Space Access Update #139 3/14/15
Copyright 2015 by Space Access Society
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In this Issue:
FY'16
Political Season Underway: Early Roundup
House Passes
NASA Authorization
Commercial
Crew Contracts
FAA AST
"Learning Period" Extension
Our
Colleagues Have Been Busy
Pioneering Space Summit
Alliance
For Space Development
March
Storm
Space Access
'15 Conference April 30 - May 2, 2015 in Phoenix
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FY'16 Political Season Underway: Early
Roundup
While we've been putting
together our upcoming Space
Access Conference, another DC space political season has been getting
underway. It's time we took a quick look
at what's going on so far. In no
particular order...
House Passes NASA
Authorization
The House of Representatives
has once again passed a NASA
Authorization bill - IE, largely a policy document indicating what the
controlling coalition in the House Space subcommittee thinks NASA should be
doing. In recent years there have been
enough minor differences with their Senate counterparts that the last NASA
Authorization to actually make it into law was 2010's. On the other hand, that 2010 Authorization is
what set Space Launch System and Orion underway regardless of actual need,
eating about $3 billion a year of NASA's limited human exploration funding ever
since. This year's version is worth a
look for issues we care about, just in case.
One thing that's obvious is,
they still really like SLS/Orion. They
still push SLS/Orion as a backup for Commercial Crew despite that idea's
widely-recognized absurdity. They set a
landing on Mars as NASA Human Exploration's primary policy goal, not totally
unreasonable given that they also allow for a variety of other destinations
along the way. But they still attempt
to establish by fiat that SLS/Orion is an essential part of the Mars-landing
and other deep-space exploration goals - it's essential because they declare it
essential, not because any impartial study of the matter has found it so.
(Impartial studies tend to
find that NASA is going to have to learn to do orbital rendezvous and assembly
for Mars even with SLS, so they might as well do it with smaller, many-times
cheaper boosters that someone else has already paid for.) (We're also actually a bit surprised not to
find specific mention of using SLS for NASA's planned Europa
mission. Although that bad idea [the full
SLS launch cost would double or triple overall Europa
mission costs, while subjecting the mission to the considerable additional
development risk of an as-yet paper SLS upper stage] could still show up in the
Senate version...)
Another thing that's obvious
is their continued mixed feelings about Commercial Crew, with a strong theme of
down-selecting to one competitor right away to save money in the short run,
while at the same time somehow leveraging competition to save money in the long
run, all while also maximizing "safety" IE compliance with NASA
procedural paperwork. Our take is, if
they got the established-industry sole-source they obviously want, they'd get
the paperwork compliance. Saving money,
short or long run, not so much - see the next section for the short-term risks
and some early info on long-term prices.
Also Commercial Crew related,
they take a pot-shot at funded Space Act Agreements, imposing requirements that
would make it considerably harder for NASA to implement significant programs
with SAA's in future.
(The highly successful COTS Commercial Cargo program, plus the initial
phases of Commercial Crew, were contracted under SAA's
rather than the significantly less flexible and more expensive FAR's, the standard Federal Acquisition Regulations.)
They also amend 51 USC
70702's requirement for an independent Presidential investigating commission
for the loss of any crewed Federal space vehicle or installation to also cover
suborbital vehicles carrying any federally-funded payload. And they call for a report supporting an
Asteroid Retrieval Mission (which we're beginning to think may
make sense as a way of establishing a useful Lunar gateway for the long
term) and a report supporting a 2021 Mars Flyby - which unfortunately simply
can't be done by SLS/Orion, since it would make the first crewed Orion flight a
500-day Mars mission, which is a bit overambitious.
All points worth keeping an
eye on, if and when the Senate starts seriously looking at this bill.
Commercial Crew
Contracts
The actual Commercial Crew final
development phase (CCtCap) contracts
have been released, though with most prices and many other "competition
sensitive" details blacked out. What's
left is info on the overall shape of the two projects, plus a single number on
page 2 of each contract that we suspect may be the total for the fixed-price
development & certification portion of the contracts - $1.115 billion for
SpaceX, $1.976 billion for Boeing. (NASA
will neither confirm nor deny.)
The individual development
milestones are there - Doug Messier has tabulated them at Parabolic Arc for Boeing
and SpaceX
- but the milestone payments have been blacked out. We're a bit unclear on the rationale for
deeming these amounts competition-sensitive, mind, as the competition involved
is over. It certainly does make it
harder to track likely overall program costs versus time though.
Two Programs
Worth noting are the two very
different milestone payment strategies. SpaceX
bid a 50-50 mix between payments for successful program reviews and payments for
successful system tests, while Boeing structured their milestone payments far
more heavily toward successful program reviews/reports (78%) and away from
successful system tests (22%). Given our
reading of the CCtCap
Source Selection Report - to vastly
oversimplify, Boeing was best at NASA process and SpaceX had best
price/performance - this difference in milestone approaches corresponds to real
differences in the two companies' approaches.
Boeing looks to us to be
pursuing a traditional NASA-process path of designing and reviewing the system
to within an inch of its life, then once it's all (theoretically) perfect,
building and flying it. SpaceX meanwhile
seems to be sticking to the rapid-paced build-test-build cycle that's worked
very well for them on Commercial Cargo and on Commercial Crew so far.
To expand on that a bit, the
Source Selection Report worries (p 14) about SpaceX "that the schedule is
compressed, with a lot of upfront tests and development activities in 2015 and
early 2016", and thus that SpaceX's schedule may
slip - but also notes that SpaceX's schedule calls
for flight tests to be done and certification complete by mid-2017, so presumably
they have some slack if they need it.
We'd also note that by this front-loaded development approach, SpaceX
will tend to discover significant system problems earlier, when there's more
time to fix them, and thus is less likely to hit really serious delays.
Meanwhile, they say about
Boeing (p 12) "...that there is a weakness in this subfactor
for the compressed flight test and milestone schedule", IE, that Boeing
has a lot of critical testing stacked up right at the end of their schedule,
which calls for just making it under the wire with certification in late 2017. If all the careful planning and reviews turn
out to have missed something significant in actual hardware performance, Boeing
will have little or no slack to work with.
(Which we note is not entirely Boeing's fault, since they gave the
customer the process it wants, rather than losing points on process in the
evaluations for instead giving the customer the early hardware testing it needs.)
Mission Prices?
Elbow-Joggling Reserves?
The tables showing IDIQ (Indefinite
Delivery, Indefinite Quantity) per-mission prices, one-to-four missions per
year for years 2015 (?) through 2020, have all their entries blacked out. Here the competition-sensitivity is obvious,
as each contractor is guaranteed two operational flights, but an additional
four will be competed.
Each contract also includes an
up-to-$150 million IDIQ item for whatever additional studies, tests, and
analyses NASA may insist on before this is over. (This may not be nearly enough if the final certification
phase is allowed to go hard-core old-NASA our-way-or-the-highway.)
Mission Prices
Between the overall prices
NASA originally announced for the development contracts plus six operational
flights, the smaller prices GAO announced for the development contracts plus
the minimum two operational flights, and what we have here, we think we may
have backed out numbers for per-flight prices.
Average per-mission price for two missions, Boeing $442 million, SpaceX $243
million. For six missions, Boeing's
average is $346 million each, SpaceX's average $223
million each.
Given that NASA has decided
to fly these missions with four seats plus some fraction of a Commercial Cargo
(CRS) mission's cargo, we can go on to estimate actual per-seat prices. Using a third of a $133 million SpaceX CRS
mission for the comparison (the better match, since both Commercial Crew vehicles
will also provide both up-mass and down-mass) and at our six-mission prices, we
come up with, Boeing, $76 million per seat, SpaceX, $45 million per seat.
Meanwhile, adding Boeing's
and SpaceX's (presumed) fixed-price development &
certification totals plus the two $150 million NASA-imposed-extras
provisions gives us $3.39 billion. This is already slightly higher than the
$3.225 billion you get if you add NASA
Commercial Crew's current-year budget of $805 million, its FY'16 request for
$1.24 billion, and the $1.18 billion it anticipates needing in FY'17.
Our Conclusion
Full-throttle political
support for full-funding Commercial Crew at the requested $1.24 billion is a
top (if not the top) political priority for this year. Down-selecting to one vendor to save money
over the next two years would add multiple unacceptable program risks and lead
to long-term monopoly pricing. Successful
flight before the end of 2017 already apparently involves optimistic
assumptions about not needing the full $300 million in NASA-required-extras
contingency funding. NASA says that any
shortfall from the $1.24 billion level this year risks further program delays,
and our look at the numbers seems to bear that out.
FAA AST
"Learning Period" Extension
The Commercial Space Launch
Amendments Act (CSLAA) of 2004 established an eight-year "learning
period" during which FAA AST's authority to impose regulations (beyond
ensuring third parties aren't harmed) on the commercial spaceflight industry
was limited. See this
story and this
for background. Briefly, the intent was
to give commercial vendors flexibility to experiment while building up the FAA
experience base with commercial spaceflight, before attempting to craft
detailed regulations.
Alas, things have taken
longer than hoped. The US commercial
spaceflight industry still hasn't carried its first paying "spaceflight
participant", though the day is getting closer. The learning period has been extended once
already from its original 2012 expiration, but it's now due to expire this
coming October.
There's a push underway to
reset the learning period to run eight years from the date of the first US
flight of a paying "spaceflight participant". An original sponsor of the CSLAA, Congressman
Dana Rohrabacher, says in hindsight it was an error not to set it up this way
from the start.
FAA AST's position,
meanwhile, is that the learning period should be allowed to expire so they can
begin crafting commercial industry regulations based on the 50-year history of
government spaceflight. We respectfully
disagree.
Supporting extension of the
learning period is our second political priority for this year, close after
full funding for Commercial Crew.
Our Colleagues Have
Been Busy
Space political activism saw
two interesting developments this February: A two-day invitation-only
"Pioneering Space Summit" in Washington DC, and a new alliance between
Space Frontier Foundation and National Space Society (with others) called the
Alliance for Space Development.
The PSS was a sponsored
get-together of a hundred or so people from the DC space policy world. The attendance list was confidential, but apparently
it included influential people from the congressional space committees and from
NASA. The Summit's output was a
two-sentence consensus statement:
“The long term goal of the
human spaceflight and exploration program of the United States is to expand
permanent human presence beyond low-Earth orbit and to do so in a way that will
enable human settlement and a thriving space economy. This will be best achieved through public –
private partnerships and international collaboration.”
Now, this would be
unremarkable if the meeting had been solely activists. (Although we might question
"international collaboration" - this typically involves adding
together national space bureaucracies, which typically multiplies project costs.) For mainstream space policymakers, it's a bit
more of a radical departure. If this
sentiment does not quickly fade post-meeting (as alas we've seen after similar
past consensus-building exercises) then we might look to see signs of movement
toward implementing the summit consensus as US policy. Here's hoping.
Alliance for Space Development,
meanwhile, was formed by National Space Society and Space Frontier Foundation,
has a Board
with two members from NSS and two from SFF, and is run day to day by Executive
Coordinator Charles Miller. It also has
at last count nine additional member
organizations, some of which (SEDS, Mars Society) are also long-established
and well-known, but none of which seem to have a share in the decision-making
apparatus.
ASD's goals and objectives
look fine to us - we see nothing to argue with there, and we expect we will
cooperate with ASD or with individual ASD member organizations to support those
among their 2015 objectives (they list seven) we think both most urgent and also
practically achievable within available resources. (To be clear, one of the classic problems
with grand alliances is setting priorities.
The tendency is to prioritize everybody's wish-lists, but unfortunately,
if everything's nominally top priority, nothing actually is. Hard choices are sometimes needed.)
March Storm
Meanwhile, Charles Miller is
also reviving the March Storm citizen space
lobbying event, in DC this Sunday through Thursday. Again we think this is a fine thing, we agree
with all five points of their agenda, and we encourage you all to sign up and
show up and tell DC policymakers what you support.
Our sole caveat is once again
a matter of priorities: We think that their items #3 (extending the FAA AST
learning period) and #5 (full funding for NASA Commercial Crew) are both
extremely urgent this year, and both doable within this community's resources.
Their items #1 (establish
settlement as NASA's official mission), #2 (an as-yet loosely defined government
Cheap Access incentive prize), and #4 (a seamless long-term transition from ISS
to commercial stations) we see as excellent priorities for the longer term, but
none seems to us vitally necessary this year, while two of the three don't seem
to us achievable this year at any plausible level of effort. (Unless there's also funding in place for a
major behind-the-scenes lobbying push on all points? Even then, we wouldn't bet on getting all of
these.) We'd recommend giving these
secondary priority in individual lobbying meetings - mentioning them, beginning
the long-term education process, but saving the major push for full-funding
Commercial Crew followed closely by extending the CSLAA learning period.
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Space Access '15 Conference April 30 -
May 2, 2015
Conference Location
SA'15, Space Access Society's
next annual conference on the business, technology, and politics of radically
cheaper access to space, will be at the Radisson Hotel Phoenix North, 10220 N
Metro Parkway E in Phoenix Arizona, with Space Access conference room rates of
$99 a night plus tax, rate includes a 25% discount on the hotel full-breakfast
buffet. Click on this
link to reserve your room at our rate, or call the Radisson at 602 997-5900
and ask for the "Space Access Conference" rate (good for up to three
days before and after our dates.)
(Attendees at SA'13 may
recognize the address - yes, this is the same location, extensively renovated
under a new owner, with a wide variety of restaurants and shopping a short walk
away.)
Conference Agenda, Schedule
Our upcoming conference will
feature a cross-section of the growing cheap access community, talking about
what's going on now and what we should be doing next, in a fast-paced intensive
informal atmosphere. For the latest on
the confirmed presentations list, see SA'15 Info. We'll be starting programming at 2 pm
Thursday April 30th, running (with breaks) till ~10 pm, Friday May 1st 9 am
till ~10 pm, then Saturday May 2nd 9 am till ~6 pm, with hanging out, talking
and partying to follow till late. Our
overall schedule will include roughly twenty-one hours of programming on the
latest and most interesting developments in this fast-moving field.
One agenda item in particular
we'd like to mention here: We'll be running a New Models For Off-Planet Settlement discussion session. We already believe settlement is essential; we
want to talk about the most practical way to make it happen as soon as
possible. The purely public model has
failed, between extremely high public-agency costs and at-best flat long-term
public space budgets. One purely private
model, bootstrapping a space media project by the multiple orders of magnitude
needed to finance a settlement, may once again be falling short. What sort of public/private or alternative
pure-private model might actually produce sustainable off-planet settlement? "COTS 2", building on the original
COTS (Commercial Cargo) low-cost commercial system development model to
affordably produce the needed transportation, habitation, and other systems,
has been suggested and sounds to us viable - but is there a better model out
there? If not, what will be involved in
implementing "COTS 2"? Come
join us and help us start sorting all this out.
Conference Registration
SA'15 registration
is $120 in advance, $140 at the door, student rate $40 in advance and $50 at
the door. (The single-day rate will be
$60, $20 student, available at the door only.)
You can register in advance by mailing a check, along with your name,
email, and desired organization name (if any) for your badge to Space Access
'15, PO Box 16034, Phoenix AZ 85011, or register online
via credit card or Paypal.
Supporting The Conference
As for SA'15 conference fundraising,
as of March 14th we've reached $7250 of the ten thousand we need to make this
conference sustainable. Yes, we're doing the conference now regardless
of whether we reach our goal.
(Commitments we've made to speakers and attendees entirely aside, hotel
contract cancellation penalties are downright fierce.) One place raising the last part of our goal
makes a difference is in the degree of conference followup we can do afterward. EG, finally after all these years getting set
up to start processing and posting conference videos online.
If you believe that Space
Access conferences are useful to this community, and that keeping conference
prices as low as possible for all of us who are still students, hungry
amateurs, or tight-budget startup pros is still the way to go, help,
please. Donate online,
or send a donation of whatever size - ten, a hundred, a thousand, it all helps
- via check to: Space Access Society, PO Box 16034, Phoenix AZ 85011.
(Note that this is NOT
tax-deductible, as we are not a 501c-anything.
It is however entirely confidential, as we have never and will never
share or disclose in any way our supporters' names. Our ongoing gratitude goes out to all who've
supported us over the years and who continue to help.)
Keep an eye on SA'15 Info for
additional details on the conference agenda as more invited speakers are
confirmed.
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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 this Space Access Update as the source and include a pointer to our
website.
__________________________________________
Space Access Society
space.access@mindspring.com
"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein