NASA's Plan For Commercializing Low Earth Orbit Is Still A Mystery
Keith’s note: The National Academy of Sciences held a “Full-Day Mini Symposium: NASA Intentions for Commercial LEO” on Wednesday. Below are some Tweets regarding the opening session with Sam Scimemi. Among other things we learned that the 2024 ISS retirement date for NASA is, well, not a retirement date after all. Something different will happen. What? No one knows. P.S. sorry for the typos: the tweets were done rapid fire in real time.
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So, from these tweets it sounds like NASA is intent on turning over operation of the ISS, and most costs associated with its operation to a “commercial” entity, perhaps like CASIS.
We had previously heard that NASA (or at least Gerstenmaier) is intent on abandoning LEO because NASA is going to busy with humans exploring Mars. This sounds like a plan.
It doesn’t sound like a realistic plan.
NASA is the only US organization funding operation of ISS. Thirty years ago NASA had a similar idea of turning over operation of Shuttle to a commercial entity. They started it with the STSOC contract. NASA Engineering abandoned systems management and development and that proved to be a major mistake. USA, Inc was created and proved to be very profitable for all of the USA managers and shareholders. But all the money came from NASA. JSC refused to relinquish operations. Costs to operate Shuttle increased with both NASA and USA providing staff to work ‘redundantly’. Why would turning ISS over to some commercial entity be different?
With minor exceptions, NASA seems to be paying about 99.9% of the US costs associated with doing anything on ISS. One or two entities, like Nanoracks, seem to be making a profit, but those profits do not seem to make their way to NASA for operation of ISS. After 5 years of CASIS, and 10 years of the ISS National Lab, few users, and apparently none who pay their own way, have surfaced. One of the leading problems seems to be that there is no capacity, mainly restricted by crew time, to be able to actually use humans to do anything on ISS. Why, if after ten years, no paying customers have surfaced, do we think that in the next 8 years something will change? It seems unrealistic. Is NASA changing its stratregy? Have new personnel been assigned? Have we seen any signs of it?
Since NASA intends to no longer be in the ISS business after 2024, I wonder what NASA will be doing? Getting ready to fly that next Orion capsule around the moon in 2028? Getting ready for that first Mars mission in 2045?
I don’t think anyone at NASA has given this any serious thought.
When commercial crew starts it will add a seventh person and productivity should increase for science…
A small side note… you should replace some refrences to NASA with the words ‘members of congress’ or just congress.
We hope productivity will increase.
In 8 years, if NASA has pulled out, who will pay for the commercial crew flights?
I’m not sure why ‘NASA’ should be replaced by ‘Congress’. Congress authorizes funds. Yes, some members of Congress take a particular interest, such as in the establishment of the National Lab (Kay Bailey Hutchinson and .Bill Nelson)-it was actually an idea that was initiated by NASA and Congress was fully supportive. But ultimately it comes back to the Administration to implement and in year 10 of National Lab it doesn’t seem like there is a lot of progress,
The Administration decides policy and strategy. NASA, is a part of the Administration and is also responsible for implementation. These tweets show that there is some idea being developed in the NASA Administration but can’t quite tell what the idea really is.
NASA, the Administration, OMB and Congress work to a 6 year (budget) planning process. So right now they are up through 2022. But obviously they have something in mind for a couple years later.
They’d best be cautious, since often times NASA’s chosen direction becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. An example was the shut down of Shuttle. There were lots of options to look at enhancing safety, reducing operations costs, reducing flight rates, etc. If you recall the NASA Administrator said it had all been a mistake and we would simply walk away-not to worry since Orion would be flying by 2011 (in 2011 it was 2014).
Because NASA is not an independent orgranization that can just make decisions on it’s own. It gets marching orders from the people with the checkbook.
Vladislaw-You are right. But in the case of commercialization in LEO, National Lab, support by multiple Presidents and Congresses, and funding, ISS got everything they needed. NASA was actively spending the money; they had hundreds of people in Houston, Huntsville, Florida, and DC, civil servants and contractors, and they had a good head start by prior programs; they had relationships with other organizations, NIH DOE, and others. The ISS management, including several people now gone and some people still in place, decided to terminate many of the PI, researcher, and commercial prospects that were in place from prior programs. They never organized their payloads and utilization organizations to streamline the integration processes. They essentially blew off utilization as an unimportant and insignificant part of the job. Some of the managers will tell you they were too focused on assembly, but that is a poor excuse since they knew all along what was coming and they had hundreds of people ready to support. The only thing required was leadership. Only in the last couple of years have they begun a process to try and refocus on utilization, commercial and otherwise.
The only reason I mentioned congress is because there are several members that always seem to, in the end, try and road block commercial efforts to protect the pork in their districts.
Yeah, it’s hard to imagine a commercial entity even being capable of taking over operation of something as complicated as the ISS. If there is going to be a commercially operated space station, I think it would have to be commercially designed and built as well (E.g. Bigelow).
Not quite – on NASA’s intent to shift ISS over to some commercial paradigm some day. Rather, NASA’s intent at the Gerst level is to be able to just SAY LEO and ISS-like operations, even things Lunar, will be commercial, some day, ONLY so as make people shut up. Vague statement = plan. If you ask for more you must be against NASA or just ignorant.
There are a few different warring factions inside NASA today. There’s the ISS crowd, wanting to see that investment mature, grow and get used successfully. There’s the Mars crowd that says about ISS what was said about Shuttle – that LEO stuff is just going around in circles. Albeit, the Mars crowd also likes blank checks, a cost-plus world, endless time to do things that won’t ever add up, and saying “space is hard” and leave me alone. Then there’s the commercial crowd, saying “see what we have been able to do, for so much less than any other approach would have. Lets do more like that”. They face off with people saying they want to build and own their own stuff, that thinking about costs are just so … beneath them
Next year will be interesting times.
It’s all about funding in the end.
Lack of a plan for what comes after ISS, or NASA’s role in furthering LEO and non-government commercial capabilities, or government “anchor tenancy” of commercial (non-government property) stations, all has the advantage of needing zero money. No plan. No need to plan funds. Vague phrases are free. Firm plans cost money.
Suppose we wanted to see private station capabilities by the late 2020’s. Capabilities NASA would use a portion of. Well guess what, we better start some funding now as well as work on what a budget profile in the 2020’s might look like. But wait, that would divert some funding from Mars – sure funding we don’t have anyway – but rather “dibs” on future funding. And we can’t have that either.