (later became Voyager), and Northrop Grumman (later withdrew from the program) here before.
The problem seems to be that none of those three surviving contractors know what NASA really wants.
In most cases of major space or defense projects, the Agency buying the project issues a document listing everything they want the thing to do. A common document is often called a Hardware Requirements Drawing (HRD) along with requirements drawings for the everything they want it to do. Before that is issued there's generally a Request for Proposal document (RFP) that lists everything they want the system to be able to do. The companies that respond to the RFP go line by line through the RFP responding if they can meet all of the request for proposal and the cost.
NASA has not released an RFP saying what they really want the independent Space Stations to do.
“We’re on a path that’s not leading us where we thought it would,” said Dana Weigel, manager of the International Space Station program for NASA.
...NASA proposed a new solution that would bind the private companies more closely to NASA, requiring them not to build free-flying space stations but rather to work directly with the space agency on modules that would, at least initially, dock with the International Space Station. This change was not well-received.
Part of not telling the private station coordinators what they need is undoubtedly that NASA themselves don't know what they need the new stations to do.
- Building space station modules is really hard. The HALO and iHAB elements of the now-shelved Lunar Gateway—have both faced significant delays.
- It’s very expensive. Privately, the space station companies have told NASA they generally expect their stations to cost a few billion dollars to construct. NASA believes a truer estimate is probably in the range of $5 to $10 billion. And then it costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year to operate, on top of approximately $2 billion in crew and cargo transportation costs for continuous presence.
- Stations are operationally challenging. The ISS (NASA) has to deal with debris-avoidance maneuvers, equipment failures, medical emergencies, and more. None of the current four companies have any experience with this.
- Who will come to the space stations? It’s not at all clear that the European Space Agency would pay private stations (or transportation providers such as SpaceX) directly for time on orbit. Typically, they have “bartered” services with NASA for crew time on the International Space Station. NASA is also dubious that the “orbital economy” touted by the private companies will come to pass. “We can’t entertain fiction,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said this week. “It has to be grounded in reality.”
This graphic outlines NASA’s alternative plan for commercial stations. Credit:
NASA
In the four months after Isaacman became administrator, the issue of what to do with commercial space stations has been one of several raging fires his team has had to put out. In some ways, it appears to be the most intractable.
The architect of the original Commercial LEO destinations (CLD) program, a longtime NASA official named Phil McAlister who retired last year, does not believe NASA’s new option meets those goals.
“I don’t see how this new plan benefits industry at all,” he told Ars. “This new plan destroys the development work the companies have accomplished over the last several years, and it ensures NASA and the nation will see no benefit from the hundreds of millions of dollars that NASA has spent on CLD designs that are now obsolete.”
Of the companies that have been working on their own stations, Axiom, Voyager, Blue Origin, and Vast Space, all but Axiom have all designed “free-flying” stations from the beginning and never intend to dock with the International Space Station, nor go through the ultra-rigorous and expensive certification process to do that. NASA is being too "top down" - decreeing things from the top. They should start from the standpoint of issuing that Request For Proposal. They should try to set it up so that they can use whatever they need to use of the other station's capabilities, and let the new space station sell time on board to colleges or small businesses that will grow into it.
I spent 30 year as a USG contractor, six of which was as an in-house SETA consulting contractor. Admittedly, I only worked on one NASA contract, the ground system upgrade to TDRS, as a subcontractor to GD/C4S. The project was called SGSS. Generally, prior to releasing the RFP, we would expect to develop in-house a systems requirement document (SRD) and a systems concept document (SCD) to which the SRD would apply. In many cases, that would define an architecture that was needed to fulfill the requirements. It was also typical to do a should-cost analysis before releasing the RFP.
ReplyDeleteAny proposal technical volume that I would tender had to respond specifically to each requirement, and address potential risks in not meeting the requirements. The cost and management volume that I would tender addressed cost (with justification), staffing, and schedule, again with risk assessments as applicable. I would assume that NASA is doing all that as well.