Bolden Comments on Calls for Crew Downselect
Comments by Charles Bolden at the COMSTAC Advisory Committee Public Meeting
“The key to achieving our goal of facilitating a strong commercial space industry is adequate funding and good old-fashioned American competition. We are working hard to maintain both. NASA’s 2013 request for commercial crew development is $830 million. Despite a bi-partisan agreement to ensure American astronauts are traveling into space on U.S. built spacecraft as soon as possible, some want to short-change this job-creating initiative and limit competition in the commercial space arena.”
Mr. Bolden said
“SLS Advanced Booster risk-reduction effort proposals are in. We’ll award a demonstration study contract this summer that will lead us ultimately to a decision on the boosters.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if this lead to SLS becoming a 7 core booster with 6 liquids/2 falcon heavy strap-on’s making it possible for SLS to be the 3 stage to orbit tinker described in an earlier thread. So the center core could be used as the BEO stage or turned into fuel depots like the wasted shuttle tanks could have been.
Merlin2 could get some juice. From SLS money.
How could the contracting method on SLS and Orion be changed to cots to force SLS and Orion to be much much cheaper, cushy jobs be dammed????
“How could the contracting method on SLS and Orion be changed to cots to
force SLS and Orion to be much much cheaper, cushy jobs be dammed????”
That’s about as likely as a Gingrich presidency at this point.
SLS and Orion are not going to be changed to a COTS-style procurement regimen. They are going to waste huge amounts of money for several years, then be cancelled. With luck, by then CCDev will have somehow gotten enough money to get one or two programs into production use ferrying astronauts to and from the ISS and then there’s a decent chance that the follow-on to the cancelled SLS and Orion will use a COTS-style acquisition strategy. That’s the best case that is at least not too unlikely.
I already knew your answer but still felt the question should be asked thanks for explanation.
I cannot remember the proper legal term for it but ordinary contracts can have stage payments. Although 4 stages a year is a lot unless planned.
Andrew,
I’m not familiar with “stage” payments, but aerospace contracts that aren’t “cost plus” generally use (in my experience) “progress” payments, whereby payments are tied directly to the demonstrated completion of specific program milestones. Generally, a milestone completion also includes a review meeting, such as Preliminary Design Review which involves the customer.
Steve
Purely IMHO, I’d like to see a downselect only after two vehicles have reached flight-test status. That way, NASA doesn’t have to get potentially stuck with a faster-to-flight but poorer-quality choice.
Bolden tried to make a simple point, that it is obviously better to fund more than one commercial provider. That creates competition and provides a backup. This logic should be obvious to Republicans. Yet they ignored him. Another sign of the problems NASA faces due to micromanagement by members of Congress who are shortsighted and interested only in getting money from lobbyists. NASA would be better off in a cabinet-level department, as JAXA is in Japan, i.e. a Department of Science and Technology.
The problem is that there is not enough manned spaceflight traffic to the ISS from the US to sustain more than one or two manned spaceflight companies.
Private space stations, not a government space station, is the key to making multiple manned spaceflight companies economically sustainable.
Marcel F. Williams
Is Bigelow going to get paying customers or not. Or does it all depend on spacexs flyback booster?
I think it’s funny that bolden says we are going to mars by 2030 as if we will do it in SLS when Im sure he knows if we go at all it will be on something more like A merlin2 vehicle.