NASA Buys More Soyuz Flights Since Congress Constantly Cuts Commercial Crew
NASA Notifies Congress about Space Station Contract Modification with Russia
“NASA Administrator Charles Bolden sent a letter to Congress Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2015 informing members that, due to continued reductions in the president’s funding requests for the agency’s Commercial Crew Program over the past several years, NASA was forced to extend its existing contract with the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) to transport American astronauts to the International Space Station. This contract modification is valued at about $490 million dollars. The letter was delivered to the leadership of the congressional committees that oversee NASA. The full text of the letter follows:”
NASA signing $490M contract with Russia, The Hill
“The new contract extension is required because Congress has not fully funded the administration’s budget requests since 2010. For fiscal year 2011, for example, Obama asked Congress for $500 million for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Congress only gave it $321 million. The next year, Obama asked for $850 million and Congress only allocated $400 million. Due to those low funding levels for five consecutive years, NASA had to ask Congress for more than $1 billion for next year. A spokeswoman for NASA said if Obama’s request is fully funded, and if NASA can fully pay its contracts, the U.S. commercial vehicles could still be ready by the 2017 date.”
Terrific. No doubt Mr Putin will be pleased.
Smith and Shelby don’t care. All they want is the SLS and Orion money flowing to their states. They are the two biggest hypocrites in congress. What could have Boeing and SpaceX done with that money? How much quicker could they have finished their vehicles?
And by the way, shame on Obama too… he could have made space a bigger priority than he did.
Orion is no longer NASA owned. It was taken over by Lockheed after cancellation of Aries.
Go look at the NASA budget munkie, Wait, I’ll do it for you:
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/d…
It is estimated on page BUD-5 that the Orion program will get $1.0963 billion of NASA budgeted dollars. NASA may not “own” it but they sure as hell pay for it.
So much “Shanking” going on with this on the House side and its shameful.
Why don’t they change Orion to cots milestones then?
Why does it remain cost plus???
Why isn’t SLS changed to cots too?
Does Boeing own the SLS hardware too?
Why or why not?
“Why is there air, Daddy”? asks the little girl.
“Why, that’s simple, honey: there’s air to blow up basketballs! and footballs!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
“And by the way, shame on Obama too… he could have made space a bigger priority than he did.”
Please tell us exactly how he could have done that.
Sure, behind the scenes in both the House and Senate Human Space Flight was never a true priority. Everything came back to climate change. Everything he does in the executive branch with respect to human space flight was always put up as a sacrificial lamb or a chip to trade away.
Obama could have simply said our three pillars at NASA are climate change, Commercial Crew, and SLS. He would have had bipartisan support.
Instead he used gimmicks and quite frankly, allowed people like Nelson, Shelby, Smith, and Mikulski to drive the NASA priorities.
NASA is in the executive branch but Obama has allowed congress to take over the policy. And we all know how good congress is, democrat or republican.
Roscosmos says Thank You very much for 490 millions dollars for the continue patronage of Russian workers. Boeing+SpaceX frustrated not getting the funding really need very badly to speed up commercial crew program by 2018.
Let them use some of their own money on development. They would like NASA to pay for the development and then sell it back to NASA. Somebody finally figured out that scam.
It is not a scam at all. In fact, SpaceX uses much of its NASA “revenue” for R&D into not only Dv2 but other parts of the company as well.
The only scam is the congressional one where people pretend to think that only Boeing and Lockheed can do this. Following your logic and being that Boeing is #1 in Corporate Welfare and LockMart is #4, why don’t they just fully fund SLS?
They all do the same thing, ask for development money and then charge the development again in cost of the product.
Negative Sir. Boeing and Lockheed do not re-invest profits into vehicles like SpaceX does. It isn’t even debatable really. Boeing and Lockheed Martin garner BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars, ie Corporate Welfare.
SpaceX has put much more of its own “skin in the game”. I derive this from my friends who work at 100 North Riverside Plaza. I can say the same for Lockheed (although not nearly as high sources)… and we all know ULA could run circles around both parents if mom and dad didn’t keep ULA grounded for life. Boeing and Lockheed just do not share the same passion like someone from SpaceX or other “NewSpace” companies.
However, if Boeing or Lockmart ever decided to take, say .75 of one percent of their “profit” and dump it into R&D for SLS and Orion, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Oh no! Not actual facts! Please sir! 🙂
That is not what I said! I said that nearly every government contractor will charge for the development and then charge it again when they start selling it to the government.
I really don’t think Boeing gives a rip about speeding up commercial crew.
It would only make SLS Orion look like the rip off that it is.
In fact, it is in Boeing’s interest to drag it out as long as possible.
As pointed out elsewhere, more money won’t speed up anything, unless perhaps it is sent to Europe for Orion.
We should have kept flying the Space Shuttle, maybe 2-3 times a year, just to bring up/return crew and cargo. Fly one configuration each time- a pallet for Orbital Replacement Units for ISS and a SpaceHab Single Module or an MPLM for supplies and science. Minimize cargo bay configuration changes; it also simplifies crew training. Yes, I am a Shuttle-hugger, damn proud!
Unfortunately such a call is years too late as soon as decision to stop flying Shuttle was made in 2004, that put into motion of closing down various parts and support services. Yes, it may have been a beast but damn it sure looked cool of a huge winged vehicle in orbit. And cool airplane like dashboard and windows too.
Keeping the shuttle flying would have eaten up billions of dollars that Ares I and Ares V needed to fund development. Now that Ares V has morphed into SLS, the billions are still needed, at least according to the politicians. That big sucking sound you hear is billions of dollars being spent by NASA for a HLV that will have such a low flight rate, it will make the shuttle look like a high flight rate launch vehicle.
So disappointing. This is all at the feet of Congress and to a lesser extent the President. Hopefully CC will get enough this year to keep the delay small.
One wonders how many examples of this senselessness exist throughout the larger budget.
We are typically more concerned with the obvious and very large money pits (e.g. the F-35) than smaller scale projects that get into years of delays and cost overruns because they aren’t being properly funded.
Who’s buying this NASA BS that more money would accelerate “commercial” crew? They can barely launch cargo to ISS, let alone crew.
Bolden once again showing the classy leadership which has been the hallmark of his tenure.
The Russians aren’t much better. Besides the somewhat recent, very public, failure of a Progress resupply mission to ISS, the Russians seem to always be flirting with disaster. The Russians have many near disasters that never see the light of day in the popular press. I’d rather take my chances on a US launch, thank you very much.
The current model of the Soyuz launch vehicle (the -U model) has something like a 97% reliability rate. The only US launch vehicles that come close are the Delta II and the Shuttle, and we don’t make one of those any more.
Actually, Atlas V’s success rate *is* better. With 54 successes out of 55 launches, that’s a 98.2% success rate. Delta IV does come close. With 29 successful launches out of 30 total, that’s a 96.7% success rate.
As much as I dislike the high cost of ULA and their past Air Force monopoly, they do have a quite impressive launch success rate.
Like I said, the Russians, not so much anymore. They have had several failures in recent years while ULA has only had two over the lifetime of the EELV program.
Who said the Atlas V was a US launcher? 😉
In fact, I was using figures from 2009; Atlas V has many successful launches under its belt since then. Id’ argue, though, that the difference between 98.2 and 96.7 per cent is probably not statistically significant when one of the vehicles ha sonly had 55 launches.
You’re looking at the situation incorrectly. It is true that more money would not accelerate commercial crew. Same as adding more money to SLS does not accelerate its development.
However, under-funding will slow down the pace of development, lack of funds means that work that could have gotten done if the funding existed would have to be put on hold.
He is not asking for more money to accelerate anything – he simply wants the level of funding that will allow it to progress without slowing down or stopping.
People, people… take a pill. This contract announcement is not news, and certainly not a good reason to engage in the usual partisan and armchair-astronaut sniping. Lamar Smith fully funded Commercial Crew. Both the House and Senate appopriators increased funding, albeit not as much as requested, within sequestration caps. The process isn’t over. For once stop bickering and ask your elected representatives to support a budget deal to free up a little more funding for NASA.
Years back noofqsc predicted that we would still be grounded now because those in CONgress and senate would be successful in delaying commercial crew because of its threat to SLS.
They have succeeded.
Comrade, May I have a ride?
How much!
I find little to chill out about.
My understanding is that the commercial crew contracts are still milestone driven. That is that the contractors only get the funding after they have completed a defined and agreed to development (can be design, documentation or actual build) milestone. Is this how it really works? Or is my understanding incorrect. If it is incorrect would NASA please clarify.
Has NASA provided an itemized list of FY16 commercial crew milestones for the SpaceX and Boeing contracts and the cost of each milestone? If so has anyone compared this to the amount NASA requested in FY16? This should be a simple PowerPoint presentation for which NASA headquarters excels at.
Also, someone either Gerstenmaier or Suffredini, has stated that once U.S. does have commercial crew NASA will still be buying seats from the Russians because they want to have assured access from multiple sources and they intimated that there would be Russians flying on U.S. commercial crew flights. Have the Russians agreed to this? Have the Russians agreed to pay for seats on U.S. commercial crew? Would this be a barter situation? To me there are a lot of unanswered questions that I wish the media covering NASA would pose and request definitive answers.
I’m fairly sure the contracts are based on payment on completion of milestones. But if NASA can’t pay, the company might stop working towards the next milestone, or delay/reschedule the work.
I’m not sure about the dollar figures for the milestones. Having worked with LMA on unmanned missions, I’ve noticed a habit of either restricting access to detailed budget information. That sort of thing is often regarded as proprietary. The bottom line is public, and NASA contract officers have access to the details, but not much more than that. I think this is a common practice in the aerospace industry.
As for continued use of Russian launches after commercial crew comes on line, since there are two US companies involved redundancy wouldn’t be a good reason. Regarding cost, I’m not sure. Does anyone remember how it was handled during the Shuttle-Mir missions? In unmanned spaceflight, a trade of services with no currency crossing oceans is a common approach.
Yes, the commercial crew contracts are milestone driven.
SpaceX CCtCap contract (with milestones):
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/…
Boeing CCtCap documents:
http://www.nasa.gov/content…
Boeing CCtCap contract:
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/d…
Boeing CCtCap milestones:
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/d…
The dollar amounts are redacted, unfortunately. However, there is a great deal of unredacted information about what each milestone’s requirements are, and the projected completion date of that milestone.
Your questions are appropriate and you should know that a little research will answer all of your questions in detail- in mind numbingly boring detail.
As to continued purchase after we have the two planned domestic methods of launching space passengers- link, please? Where did you see that?
And finally even if true purchasing an ‘as-needed’ seat or two from the Russians probably keep their mission control running which is to our great advantage. As others have pointed out the great Russian Empire appears to be still born.
SpaceMunkie you are wrong. Boeing on record saying they will not spend any large amount of development money unless they get NASA CCtcap contract award 4.2 billion dollars and invest only10% of there own money. SpaceX launch Dragon v1 6 times to ISS and May 2014 unveiled Dragon v2 to everyone. They have experience to build,launch and recover Space Capsules, invested 390million to 1billion dollars own money and ask only 2.6 billion dollars from NASA for CCtcap contract award. NASA need this capability to transport NASA astronauts to ISS. So they are willing to invest money in 2 providers which is Boeing and SpaceX to achieve this goal in commercial crew program and not a scam.
SpaceMunkie Orion space capsule really is paid in full and own by NASA. NASA awarded contract to Lockheed in 2006 to build the Orion space capsule and later 2011 rewrite the Orion contract to Lockheed under SLS by U.S Senate to continued the program and finish it.
While I would like to see a more responsive government, I don’t think Id like to see professional ‘managers’ with no political constituency running anything.
It’s the way democracy works, that’s all. We can wail and gnash our teeth because our particular ox is being gored at the expense of someone else’s program but that’s the way it works when you live in a huge country with disparate interests.
It is also true that the money in elections these days has separated the politicians from the people but that’s another topic.
oh, please! You actually want sanity!
Our great country is so incredibly rich that a little foresight and patience could accumulate sufficient money to fund the government partially through investment dividend.
We’d have to give up warring all over the planet, and we’d need a rational energy policy.
Never happen.
Nonsense. The numbers show that Congress has provided more than half the requested funding, yet NASA continues to carry more than one contractor. If ending reliance on Soyuz was the primary goal and -if- progress has been funding constrained, then NASA should have down selected the number of contractors to fit the available budget. Congress didn’t mandate continued use of Soyuz – that is Charlie’s choice.
Realistically though, with all the milestone delays due to development challenges that have happened, how would additional funding have accelerated the schedule? Clearly NASA and their contractors were overly optimistic in thier original schedule estimates. Nothing new or even that bad about doing so, but trying to divert blame to Congressional funding politics is just disengenuos.
By underfunding Commercial Crew, Congress has effectively mandated that we continue to rely on Soyuz.
The largest discrepancies in the funding was at the beginning of CCiCap, which is when the funding could best have been applied to speed up the design process. Development issues / delays are then easier to absorb into the overall schedule because the development and testing process began sooner.
I realize it is popular to blame Congress for this. Please note, however, that NASA selected Boeing CST at a cost of $900M higher than SNC’s bid using Dreamchaser spacecraft for commercial crew. Gerstenmaier said he made that choice because of schedule risk. Well, look where we are. We’re going to lose the schedule to the right because we don’t have the budget, yet that budget would have been $900M less if Gerstenmaier had followed a sane bidding environment and rewarded the lowest bidders. Please compare $900M of NASA preference versus $490M due to “Congressional underfunding”.
Too many variables to rationally respond. One, for example, is the assumption that had NASA down-selected that Congress wouldn’t have shorted the single program.
The money would still be allocated by Senators and representatives with constituencies to represent. Do you think any change in how NASA is managed would change design by Congressional subcommittee chairs’ staffers?
Instead of funding NASA’s Commercial Crew, Congress is funding the Russian space program.