Certifying Commercial Crew Transportation Systems
NASA Requests Proposals for Initial Contracts to Certifying Commercial Crew Transportation Systems
“NASA on Wednesday released a request for proposals for the first of two contract phases to certify commercially developed space systems in support of crewed missions to the International Space Station. Through these certification products contracts, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP) will ensure commercial missions are held to the agency’s safety requirements and standards for human space transportation system missions to the space station.”
Is this a good thing or is this over kill that slows commercial to much so that public space SLS can compete.
Whats real? Whats BS?
I never know lolol
Doesn’t this 2 phase approach make it impossible to fly to a Bigelow hab sooner than ISS or just go do commercial test flights. Like maybe spinning two dragons to have moon or Mars gravity Maybe 🙂
Why can’t I fly in an FAA approved spaceship if I want too?
As far as I know NASA certification standards for Commercial Crew apply only to commercial launch providers carrying NASA personnel under contract to the US government. Commercial passengers paying their own way would presumably be subject only to FAA regulations. In practical terms SpaceX and Boeing will want to be certified, of course, since NASA is a major customer.
I suspect that ATS (Air Traffic Service) for the countries under the flight path, or at least the launch path, would have to give approval as well, although last I heard, this was still being discussed.
Steve
Every country that has ever had the capability to put anything in orbit has taken the position that it doesn’t have to ask permission of any country the satellite passes over, whether it’s during launch, orbit, or re-entry; and whether the object has people aboard or not. I don’t see any reason it should be different for commercial providers. Anyway, all the proposed US-based commercial launch systems would be over US territory and/or international waters until they’re out of the atmosphere anyway. I seriously doubt anyone will be asking for approval from any non-US ATS for any of these US-based commercial launch systems.
Chris,
I agree with what you’ve said, but I see things that are changing. The existing Outer Space Treaty makes the government of the country doing a launch liable for any damages, etc. This was reasonable back in the 60’s when almost all launches were for government programs. We now have many non-government launches, and we have the ISS, and we have talk of tourism, and we will shortly have a situation where whole launches are bought as a package, off the shelf. We also have an ever increasing number of countries and companies with the ability to launch stuff into space, not just two. And we have a horrible and still growing space debris problem. And we are launching more massive, more expensive payloads than ever. And, an, and…
Just because things have been done (or not done) a certain way in the past does not mean they will continue to be done that in the future. Things change. At some point, for better or for worse, space flight is going to have to take on some of the characteristics of air flight, and Air Traffic Control (redefined) is certainly going to be an obvious one, and ATC, so far, comes under the ATS umbrella in the US.
This is going to be an area requiring new and/or revised international treaties. Discussing and implementing something like a treaty always seems to require some sort of “event” to bring parties to the table. In this case, the transition to/addition of a redefined “commercial space” entity seems to me to be the only event for this to hinge on that’s likely to come along quite for a while. The next event probably won’t be until space tourism actually becomes a reality, by which time it will be far too late to look at revising space treaties and legislation because too many companies in too many countries will already have made huge investments based on “the old ways,” and the longer we wait for change, the more it’s going to cost everybody. Everything considered, I think right now, before “new space” takes off is the logical and practical time to be formulating the new space regulatory requirements, because they will have to change, and it will be an international undertaking, just like ATC, which raises the question — what will be the international language of space travel (it’s English for ATC, but English-speaking countries are no longer dominating space launch/travel). Just my thoughts on the matter.
Steve
It will be interesting to see if international spaceflight utilizes the metric system, as this is standard in almost all countries.
On the liability issue, a government subjected to liability action would always have the option of negotiating a settlement and either accepting the loss itself or pursuing recovery from the corporate owner. The potential damages don’t appear significantly different than they are for air travel.
ASAIK the only major settlement for spacecraft damages was $3M (Canadian) paid by the USSR to Canada for damages from the crash of the Kosmos 954 with its nuclear reactor in 1977. In November 30, 1960 parts of a Thor booster (the predecessor of the Delta) from a failed Transit comsat launch impacted in Cuba, killing a cow and precipitating diplomatic protests but apparently no demands for compensation. And of course, Skylab impacted in Australia, where it was viewed as a rather exciting event. Kazakhs living downrange of Baikonur have protested for many years, so far without much success, the periodic impact of booster stages, some containing toxic hypergols, in and near their communities.
At present I would conclude that the threat of third-party litigation from spacecraft-induced damage does not appear overwhelming.
Huh? Not true. US launch vehicles do not enter any other country’s airspace at any point in their trajectory. And wrong, English will be the language of choice since it is a common denominator. BTW what was done in the past is applicable when it comes to laws.
James,
My point was that things change, are changing, will continue to change. Regulatory and treaty processes are going to have to change with them. And you seem to be overlooking the point that this is an international matter, not US only. Whether anybody’s LVs pass over another country now does not determine what may happen in the future. And payloads certainly pass over other countries, and in the future more and more of those payloads are going to include people. Finally, just because the US would prefer English doesn’t mean that t he whole world will. The US is in the minority in this matter.
Steve
Public space compete? all the current commercial concepts including space x cant go anywhere beyond LEO
SLS opens the door to deep space exploration
They better hurry and get cheap reallll fast or the little guys will kick their ___ lol we well see lol
Parallel Lines
ADD
found this today
Sure would be cool to learn to fly in BEO on the cheap
http://thespacereview.com/a…
I expect the commercial crew systems certified by NASA will be much safer than anything NASA would ever do for itself. NASA will be less likely to gloss over major safety issues on someone else’s vehicle like they did their own (i.e., o-ring blow-by and TPS impacts). Once NASA establishes this certification criteria and gets a spacecraft or two through the process, we won’t be needed anymore and NASA HSF can fade away quietly. Or we could continue on and have an SLS/MPCV flying in another 15 to 20 years. SpaceX will be on the Moon by then.
Or HSF sends its astronauts to the Moon
and Mars by first buy tickets to the EML-1 spacestation. The
astronauts then change to the transfer vehicle and lander.
HSF had better get on with building the
NASA Mars and NEO transfer vehicles.
Couldn’t NASA use the extra lift from the new bigger falcon V 1.1 to use dragon trunks to lift modules for transfer vehicles soon! Sure would be cool if NASA were building transfer vehicles modules that could be hauled up by cheaper NEW commerical space, instead of building Orion and SLS. Hell we could be on the moon and mars in no time if they did something like that with all that good NASA R and D
I just don’t understand rebuilding an old fashion throw away Heavy lifter again. When we should be building modular space ships. It just seems SILLY at this point.
Transfer vehicles are big so you would need a lot of lunches to assemble one in space using Falcon 9s. For instance the living area could be a 20 tonne Bigelow BA 330 module. The storage areas, engines and fuel tanks would be on top of that.
They do lots of Cargo launches to ISS
You could also build Dragons that are never intended to return to Earth OR launch manned crews. You could lose: the heatshield, LAS, Outer door (keep the docking port) and parachutes. With the life support systems in every module, you could dock 5 or 6 of them to a ring and have a habitat for a dozen astronauts with room to spare, comfortable personal space, and redundant life support.
If any module had the outer door, it would be a nice big airlock.
Ooooh, and you could spin the whole ring while the crew is sleeping for artificial gravity – part-time
So obvious and simple you should be ashamed lolol
I don’t understand why we DON”T do such simple, easy SMART cheap stuff
🙂
I’m not sure I would expect commercial crew spacecraft to necessarily be any safer or worse than NASA spacecraft. Certification is only part of the process. Also required is continuing quality control.
An present day example would be commercial airlines. The aircraft are certified before allowed to carry passengers, but the airlines operate the aircraft afterwards and try to balance safety against cost. If commercial space were to be competitive, there would be pressure on the companies to reduce cost and potentially safety.
I thought the mantra was that the private sector always does a better job than the government.
Some might spout that mantra, but I think a more relevant mantra might be “horses for courses”.
I expect the commercial crew systems being developed to be safer than past manned craft, but that’s not necessarily a high bar, and it doesn’t mean NASA wouldn’t make similar safety improvements now.
We’re talking about a fresh look at spacecraft safety and design, and they’re building systems that may not have been possible last time a manned craft was designed (which was in the 70’s). The Shuttle, after all, was a safety regression from Apollo, featuring exactly no chance of launch escape. Now we’re seeing integrated LAS systems that don’t have to be jettisoned and work all the way to orbit.
However, it’s not a safe assumption that these commercial crew launch services will automatically render NASA HSF obsolete, because as commercial entities they can’t undertake endeavours that don’t make them money (Unless that’s what their board & shareholders choose to do). NASA, on the other hand, is not a for-profit venture, it’s a research institution (or at ieast that’s the theory). As such, it’s the only entity suited to undertake pure exploration & research. That doesn’t mean they won’t still contract with commercial entities to build beyond-LEO craft (Just as they did with Apollo and the Shuttle). But I doubt it’ll happen in the same Space Act kind of atmosphere until there’s a business case for beyond-LEO.
You’re going back over 25 years to bring up o-ring blow by. Why don’t you include Apollo 1? Even Columbia is now approaching ten years.
After Challenger there were safety improvements, and after Columbia there were considerable safety improvements. I think NASA reflects the rest of the country in this respect, in this same time period there has been increased awareness of safety by government and individuals. I’ve made this point before that when the Shuttle was designed, the NHTSA wasn’t even crash testing new cars yet, that didn’t start until 1978. Our culture at the time was much more fatalistic when it came to accidents and rebelled against restrictions of any type. That’s why they had to pass laws to force people to wear seatbelts and motorcycle helmets.
Where I work we have now to take mandatory safety courses once a month, and I work in an office! That only started a few years ago.
Spacecraft designed today are reflecting not just advances in safety technology, but also advances in our cultural attitudes towards safety.
Challenger and Columbia were the result of gross mis-management. In both cases, the system showed obvious signs of impending disaster. In both cases, Engineering raised the issue and was squashed by program management. The lesson from Challenger didn’t last two decades and Columbia was a repeat of the same failed management decisions to NOT stop flying and fix a known issue with catastrophic consequences. It’s less about the safety of the design, we strive for that. What we don’t strive for is excellence in program management. My comment was expressing the opinion that NASA management is more strick in its oversight of contractors than of itself.
Your comments are more clear now. However I’m still not sure that Challenger and Columbia help make your point. Of course they should have not launched on that cold morning in 1986 despite engineers warnings. In fact even before Challenger they should have shut down the Shuttle program for two years to redesign the SRB joint. And long before 2003 they should have realized that they would never be able to completely eliminate foam liberation, and so should have either shut down the program for good or else institute the policy that was later instituted after Columbia that only allowed flights to a space station.
However back to my point, these measures would have been unusual for just about any organization, either government or private. Just look at the FAA and airlines and how often they have flown known issues, instead of grounding the airplane type until the problem is fixed. The 737 uncommanded roll problem threatened millions of people during the decade that it took investigators to finally locate the problem, but the 737 was never grounded during that period, not even after the second incident which killed 132 people, or the third incident which fortunately was not fatal although it nearly was. Or endless examples in other types of transportation, as well as manufacturing. Was NASA really worse than just about any other large organization in the United States?
I am not justifying bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior, I am just saying that this problem is within our society and is bigger than just NASA. Although hopefully we are seeing signs in the past few years that proactive safety measures, as opposed to reactive safety measures, are starting to become more common than they were in the past. In fact the last few years of the Shuttle program seemed to be run extremely tight. I remember many launch delays caused by Shuttle managers wanting to fully understand a problem or anomaly that had an extremely low probability of causing an actual problem.
None of this negates your point about NASA being stricter with contractors than with itself, but I think you will need more current examples to convince people of this, or to assert that ten years after Columbia NASA would still fly an unsafe vehicle in spite of warnings from engineers.
Steve,
I agree with your assessment, but I would suggest that, then and now, a lot of times decisions were/are made, at least partially, on the basis of public visibility. If nobody but a handful of company people knew about a problem (as in the earlier stages of the 737 case), managers everywhere were/are probably less likely to be conservative, because any measures taken inevitably cost money for the company, which could lose you your job. I’d file that under sad but true.
Steve
The companies should supply this information for free.Sounds like Mango just wants to feed them some more money.Wasn’t Boeing stopped from bidding on government work for awhile?Are they still on probation?They sue all the time.Why do we still do business with them?
I’ve reread this twice and still not sure what these contracts are for.
Are they to write the certification requirements? I thought NASA would do this?
Or are they to oversee the 3 CiCAP awards and make sure that those contractors adhere to NASAs certification requirements?
Or are they just to funnel additional money to the 3 CiCAP contractors? I’m basing this on the statement “During the first phase, companies will provide data related to the development of their Crew Transportation System (CTS) design…”
Doug,
I half suspect that what NASA wants these submissions for is to give them a check-list of things to cover, which NASA will then use as a basis for writing the specs themselves. It is always easier to critique than to create, so by acquiring something to critique first, NASA can then create use these submissions and their own critique of them as the “data” from which to draw their spec contents. I know this sounds silly, but it actually very often yields better results than simply starting from scratch, doing it on their own. I have no evidence that this is what’s happening; I simply point it out as a possibility.
Steve
Does the probable duration of this effort seem unusually long to anyone else?
While non-NASA astronauts could probably fly before this certification is complete, it looks like flights by NASA personnel to destinations like the ISS could be a long time coming.
It sure seems long to me. The reason I was asking my questions
I think it’s already assumed that as technology advances safety measures for NASA should also move forward. Since it is important to have a high standard safety outer space transportation for humans.
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