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Commercialization

OIG Predicts Commercial Crew Delay To Mid-2020

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
November 14, 2019
Filed under , ,
OIG Predicts Commercial Crew Delay To Mid-2020

NASA OIG: NASA’s Management of Crew Transportation to the International Space Station
“Boeing and SpaceX each face significant safety and technical challenges with parachutes, propulsion, and launch abort systems that need to be resolved prior to receiving NASA authorization to transport crew to the ISS. The complexity of these issues has already caused at least a 2-year delay in both contractors’ development, testing, and qualification schedules and may further delay certification of the launch vehicles by an additional year.
Consequently, given the amount, magnitude, and unknown nature of the technical challenges remaining with each contractor’s certification activities, CCP will continue to be challenged to establish realistic launch dates. Furthermore, final vehicle certification for both contractors will likely be delayed at least until summer 2020 based on the number of ISS and CCP certification requirements that remain to be verified and validated. In order to optimize development timelines, NASA continues to accept deferrals or changes to components and capabilities originally planned to be demonstrated on each contractor’s uncrewed test flights. Taken together, these factors may elevate the risk of a significant system failure or add further delays to the start of commercial crewed flights to the ISS.”

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

21 responses to “OIG Predicts Commercial Crew Delay To Mid-2020”

  1. ed2291 says:
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    Compare the overfunded SLS with the underfunded commercial crew and commercial crew – especially Space X – looks pretty good. Dragon static fire went well, just leaving max-q escape flight test and 9 parachute tests before Space X will be ready for a crewed flight to the ISS.

    • Terry Stetler says:
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      Eric Berger at Ars Technica has a good write-up.

      This whole thing just flat reeks. After reading today’s reporting, one wonders if the fallout from this contributed to Gerstenmaier’s demotion.

      • Zed_WEASEL says:
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        Well, Gerstenmaier have to sign off on the extra payments to Boeing for both the SLS and the Starliner.

        Gerstenmaier better not show up as a new Boeing executive in the next few years. Or he might be haul in front of a Congressional panel to answer about the extra payments to Boeing.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Mr. Gerstenmaier deserves our thanks and our respect for a job well done.

        But the job done by Mr. Gerstenmaier for so long, and so ably, simply no longer exists. Those days are over.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      I’m not so sure that I’d call the commercial efforts ‘underfunded’, although I certainly take your point.

      It’s true that, for instance, SX has received fewer in-house dollars and (many) fewer tax dollars. On the other hand, what would more dollars have produced, other than less anxiety for Mr. Musk during certain critical periods?

      Certainly I don’t know. But I do know that F9 and FH are serious competitors on any unit of measure, including dollars, and that the lesson here is brutal: the governmental efforts simply don’t compare to those of private industry.

      There are many other factors that are part of this comparison, to be sure.

      But facts are facts, even for this die-and leftist.

  2. MAGA_Ken says:
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    Can someone explain to me why hypergolics were required for the escape system rather than solids?

    • drasnor says:
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      NASA didn’t levy a requirement either way. Using the same propellants in the abort engines and the orbital maneuvering and attitude control jets allows the possibility of sharing the propellant system and realizing overall system mass efficiencies. The Orion abort motor weighs around 7 metric tons by itself which is about two metric tons less than the dry mass of the entire Dragon 2 spacecraft (per Wiki).

  3. mfwright says:
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    I’m thinking overall design (shape and abort method) of Orion, Dragon, Starliner are fixed for the next 20/30/40 years. Though some time was spent on creating the concept but once the concept design is done, it will live forever. So what was chosen, it will have to do whether inherent design too expensive or not.

    I can see advantage of Dragon design that has large door for passing large equipment and cargo to and from ISS (Orion and Soyuz door much smaller).

    We see the classic shape of Orion and Starliner like the Apollo command module, and that shape was conceived in 1960 (or 59). Why that shape? Was it extension of Mercury? and Max Faget figured best shape for those days when spaceships were the new thing?

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      Actually, all three crewed spacecraft (and the Dragon 2 cargo spacecraft) all use the same docking system, so Dragon 2 does not have an advantage in terms of “a large door for passing large equipment and cargo to and from ISS”.

      The original Dragon (cargo) doesn’t dock. It has a grapple fixture for the SSRMS to grab and a CBM (common berthing mechanism), so it does have “a large door”. This is also true of the Cygnus and HTV cargo spacecraft as well. So even when SpaceX switches to using Dragon 2 Cargo, there will still be two other cargo spacecraft which use the CBM.

      Also, I doubt we’ll see these spacecraft flying for even 20 years, let alone 30 or 40. As companies in the US innovate by introducing reusable launch vehicles, that opens up the possibility of also creating truly reusable spacecraft as well.

  4. Jeff2Space says:
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    And then there is this little nugget:

    “We found that NASA agreed to pay an additional $287.2 million above Boeing’s fixed prices to mitigate a perceived 18-month gap in ISS flights anticipated in 2019 and to ensure the contractor continued as a second commercial crew provider, without offering similar opportunities to SpaceX,” the report states.

    Good job Boeing! Way to turn a fixed cost contract into a fixed cost-plus contract.

    • MAGA_Ken says:
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      How does this stuff happen? Does NASA have to go back to Congress for authorization for the $287 million?

      Was that payment to Boeing to buy seats on the Soyuz?

      • fcrary says:
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        The budget passed by Congress does not go into great detail on every item. NASA does have some freedom to shift money from one thing to another. Used with good judgement, that sort of flexibility is a good thing. But when used with poor judgement, it’s both wasteful and an invitation for congressional micromanagement.

        • MAGA_Ken says:
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          Where was the money shifted from in this case?

          • fcrary says:
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            In this case, I have no idea. The process isn’t exactly transparent. But I will note there are approved funds to support the continued presence of US astronauts on the space station. That $287 million was to prevent a potential 18-month gap in flights, which would have interrupted US presence on ISS. Tapping into the ISS operations budget probably would have been consistent with congressional appropriations and authorizations. But that’s speculation. The fact is there are many vaguenesses in the budget.

      • Not Invented Here says:
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        No this has nothing to do with Soyuz seats, it’s purely for CST-100 mission 3 to 6.

        Note the money is paid in milestones, so NASA won’t be paying an additional $287M upfront, this money would be spread out for several years, so they don’t need to shift a lot of money initially, any additional money for later years would just be included in budget request for that year.

        • fcrary says:
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          Actually, in another Boeing triumph, Soyuz seats were involved. Remember, Boeing bought up five seats from the Russians and later resold them to NASA. According the the OIG report, they offered them to NASA immediately after NASA signed off on that extra $287 million. That removed the potential 18-month gap the extra $287 million was supposed to prevent.

          In any case, no extra milestones were involved. NASA was paying for “substantially reduced lead times for all four missions, the ability for NASA to have a varied launch cadence through 2024 based on Agency needs, and no penalties for some NASA-requested mission delays.” In other words, the same work (and the same milestones) but with NASA having a greater ability to set the schedule.

          And some of the money has already been paid. CST-100 Starliner orders have a 32-month lead time. Work on the third flight is already in progress and some of the milestones have already been passed and some of the payments have already been made.

        • fcrary says:
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          By the way, you made me read the whole report to make sure I understood the issues correctly. That made me realize three things:

          1) The Boeing schedule is not even vaguely realistic. The OIG report criticized both the Boeing and SpaceX schedules, but figure 3 shows only about a month between the two CST-100 flight tests (without and with crew.) That’s not even vaguely enough time to review the results of the first test and do the reviews required for the second.

          2) Based on the description of the process and how CCP is working, if that’s streamlined contracting and minimal NASA oversight, then I’d hate to see the alternatives. 360 people at NASA to handle the certifications and requirements, and that’s something the OIG considers far too few for the work they’re supposed to do? A couple thousand requirements for the contractors to close and for someone at NASA to verify that they were properly closed? Yes, that’s all necessary work, but I thought the idea was for the contractors to do it, not for NASA to be looking over their shoulder to that extent.

          3) Reading that report was two hours of my life I’m not going to get back. I wish government officials could adopt a writing style that wasn’t quite as dry. What was the name of the Apollo-era manager who ended up producing very stream of consciousness and unstilted memos? Maybe we could use more of that.

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            “you made me read the whole report”

            And bearing the pain for the rest of us. Thank you…

  5. pbackman says:
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    How much of their own money is Boeing and SpaceX putting into Commercial Crew?

  6. MAGA_Ken says:
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    Remember that tweet from Bridenstine to SpaceX? He made that knowing NASA wrote a $287 million dollar check to Boeing.