NASA Announces A Space Station Pricing Plan
NASA to Announce Commercial Opportunities at International Space Station
“NASA will announce the agency’s plans to open the International Space Station to expanded commercial activities at 10 a.m. EDT Friday, June 7, at Nasdaq in New York City. The news conference will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency’s website. Participants in the news briefing are: Jeff DeWit, chief financial officer, NASA Headquarters, Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator, NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Robyn Gatens, deputy director, International Space Station, NASA Headquarters”
NASA Plan for Commercial LEO Development
“This plan, entitled NASA’s Plan for Commercial LEO Development, addresses supply, demand, and lays out steps to date that have been taken. It also includes detailed steps that will be taken in the near-term, mid-term, and long-term.”
NASA Opens International Space Station to New Commercial Opportunities, Private Astronauts
“This effort is intended to broaden the scope of commercial activity on the space station beyond the ISS National Lab mandate, which is limited to research and development. A new NASA directive will enable commercial manufacturing and production and allow both NASA and private astronauts to conduct new commercial activities aboard the orbiting laboratory. The directive also sets prices for industry use of U.S. government resources on the space station for commercial and marketing activities. Pricing released Friday is specific to commercial and marketing activities enabled by the new directive, reflects a representative cost to NASA, and is designed to encourage the emergence of new markets. As NASA learns how these new markets respond, the agency will reassess the pricing and amount of available resources approximately every six months and make adjustments as necessary.”
Soliciting Proposals for Exploration Technology Demonstration and National Lab Utilization Enhancements
“This announcement is for the development of experiment hardware with enhanced capabilities; modification of existing hardware to enable increased efficiencies (crew time, power, etc.); development of tools that allow analyses of samples and specimens on orbit; enhanced ISS infrastructure capabilities (ex. Communications or data processing); concepts contributing to the development of a sustainable, scalable, and profitable non-NASA demand for LEO services; and specific technology demonstration projects as detailed below.”
Keith’s 6 June update: Tomorrow there will be a news briefing by Sierra Nevada to talk about their various services given that “the agency plans to open the space station and low-Earth orbit to expanded commercialization.” Dream Chaser offers some very interesting capabilities not offered by other cargo vehicles such as being able to land at many regular airports with a substantial amount of payload that you can get to rather quickly after landing. More importantly allowing Dream Chaser to conduct flights to/from the ISS offers a totally independent utilization path from the one that CASIS runs for the ISS National Lab portion of the ISS.
Keith’s 7 June update: The news conference will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.
Looks like NASA is letting CASIS (aka “ISS National Lab”) participate after all – sources report that they were feeling like they were being kept out of the loop on this.
Following the news briefing, Nasdaq will host a Facebook Live to discuss some of the related topics in more depth at https://www.facebook.com/Nasdaq/ This will overlap with a Sierra Nevada media briefing being held on this topic – simultaneously -at noon EDT.
11:30-11:45 AM: How did we get here and where are we going?
Doug Comstock, Deputy CFO for Integration, NASA
Mike Gold, Regulatory and Policy Committee Chair, NASA Advisory Council
Ken Shields, VP and COO, ISS National Lab
Phil McAlister, Director of Commercial Spaceflight, NASA
11:45-12 PM: Commercial activities on the International Space Station
Marybeth Edeen, Manager, International Space Station Research Office, NASA
Stephanie Murphy, Founder and Chairman, AlphaSpace
Jeff Manber, CEO, NanoRacks
Justin Kugler, VP Advanced Programs and Concepts, Made in Space
12-12:15 PM: Growing future markets
Robert Bigelow, Founder and President, Bigelow Aerospace, LLC
Kevin Foley, Global Sales and Marketing – Space Exploration, Boeing
Michael Lopez-Alegria, VP Business Development, Axiom
Alex MacDonald, senior economic advisor, NASA
Keith’s note: This new NASA station pricing plan will cover services that are not part of the ISS National Lab allocation that has been assigned to CASIS. The plan will cover upmass and down mass, crew time, various utilities and services, visiting vehicles and potential add-on modules, and will address the flying of paying passengers on commercial crew flights.
NASA has admitted that the recent ISS commercialization studies were less than enthusiastic about the commercial potential of ISS and that companies were only interested in commercial activities on the ISS if NASA remained as an anchor tenant to assure the station’s continued operations. As such NASA is now trying to do a bit of a diving catch with this pricing policy so as to try and spark some new interest in the ISS. Robyn Gatens has been heard to make mention of “auctions” of ISS resources recently.
There is no mention of CASIS or the ISS National Laboratory participation in the press release about this event. Nor is there any mention of it on the CASIS website. NASA HQ told me that CASIS will not be participating in this event other than to send representatives to sit in the audience. The perception at NASA Is that CASIS is not the solution to the ISS commercialization dilemma and that the agency needs to take new action to try and spur additional utilization of the ISS – possibly to underwrite some of the common operating expenses. But a fully commercialized ISS – of the sort envisioned as recently as early this year as part of NASA’s shift to cislunar operations – is simply not in the cards. NASA is no longer expecting to be able to hand off the ISS to commercial operators and knows that it will be paying the bulk of its operational costs for another decade or so.
The thinking that is circulating internally is that NASA going to try and do a diving catch on their part of the ISS so as to try and score some success there. Something big and sexy would be nice. Then, hopefully with some actual success, they will turn to focus on the CASIS issue. They will be able to say with a straight face that ISS is a viable place to do new things and that after a decade the CASIS model for managing the National Lab portion of the ISS needs refreshing. And no one will question that assessment.
At last week’s NASA Advisory Council meeting ISS Director Sam Scimemi said that if this new plan sells out very fast then they probably priced things too cheap. Conversely if there are no takers then the prices will likely need to be adjusted downward. He also made some confusing comments:
Sam Scimemi just said that @NASA cannot sell priority to ISS users yet he also said that as early next week that NASA will release a policy that allows people to buy priority access to ISS. Someone is confused.
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) May 31, 2019
I have to wonder whether the focus on Sierra Nevada and Dream Chaser is NASAWatch’s or NASA’s? Remember Dreamchaser was the system that promised at least a bit of the capability offered by Shuttle and yet was not selected-was deferred for about 5 years and instead NASA went with 4 basically redundant capsules: Orion which grew so late and expensive it was pulled from ISS, Dragon, which at least something worked, Boeing’s CST-not yet flying and Cygnus, which has no heat shield so only offers a one way ticket. Of course Shuttle itself had to be terminated in order to save all that money that was going to be put on that safe simple soon Orion that was going to be flying in 2011..
The other part of this is the ‘marketing’ of ISS. NASA’s Research Office apparently leads this effort by advertising what wonderful research is being performed on ISS, while the actual process, schedules and lack of utilization resources remained the chief deterrent to any serious expanded use. A long time ago, for other programs, NASA had figured out how to do payload integration and what resources and capabilities were required to get payloads, commercial and otherwise, on board. Its too bad there was zero continuity between those earlier times and ISS. While CASIS, as implemented, was totally the wrong way to go about it, NASA itself did no better. And even with this current enthusiastic effort, NASA seems to want to jump start commercial utilization, but as near as I can see still has not improved their integration processes. Is there anyplace even now a prospective user can go to find out the capabilities, facilities, processes, schedules, costs and alternatives to get onboard ISS? I don’t want to be told what wonderful work they re already doing; I figure if they were really doing such great work we would have seen some Nobel Prizes or at least some eye-opening scientific results or commercial products, and we have yet to see any. Of course the real shame is that they have lost a decade and perhaps a hundred billion $$ of ISS utilization in the meantime.
You said: “Too bad there was zero continuity between those earlier times and ISS.” and I’d like you to give us some evidence. I am not in the program now but worked Space Shuttle (and Spacelab) and Shuttle/Mir and ISS and there is considerable continuity between all of those programs.
CASIS is certainly ineffective and seems to exist to provide CASIS executives with reasons to go to conferences, but NASA still integrates and flies a lot of payloads and science. An one example, a lot of small CubeSat form factor satellites have been deployed from ISS – they are similar to satellites such as SPARTAN that we flew on Shuttle. NanoRacks flies a lot of internal and external payloads.
What is your evidence that there is no continuity?
It didn’t help that Dream Chaser crashed on one of its last test flights due to not deploying the front landing gear.
Sooo… to get rid of an underperforming contractor, NASA has to compete with it?
And how much exciting conversation has started, now that we have a big roll out of commercialization? None? Hardly anything? Why? Because trump tweeted some incoherent stuff about NOT going to the Moon and going to Mars.
How can the US have any consistent policy or programs when the policy can suddenly be changed because trump misunderstood what some Fox talking head said?
Bridenstine is NOT the Administrator of NASA – random Fox personalities are.
“How can the US have any consistent policy or programs when the policy can suddenly be changed because trump misunderstood what some Fox talking head said?”
TBH, there’s a bit of truth in what he said – our schizophrenic Moon vs Mars “policy” via NASA appropriation chicanery has been a mess since at least 1990 and we’ve wasted a s***load of money as a result.
Substitute the usual suspect congresscritters for Trump and any other media source for Fox and you could have writ this thread any number of times.
It’s a bad habit we have. China plans decades ahead and sticks to it. We can’t make it to the end of the fracking week, whoever’s in power.
“China plans decades ahead and sticks to it”
Which is fine as long as the policy is one you find agreeable.
Not quite. As long as you find the plan agreeable, realistic and productive. NASA has had problems with plans which were politically agreeable, but not productive. Mao’s Great Leap Backwards was also politically agreeable, but neither realistic not productive.
The inability of governments to keep focus through multiple administrations is why private industry generates the real sustainable breakthroughs. That is why it was private corporations, and not the Kings of England, that developed and explored North America. Now that HSF is reaching that tipping point it will soon be irrelevant what NASA does or what the NASA Vision of the day is.
As for ISS, this is the best evidence yet it is on the way out. There are no commitments by the International Partners, especially Russia, to fund it past 2024 and the failure of commercialization to pick up the gap will seal its fate. This will finally clear the great money pit out of the way allowing more rational, and commercial, space stations to replace. Hopefully the ISS will last that long so it won’t turn into another Skylab the sky is falling drama.