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NASA OIG Delivers Blunt Reality Check On NASA's Faith-Based ISS Plans

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 16, 2018
Filed under ,
NASA OIG Delivers Blunt Reality Check On NASA's Faith-Based ISS Plans

Examining the Future of the International Space Station: Administration Perspectives, Archived webcast
Statement by William Gerstenmaier – Hearing Examining the Future of the International Space Station: Administration Perspectives, NASA
Examining The Future of the International Space Station, Statement of NASA IG Paul Martin, NASA OIG
“While all of these actions are positive steps, NASA’s current plan to privatize the ISS remains a controversial and highly debatable proposition, particularly with regard to the feasibility of fostering increased commercial activity in low Earth orbit. Specifically, it is questionable whether a sufficient business case exists under which private companies can create a self-sustaining and profit-making business independent of significant Government funding. In particular, it is unlikely that a private entity or entities would assume the Station’s annual operating costs, currently projected at $1.2 billion in 2024. Such a business case requires robust demand for commercial market activities such as space tourism, satellite servicing, manufacturing of goods, and research and development, all of which have yet to materialize.
Candidly, the scant commercial interest shown in the Station over its nearly 20 years of operation gives us pause about the Agency’s current plan. This concern is illustrated by NASA’s limited success in stimulating non-NASA activity aboard the Station through the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, Inc. (CASIS). Established in 2011 to facilitate use of the ISS by commercial companies, academia, and other Government and non-Government actors for their research or commercial purposes, CASIS’s efforts have fallen short of expectations. Apart from these privatization challenges, the amount of cost savings NASA may realize through commercialization of the ISS may be less than expected given that significant expenditures – particularly in crew and cargo transportation and civil servant costs – will likely continue even if many low Earth orbit activities transition to a privatized ISS or another commercial platform.”
“Even if the Agency ends direct funding of the ISS in 2025 as envisioned in the President’s FY 2019 budget request, it is unlikely that the bulk of the funding currently devoted to the ISS Program could be immediately diverted to these and other exploration activities. Even with termination of most Station activities, NASA expects to retain a presence in low Earth orbit and therefore would need to fund related crew and cargo transportation costs. Furthermore, significant funding would be required to maintain offices and infrastructure currently funded by the ISS Program such as the Mission Operations office, which is expected to be needed by future exploration programs.”
“In January 2017, NASA completed a draft plan to address various deorbit scenarios; however, the plan has not been finalized and is pending review by the Russia Space Agency. And, while NASA engineers continue to work on the technical details of deorbit scenarios, the Agency presently does not have the capability to ensure a controlled deorbit of the ISS in the event of an emergency.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

22 responses to “NASA OIG Delivers Blunt Reality Check On NASA's Faith-Based ISS Plans”

  1. Bob Mahoney says:
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    And that’s just the thing…when it became a ‘base camp’ instead of an actual way-station.

    Same goes for a cislunar facility. As soon as it becomes a presumably self-justifying entity outside the context of a larger infrastructure or strategy, it begins to fail of its promise as it becomes another techno-governmental appendage that simply ‘just is’ instead of being something ‘just for’.

    Happened to shuttle, happened to ISS…and it will likely happen to Gateway unless the bureaucrats stop trying to stuff it with buckets of extraneous duties & ‘possibilities’ instead of sticking to it’s original purpose: a transportation gateway-station testing ground aimed at supporting the establishment of a sustainable cis-lunar & beyond transportation infrastructure/architecture.

    Why don’t they ever read their own history books?

  2. mmealling says:
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    Look at the fact that all of the companies interested in commercial applications in LEO assume having their own free flying station and you realize that the problem isn’t the lack of customers but in the price of the Station and the overhead of CASIS.

    • Brian_M2525 says:
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      I don’t know about all the companies owning their own stations, but as long as the NASA bureaucracy is as cumbersome and expensive to deal with (both time añd money) any prospective users will go to someone, anyone else. We already see that with nanoracks and the internationals. Everyone avoids dealing with NASA. Few see any value added.

  3. Tally-ho says:
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    “…significant expenditures – particularly in crew and cargo transportation and civil servant costs – will likely continue even if many low Earth orbit activities transition to a privatized ISS or another commercial platform.” I presume this is because we can’t reduce civil servant headcount. How about a RIF?

  4. Vladislaw says:
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    “Candidly, the scant commercial interest shown in the Station over its nearly 20 years of operation gives us pause about the Agency’s current plan. “

    It wasn’t about commercial at that time. Heck look how congress and NASA responded when Dennis Tito wanted to go there..

    “illustrated by NASA’s limited success in stimulating non-NASA activity aboard the Station through the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, Inc. (CASIS). Established in 2011 to facilitate use of the ISS by commercial companies, academia, and other Government and non-Government actors for their research or commercial purposes, CASIS’s efforts have fallen short of expectations.”

    And we all know why .. Keith has been beating that drum for years..

    Put it up for auction.. the winner has to deorbit in X years… We will shortly know the market value of it.. a billionaire snaps it up .. or not.

    • mmealling says:
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      its not the price that kills the deal. Its the future operational costs to keep it running.

  5. Nick K says:
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    For nearly the last 20 years NASA has tried a new way of doing business and it has failed. Despite the failures showing up years ago, they have taken no corrective actions at all. Something needs to change.

    NASA human space flight science used to have a separate budget. The Station Program took control of the budget and put it into their prime contractor ostensibly for hardware. They needed to pay for a Lab, 2 Nodes, a Cupola, a Logistics Module. Somehow NASA bartered to get all of these ‘for free’ from ESA, and yet the cost still went to NASA’s contractor for hardware they were no longer procuring and no money went to science.

    Before Station, NASA poured a lot of money, through grants, into industry and academia. NASA worked out efficient ways to get payloads on board Shuttle, Spacehab, Mir. Before Shuttle, NASA put a lot of money into science on Skylab, and before that into science on Apollo.

    NASA decided they wanted to get out of the science in spaceflight business. NASA did an inadequate job of finding a mechanism for integration or for sponsorship of science. Supposedly that was what ISS was for. Why did NASA terminate the effort just as the ISS was getting up and operating?

    NASA really needs to decide on its priorities. NASA is not developing new technology. NASA has not developed more cost effective methods of reaching space. NASA is talking about flying in deep space with archaic unaffordable throwbacks to Apollo – no one knows what that is about. Its not technology, its not exploration, its not science, they are going to put 4 astronauts out in the middle of nowhere for no particular reason, and that doesn’t happen for another decade and probably longer.

    We are waiting for the new Administrator to start making some changes.Or we can continue like we’ve been doing the last 10 years.

  6. buzzlighting says:
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    Since 2011 CASIS has total monopoly on ISS for too long and they failed to fully utilize ISS for commercial use. So why not NASA follow CRS method and Put RIF bid to other Space Companies do better job promoting ISS commercial uses. NASA get better deal from other Space Companies pay a lot less and get 100% commercial use of ISS.

  7. Michael Spencer says:
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    I suppose that the first runs at Everest involved, among other tasks, analyses of possible base and intermediate camp locations.

    It’s just possible that LEO (and at a difficult orbit) means that ISS is in the wrong place.

    • Bob Mahoney says:
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      ISS is in the wrong orbit for various applications, but it is in the right orbit for other applications/constraints. Like any engineering undertaking, an orbit is designed to satisfy requirements within constraints.

      Keep in mind that with an electrodynamic tether and/or electrodynamic thrusters ISS could slowly change its orbit if larger programmatic requirements merited such a change.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Orbit change: is that actually the case? Many have posted here that the torsional and other stresses on ISS preclude such a maneuver?

        • fcrary says:
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          I’m not sure about plane and inclination changes, but an electrodynamic tether is a low acceleration system and shouldn’t put stress on a large structure like ISS. You just need to deploy a cable a few dozen kilometers long and run an electric current through it. “Just” meaning no one has ever made this work, and people have tried… But in theory it should work. In fact, you could even generate power while lowering the orbit (raising the orbit takes power.)

        • Bob Mahoney says:
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          Technologically possible, yes. Programmatically? Perhaps too far a reach.

          As frc describes it would involve low thrust, but over sufficient time the orbit could be altered in both size and inclination. TSS on shuttle demonstrated the basic electrodynamic technology (though things didn’t quite go completely according to plan. 🙁 ) Folks have been working on better designs and systems since, learning from the experiences.

          The biggest bugaboo for the ISS orbit is its 51.5 deg inclination which accommodates the Russian launch constraints but makes regular lunar trips more difficult/expensive. Lunar & solar system trajectories prefer a lower equatorial inclination since it more closely aligns the given orbit with the plane of the ecliptic where most of the long-distance action is. [KSC latitudinally was actually positioned at the top of the ‘preferred’ lunar range of +/- 28.5 deg latitude—23.5 (Earth’s rotation axis obliquity) + 5 deg (Lunar ecliptic inclination*) = 28.5 deg latitude KSC.]

          *(Remember, the Moon’s orbit is inclined 5 deg wrt the ecliptic plane, not inclined relative to the Earth’s equator—another piece of data confirming that the Earth & Moon are really a double planet. But I digress.)

          Each ONE degree of orbital plane change down in ISS-typical-altitude orbits costs substantial delta V (~400-500 ft/sec; shuttle carried ~1000 ft/sec of OMS orbital delta V on each flight, and had to use some of that getting up and getting down). This might be what you were thinking of. There are some tricks available to make this more efficient (e.g., doing planar changes at the apogee of an elliptical orbit), but there’s no mistaking that turning a 5 mile/second velocity in the sky ‘sideways’ takes a bit of energy…

          BUT, low thrust over lots of time can chip away at the required high delta V. A little each orbit (16 revs/day) over weeks & weeks can add up.

  8. Richard Malcolm says:
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    The ISS is simply too expensive to operate for anyone but a sovereign operator (what a surprise – NASA built it).

    So any plan to commercialize it is not likely to work on any terms that will actually help NASA.

    So if NASA (Congress) wants some LEO HSF presence, it will have to use some other mechanism after ISS is no longer tenable. Perhaps just figure out if there’s a way to put up a Bigelow station with NASA as anchor tenant but with annual operational cost under $1 billion.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Do we really know just how expensive ISS is to operate?

      In the case of building and flying rockets, until lately we had only the NASA model (domestically, at least). Then a couple of private companies looked at the requirements; shaking things up they found a much cheaper way to do the same thing- build and operate rockets.

      Isn’t this comparison the true legacy of SX and others? I mean in the sense that everything NASA does now will be re-examined for a similarly dramatic cost reduction. This would apply to the operation of ISS as well.

      • Richard Malcolm says:
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        Well, NASA spends about $3 to $ billion per year to operate ISS.

        Could it be done more cheaply? Most likely.

        Could it be done cheaply enough that a company could build a business case on it? So far, it doesn’t look like anyone has come up with an affirmative answer on that.

        SpaceX at least was able to design its hardware from ground up to be operated at a profit. Anyone who takes over ISS takes it over as-is.

        Which is why I think the real answer is going to have to be a new commercial station, designed to be far cheaper to operate.

      • mmealling says:
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        Between $3 and $4 billion a year based on the Boeing contract.

        • fcrary says:
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          That answers the question while missing the point. That’s the current cost, given operations according to the currently accepted practices. In a very different, but still related field (launch vehicles) SpaceX has demonstrated order of magnitude cost reductions. By changing those accepted practices and doing things differently. I guess the real question should have been, “How much could it cost to operate ISS?”

      • fcrary says:
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        Possibly, and that’s at the core of my disagreement with a recent paper by McNutt and Delamere. The estimated the cost of a human Mars mission based on a fairly good estimate of the mass involved, assumed on-orbit assembly in LEO (not a terrible assumption) and that the cost of building it could be estimated from the mass of ISS and the cost per kilo of building ISS. I disagree with that final assumption, because it is based on things being done the same way NASA built ISS. Given what SpaceX has proven about rocket development, cost estimates based on the NASA approach are suspect.

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          “Given what SpaceX has proven about rocket development, cost estimates based on the NASA approach are suspect.”

          That’s my central point: EVERYthing NASA does is now suspect, fairly or not. In truth, proven correct is the politically right wing mantra that government always mucks up the price.

          I’m not sure, though, where to assign the medal. SX has also shown that what we once thought was a solved problem – assembling rockets – isn’t.

          And I should add that BO is hardly seeing the same gargantuan cost reductions, having spent about $4B so far developing whatever it is that they are developing (nothing orbital, it appears).

          That $4B figure comes from Davenport’s “The Space Barons.”

  9. Michael Spencer says:
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    A thoughtful piece worth reading:

    http://www.thespacereview.c