NASA Wants To Buy Russian While The White House Says Buy American (Update)
NASA is bargaining with a US space startup for a Soyuz seat, The Verge
“NASA is planning to buy an astronaut seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft through Texas-based aerospace firm Axiom Space, according to two people familiar with the plans. It was unclear how much NASA is considering paying Axiom for the single Soyuz seat or what cut Axiom would get from the deal.”
Keith’s update: Nice scoop by Joey Roulette. So … why is it that NASA is buying a seat from Roscosmos via a third party? Axiom Space has to be making some money off of this, right? So why go through Axiom Space and pay them a fee when NASA can just go directly to Roscosmos – minus the Axiom Space reselling path – as NASA has done for decades? Wouldn’t that be cheaper? Does this involve the $140 million deal that Axiom Space has with NASA to study their commercial space station module? Or … does the use of Axiom Space (an American company) as a middle man provide a way to technically “buy American”?
NASA Weighs Options for Additional Crew Transportation for Spring Soyuz Mission to Space Station
“NASA now is considering obtaining a supplemental seat on the upcoming spring Soyuz crew rotation mission for a NASA astronaut to add additional capability to the agency’s planning. The agency issued a public synopsis to identify all sources that potentially could provide the crew transportation service in the needed timeframe beyond the capability NASA already has in operation with the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. … Securing an additional Soyuz seat assures the back-up capability of at least one U.S. crew member aboard the International Space Station in the event of a problem with either spacecraft. NASA is considering providing in-kind services for this supplemental crew transportation service, rather than an exchange of funds.”
Executive Order on Ensuring the Future Is Made in All of America by All of America’s Workers, 25 January 2021
“Section 1. Policy. It is the policy of my Administration that the United States Government should, consistent with applicable law, use terms and conditions of Federal financial assistance awards and Federal procurements to maximize the use of goods, products, and materials produced in, and services offered in, the United States. The United States Government should, whenever possible, procure goods, products, materials, and services from sources that will help American businesses compete in strategic industries and help America’s workers thrive. Additionally, to promote an accountable and transparent procurement policy, each agency should vest waiver issuance authority in senior agency leadership, where appropriate and consistent with applicable law.”
Keith’s 9 Feb note: NASA has been crowing about its commercial crew capabilities with SpaceX and soon, with Boeing. The whole idea behind the commercial crew thing was to provide the U.S. with its own redundant ability to launch astronauts and to end the reliance on foreign providers. The idea behind having more than one domestic provider was that one could back up the other using dissimilar redundancy i.e. two different systems. Now, NASA apparently wants to back-up the back-up citing dissimilar redundancy as the rational. So it now wants doubly-dissimilar redundancy, it would seem. Or do they have doubts about Boeing and/or SpaceX?
With regard to NASA saying “NASA is considering providing in-kind services for this supplemental crew transportation service, rather than an exchange of funds.”, the “in-kind services” that NASA is offering cost NASA something to provide. They are not provided to NASA for free. NASA is offering something that cost them money in exchange for these Soyuz seats – seats provided by an offshore source.
Meanwhile the White House issued an executive order mere days after taking office that mandates a government focus on procuring goods and service domestically. Is NASA somehow special in thinking that it can overtly ask for a foreign provider when we make nice sexy spaceships domestically? SpaceX just announced that it is launching an overtly commercial flight, and launching another for Axiom, and yet another for Tom Cruise. Is there really a lack of domestic capability? Or is NASA just falling back into old habits. Just wondering.
My understanding is that a seat trade arrangement was always the plan (a Russian on a CCV and a USOS crewmember on Soyuz). Not only is it redundant in terms of one transportation system having a failure but also if heaven forbid there was a medical emergency onboard that required a crew to return to Earth.
The Russians though have been throwing a hissy fit since SpaceX succeeded and have so far refused to put a cosmonaut on Crew-1, Crew-2 (and maybe even Crew-3).
This kind of arrangement by NASA makes sense. We are still in the early days of commercial crew and there is only one launch provider online. While SpaceX has been wildly successful we aren’t to the point of them being able to launch on need (as would be needed with the aforementioned medical emergency).
Is it possible this represents doubts by NASA that Starliner will meet its schedule, or meet it and fail – again?
That’s more than possible. The Dragon 2 is in operational use. If the concern is about redundancy, that strongly implies a concern about Starliner not being available to provide redundancy any time soon.
That’s my guess as well. Starliner still needs to successfully complete a flight test to ISS. We don’t know what possible problems might be lurking that weren’t caught in the latest round of ground tests and simulations.
Launch on need? That’s never been a requirement for ISS operations. In the case of an emergency, they always have enough crew capsules docked to ISS to return _everyone_ if there is a need. The idea of launching something up to ISS on short notice has never been a requirement. And Soyuz can’t do it, so buying a seat on Soyuz wouldn’t even satisfy that non-existent requirement.
Isn’t the point that since we aren’t planning to prepare standby, launch-on-need missions, a medical emergency with a single crewmember would result in the complete evacuation of the ROS or the USOS … unless we regularly swap seats with theRussians? (Or unless the emergency just happened to occur during crew handover.)
If ISS capacity can be increased to 11 there could be two US spacecraft docked, SpaceX, Boeing, or one of each. Alternatively the best approach would be to use a US spacecraft for the evacuation with one Russian aboard and send another Russian up on the next US launch with a seat liner for his return in the Soyuz.
Yes there are always enough capsules docked to get the whole crew home. Launch on need was never a requirement.
Previously if there was a medical emergency that person and their two crewmates would return to Earth in one Soyuz leaving the rest of the crew on station with their Soyuz.
In the previous arrangement that meant at least 1 USOS crewmember and 1 Russian segment crewmember would still be aboard.
Going forward if there are no USOS crew on Soyuz (and no Russians on a CCV) that means that a medical emergency would require either the USOS or Russian segment to be without a dedicated crewmember.
If there is no seat swap the only way to get a USOS crewmember up there to prevent such a thing from happening would be a launch on need mission.
Much better and simpler to follow the original plan and have a seat swap. Hopefully the Russians will see that their fit of pique isn’t going to stop SpaceX and they start assigning crew to CCVs.
That assumes there could not be a seat swap in the case of an emergency. I.e. that Russians who went up on a Soyuz could not return on a Dragon 2, and Americans who went up on a Dragon 2 could not return on a Soyuz. There are good reasons why that is not a normal practice, but it should be possible in an emergency.
One of the reasons is that anyone riding on Soyuz has a custom made seat liner so that the forces on the body are equally distributed. This is helpful in a ballistic reentry which can be about 8 Gs. But it would be critical in the unlikely event that the soft landing rockets don’t fire the moment before landing, in which case the capsule would hit the ground at about 26 kilometers per hour.
Now yes in an emergency where there is no choice this would not prevent someone from coming back on a Soyuz. I just don’t know what the quantification is for the risk in that situation, i.e. how likely is it that the soft landing rockets fail (extremely low obviously), what are the estimated g-forces in that situation, and how much of a difference would the fit of the seat liner make in that forceful of an impact.
Also as yet Boeing’s solution is not capable of carrying people, so the only backup is Russia.
Yea but the White House just issued an executive order that directs the Federal government to buy American.
For clarity, are you intentionally equating seat swaps with buying Russian, or are you suggesting there is more to this than the long-planned swapping of seats so that neither segment would be left deserted in case a single crew member needed to be medically evacuated?
Nothing is ever cost free when it comes to dealing with Russia. They are clever in that regard.
Well, there you go.
https://twitter.com/joroule…
Working with the Russians was fascinating but very difficult, it is time to leave them behind. I worked with them a lot and they were never good partners, they just wanted our money. See Rhea Seddon’s book “Go for Orbit” for more.
Maybe they could pay us (yeah, right!) to fly a cosmo on Starliner/Crew Dragon??? We should not spend money to fly an astronaut on Soyuz, it is way too cramped and the conditions (launch and landing) are what we should have left behind
withwhen we started flying Shuttle.Well, what this certainly looks like is NASA not wanting to alienate a long time partner that really liked the business NASA gave them for many years, never mind the fact that the partner in question, Russia, promptly gouged the American taxpayer the moment the the Space Shuttle was retired.
Needless to say, this is dumb and should not go forward.
Yeah sure, part of is probably hedging against further problems with Starliner. That’s logical I suppose. But it’s also pointless. Having two independent ways of manned access to the ISS is a pretty nonsense requirement. It’s certainly a great item in the “nice to have” column, but for the overwhelming majority of the US Space program, there has been one ride into space – the US vehicle du jour.
If NASA is truly so concerned about Starliner that it wants to hedge on an additional Soyuz seat – and we all know there is no chance this is the last time they try and get that additional seat – they should really just be giving money instead to SNC to speed up Dream Chaser and its crewed variant. That still exists. They are making steady, if slow progress for CRS-2. It’s American.
Really though, this is all ridiculous. NASA has commercial access to the most advanced manned space vehicle in the world in Crew Dragon, and the most proven launch vehicle in the world in Falcon 9. It needs to learn to live with it. And when failures happen – because they will – not ground the vehicles for a minute longer than they need to.
It’s true that SpaceX has shown that they recover quickly from launch failures. However, Commercial and competition go together. NASA wanted more then one provider…not just for redundancy, but also to build a robust NEW Commercial Space industry. The failure by Boeing to keep up very nearly put Russia up there alone. NASA has to prevent that risk. One seat on the Soyuz would do that.
Also, the root reason for U.S. partnership with Russia in space still exists. Do you remember what that was? That partnership does not exist with Artemis (partly because of policy and partly because of Russian arrogance) and that is a connection that I think we will miss some day.
I believe it has more to do with Russia not wanting to fund anything new that is space related.
The most interesting subject I heard on the topic is “they basically haven’t done anything new since Mir”. I think generally speaking that is true. They’ve iterated on Soyuz capsules since the 1960s. And sure they’ve come quite a ways, but locked themselves into one launch approach, one basic vehicle design and it always seems to outlive it’s promised successor. They’ve had Angara planned for 30 years, but only launched it a few times, and really seem to just keep building more Soyuz launchers and more Protons.
Russia has had a way to a post-legacy hardware future in front of them for many years. But there is never any follow through.
Perhaps there’s the notion that helping to prop up the Russians has strategic benefit.
Well, for my part I’ve never been much of a believer in partnership for partnerships sake with Russia (nor China). I’ve long felt that separating our Earthly issues with them to cooperatively engage in space exploration to be incredibly naïve and frankly, very self serving of the space community. The United States’ issues with Russia, particularly since 2014 (Ukraine) and China are extremely serious. With Russia, it’s about our ability to conduct our democratic affairs freely without interference (and keep in mind this is a country that is even engaging in spreading disinformation about Western vaccines in the middle of a pandemic). With China, it’s only about who will be in the driving seat of the 21st century and what the shape of human freedom everyone will be as a result of that struggle. And no, engagement with them won’t change their behavior one bit. We are here, with them, because twenty years or more of engagement failed to change their behavior, or shape positive outcomes for us.
That’s more important than building a space station together, or going to Mars together. Our relations in every setting should be defined by our fundamental international relations, which right now are extremely poor for very good reasons. And (since we’re talking about Russia mostly), it’s on them to make the first move to improve them.
So no, I don’t think that partnership should be preserved and I don’t think we should miss their involvement in Artemis. They have little to offer anymore, and moreover we should not be engaging with them in a benevolent way until they decide changing their behavior is in their interests.
Yes for the majority of the U.S. space program there was just one ride into space, and when that vehicle was grounded (twice) the entire U.S. program was grounded for an extensive period of time. That’s what they are trying to avoid. Probably none of us expect that there will be any problems with crew Dragon since it has already flown a few times, but no one can say with certainty that there won’t be an underlying problem found at some point, perhaps the type of problem that won’t cause a failure every time but that has a risk of catastrophic failure and so you need to stand down and correct it if you really want to be safe. And you can’t say for certain how long a fix would take to be researched, designed, implemented, tested and certified. SpaceX usually moves quickly but that’s no guarantee that every problem can be quickly fixed. Easy for us to say this will never be a problem, but managers of a multi-billion dollar program cannot make that assumption.
Yes the Dragon has flown but we still could find a problem and have to pause flights. We flew the Shuttle
2524 times before a big problem bit us hard. We flew various versions of the Apollo system several times before Apollo 13. We need a redundant capability – hopefully Starliner will soon provide that.Although Boeing has not proven as nimble as SpaceX the basic design of the Starliner is solid and it may soon be operational. Off course having the Dreamchaser as well would have been even better.
I definitely agree, the Starliner is a very risk averse design. I know people who work on the project here and they are very confident (of course they were very confident before the first test!). The software problems they had were due to cutting corners – people here and in other places made mistakes by accepting superficial testing.
I disagree. ISTM that ~14 meter circumferential seam between the upper and lower clamshells is a leak looking for a place & time to happen.
Terry Stetler And what system does NOT have concerns? Did you invent one?
Leaky vehicles have killed people, and the length of that seal is a larger risk than not having it. “The best part is no part,” or seal in this case.
Well not exactly. Apollo 7 flew 20 months after the Apollo 1 fire with a redesigned capsule. The Challenger grounding was 32 months long. The first return to flight after Columbia was 29 months, and the second was 12 months later. The reasons for these groundings and their duration are all well documented and safety-conscience. But there is a key differences between all of them. This matters because NASA and the country has to decide where Crew Dragon (and other commercial crew) fall, to decide the level of risk and loss it is willing to accept.
The 20th month “grounding” of Apollo 1 was not “lost” time per se because NASA flew important uncrewed missions in the interim until Apollo 7. It was a vehicle where the disaster came as a result of a design flaw, but a flaw they intended to correct and improve upon the vehicle to use it in ever more ambitious missions down the line.
STS-51-L by contrast, as the 25th Space Shuttle Mission, came as the program was hitting a kid of mid-80s operational stride. But the entire shuttle program wasn’t brand new, but not old either. It was in the first third of its life. NASA and the country had little choice but to take the time needed to make the Shuttle safe to launch… in other words, to restore confidence in the launch system.
And then we get to Columbia, which is perhaps the greatest contrast of all. Not only is it cumulatively the longest grounding (with both of them combined), but the changes to the program were fundamental. Only missions to the ISS (except for the Hubble repair mission, which was controversial despite previously being routine). Having a second Shuttle ready on the launch pad, or ready to launch within 30 days to save a disabled vehicle. Having the Shuttle do back flips so the ISS crew could photograph its underside. Developing a boom for the arm to reach around the underside to laser scan the tiles. The Shuttle, after Columbia, was so obviously a system that NASA had lost complete confidence in the saftey and reliability of, but was committed to because it was required to build the $140 billion Space Station. And the moment the ISS was done, the Shuttle never flew again.
So where does Commercial crew fall? Developmental? Midlife? End of life? Because that’ll define I think, in large part how we should view risks, losses and grounding times with Commercial crew. Many years ago commercial crew was likened to being as safe as the first generation of commercial aircraft. I don’t have the expertise of course to say if that’s the case (and we haven’t had the flights to compile meaningful data on that yet in any event), but if we say that that’s the expected level of saftey, do we mean it? Because the implication of that is “ground for a few months, fly again”,
The next fifteen years of American space travel are going to be unlike any in the past 50, and our country has to understand psychologically what that means. Yes, a different generation of Americans successfully landed on the Moon six times, 60 years ago. But just six times. The Space Shuttle also flew 24 times before the 25 resulted in a disaster. Commercial crew via Crew Dragon, Starliner or Starship will fly more passengers, more frequently than any vehicle since the pre-Columbia Space Shuttle program. And if Musk has his way, it’ll be far more. No matter the preparation and safety – and Elon Musk, who is certainly a character was deadly serious when it came to safety on the Crew Dragon flights – the record will not be perfect. We still lose Jetliners, and those have 70 years of development behind them.
That’s how I see it. The issue of “we need a second vehicle in case this gets grounded” becomes moot if Crew Dragon is launching once every 6 weeks or more frequently on a NASA or commercial flight. Because that rate of flight will imply we’ve accepted an operating rate and the risk involved in that. And if we haven’t accepted the risk – if we expect every mission, every launch, forever to go picture perfect – then we’re being delusional and shouldn’t be flying at all.
That’s all I’m saying. Commercial crew means a new operating paradigm beyond just how contracts are signed. It changes how we think about flight rate, risk, groundings, return to flight and redundancy. And if we’re really just not able to be there psychologically as a country, we really should just fly on Orion once a year, and spend $2.5 billion per launch to make sure it goes off without a hitch.
NASA wants to always have a U.S. astronaut onboard ISS at all times. Maybe you disagree with that and feel that is not a necessary requirement, but that’s a separate discussion. My comment was replying to the concept implied by some that because SpaceX is so reliable NASA doesn’t need redundancy. When in fact it is not outside the realm of possibilities that Dragon could be grounded for a period of time, which if it lasted more than a few months could impact NASA’s goal of maintaining U.S. presence on the station, as well as the ability for the partner space agencies to fly their astronauts.
If there were a sudden grounding of Dragon, arranging (and yes negotiating) a ride on Soyuz might not be possible in time to maintain that presence, depending on the length of the grounding and how long the astronauts currently on the station could be extended.
All of your other comments are interesting but I have to admit I am having trouble relating them to the topic. For example I don’t understand how the fact that SpaceX is capable of launching frequently has any bearing on the repercussions to the ISS program if Dragon is grounded. One concern is that you seem to imply that if SpaceX (or anyone) is grounded that a “space will always be risky” philosophy should govern how much time should be allowed before they just get on with it and fly again. Sorry if that’s not what you meant, but anyway that’s a separate discussion that has been had here many times, with pro and con on either side. But in this case there is a much safer way to meet the goal without putting pressure on the provider to quickly fix a problem. That safer way is dissimilar redundancy. Which apparently at the moment is available only by signing some additional paperwork with our old pals.
I apologize if I went a bit afield. I’ll try an clarify. My argument here comes back to exactly what you said: “NASA wants to always have a U.S. astronaut onboard ISS at all times”. It wants two crew vehicles in case one is grounded for an extended period of time
My view is that this requirement makes no sense if crew launch is provided commercially as a service.
If utilizing commercial crew is conceptually akin prior government owned and operated manned space vehicles, the the redundancy is logical because, like the post-Challenger Shuttle, an extended year or two grounding would be the model of responding to a failure. However I see it differently. Commercial crew vehicles over the next 15 years are supposed to fly at a rate greater than Shuttle. And collectively they should take more passengers to Low Earth Orbit than the Shuttle program ever has (especially if Starship has large compliments). This rate of flight and mode of operation, more akin to an early commercial airplane taxi service than the Shuttle Program or Soyuz program, will see failures happen (though not necessarily leading to loss of crews) and bringing out problems with the vehicles than a far smaller number of flights may have overlooked. To offer a hypothetical example of this: we have a historically high opinion of the Apollo Lunar Module, but it only fulfilled its function six times in extremely carefully planned landings. Would we have the same opinion if it was operated 70 times, in less planned landings, in a more diverse set of landing areas? Probably not. Flaws in the design would likely have come to the fore.
So with Commercial crew, unless there is a truly catastrophic failure that calls into question the viability of the vehicle, if the goal is to fly often, then commensurate with that is the understanding that groundings for failures aren’t long. One month. Two months at most. A grounding that long would not require a second vehicle as a redundancy. Vehicles would refly with the understanding that “the fix”, if needed, would be implemented via an ongoing retrofit as the vehicle stayed active (again, akin to most historic commercial flight fixes), rather than a grounding on the level of the post-Columbia shuttle.
I guess at the core of this is what I see to be an inconsistency. It’s like we want to buy tickets to space as a service, but also want that service to operate like a government space program when it comes to addressing failure, rather than as a commercial enterprise. That just doesn’t scan. As I see it – if we buy commercial, we intrinsically buy into a level of risk that makes the need for a redundant vehicle requirement pointless. If we want to be super safe, we keep flying government owned and operated vehicles infrequently at great expense. But the opportunity cost of flying commercial more often and much cheaper, is that increased risks.
I again just want to highlight Challenger – 24 flights of the Shuttle made the Space Shuttle look like a vehicle that could be a true workhorse. Flight 25 showed a major design flaw. So working from this example, what happens when Crew Dragon does 24 flights in a few years, but #25 has a major failure. Do we hold off on #26 for two years or do we fly #26 in a couple of months and work to address the problem while still utilizing services? If we’re trying to stick to what we set out to do with Commercial space, the latter option is the logical one. But we have to accept that risk is an intrinsic part of that. And if we can’t, we should stick to government-funded space.
I’m not so sure on the ‘gouged’ part. The price that Roscosmos was charing NASA for seats on Soyuz is pretty comparable to what Boeing is planning to charge for seats on their ride.
In 2005, the cost of a Soyuz seat was about $20 million.
In 2010, a Soyuz seat cost NASA $25 million.
In the first half of 2011 (the last year of the shuttle), it went for $27 million.
Then the shuttle retires.
In the second half of 2011, the price jumps to $44 million.
In 2012, $50 million.
In 2013, $56 million
In 2014, $60 million. They offer us a trampoline.
In 2016, $70 million.
In 2017, $77 million.
In 2018, $81 million.
In 2020, $90 million.
. Russia hiked the price by 62% within months of the Shuttle retiring and the Soyuz becoming our only access to space. And then 18 months later, the price had effectively doubled from it’s pre-shuttle cost, which was stable for a decade before hand. And then after that. And then it increases every year for the next seven years until that NASA seat has more than tripled it’s pre-shuttle retirement cost.
If that isn’t a gouge, then I don’t think gouging exists.
Space utopians will of course, want to turn the other cheek, because that is their response to everything. But it’s absurd to cling on the that the whole notion of partnership and cooperation when the ostensible “International” Space Station turned into just yet another avenue for the Russian government to be its typical gangster self. Putin’s government does this sort of thing because they’ve never faced any consequences to behaving any differently. Without fairness and respect, there can be no cooperation. A Russia that triples its per-seat price in 10 years because it has a monopoly on manned launch it can exploit, does not respect its international partners. It’s Cosmonauts certainly do. And I’m sure most people at Roscosmos do. But the Russian officials who make the decisions clearly do not.
NASA should be laughed out of the Congressional hearing chamber / Zoom call for daring to asking for another Soyuz seat. If they need an alternative launch vehicle, put the money towards Starliner. They can live with just Crew Dragon for the next 18 months.
And if it is grounded and we have to break our perfect attendance record for a few months, so be it. That’s better than giving Russia another cent.
NASA and Roscosmos are partners with the ISS. Some integration of launch services is necessary. That’s what partners do.
Further, most of us here opposed the down-select that put Boeing on the final leg of CCDev in the first place. The claim that Boeing was somehow more up to the task than the others was hogwash and everyone here knew it.
Now, NASA has a problem (as usual) that Old Space and its allies in Congress and among the NASA ranks have saddled them with.
They shouldn’t have been forced to down-selected to just two. There should have been three and two of those should have been market disruptors. It is what it is, but what’s more important? The show must go on. Personally, I think the Boeing problem will be fixed, but they will never compete with SpaceX head to head and I wanted TWO SOLID commercial crewed launch providers with comparable capabilities and pricing. Some day we will have that, but not today. If Boeing fails again the next time around they’re going to want out and NASA needs to be able to let them go. If not then we risk sending up a less-safe system with our astronauts aboard, which could lead to disaster.
There will be a round two of Commercial Crew someday maybe. Maybe we’ll have to let LOP-G (is that still a thing?) and Artemis give us true Commercial competition in space.
Did I read it correctly that this would be a seat exchange without any funds exchanged? If so, then we’re not exactly buying anything. In fact it puts pressure on Russia to justify the price of their seats.
Gerst talked about this on the hill with committees before there was a program, my understanding it was always a part of the plan.
They are bartering for a seat exchange not buying a seat.
SpaceX may soon be capable of providing nearly on-demand service. Considering that they plan to launch multiple private missions per year, there should be a contingency to redirect a launch to NASA. And if the problem is that the Falcon/Dragon were grounded, then I’m certain the Russians would provide NASA a seat for the “right” price.
At times I wonder if there are political reasons that if being one of few top men it all makes perfect sense. But for rest of us who are mainly spectators certain things just don’t add up. I’m thinking only reason why ISS was built was the partnership with the Russians because of political reasons and there’s still all kinds of stuff going on behind the scenes. Keith and his connections give us some insight. I’m also thinking about the Discoverer program “that made no sense why USAF is working biological experiments when it is clearly NASA’s job.”
People are TERRIBLE about keeping secrets, I doubt that there is much going on behind the scenes.
We built ISS for the same reasons we built Skylab and we flew Spacelab – we wanted a big piece of “test equipment” and so we built one. Our partnership with Japan, Canada, Europe and other reliable colleagues is more important than our business with Russia.