Space Access Update #129 12/15/11 Copyright 2011 by Space Access Society ________________________________________________________________________ News came out of a significant victory this morning. NASA has announced that in order to make the most of the limited Commercial Crew funding in this year's budget, the program will continue with multiple competitive Space Act Agreements (SAA's) with the commercial crew developers, rather than (as had been announced over the summer) switching over to contracting under the standard Federal Acquisition Regulations (the FARs). (As we made plain in our last few Updates, contracting under the FARs was likely to fatally increase Commercial Crew Program costs and timelines.) (See http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=34477 for more on today's NASA announcement.) We will admit to having been deeply pessimistic about the future of NASA Commercial Crew. This is a surprising victory for common sense within NASA in getting the most benefit for the country out of a limited Commercial Crew budget. Our compliments to everyone involved in the heavy lifting we expect it took to achieve this result. (And that it will no doubt take to protect this result over the coming years - the internal NASA tendencies to embrace and smother CCDev will not have gone away.) Under the circumstances, assertions that this decision is purely for NASA reasons and not in any way a response to external pressures are forgivable. Results are what count - and with a little luck and a lot of hard work, this decision will be a major step toward producing viable US commercial crew transport capabilities in the coming years. ________________________________________________________________________ Space Access Society's sole purpose is to promote radical reductions in the cost of reaching space. You may redistribute this Update in any medium you choose, as long as you do it unedited in its entirety. You may reproduce selected portions of this Update if you credit the source and include a pointer to our website. ________________________________________________________________________ Space Access Society http://www.space-access.org space.access@space-access.org "Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System" - Robert A. Heinlein