On Friday NASA hosted a ceremony recognizing Armadillo Aerospace for winning Level One of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, one of the agency’s Centennial Challenges prizes. There were congratulatory speeches, the presentation of an oversized check, and photo opportunities. Mixed in with all this were some new announcements about commercialization efforts by NASA by administrator Mike Griffin, who popped in to give a brief speech during the event. (“I apologize I can’t really stay longer,” he said. “I’m not actually one to pop into a ceremony, offer up a bunch of congratulatory platitudes, and hand out a big check. I think that’s Ed McMahon at Publishers’ Clearinghouse.”)
Griffin called parabolic flight services, like those provided by Zero Gravity Corporation, “another real opportunity for us to turn to the commercial sector to meet our requirements,” in this case for reduced gravity research and related applications, a market Zero-G had been trying for some time to access before winning a NASA contract early this year. Griffin said that NASA has completed several flight tests with Zero-G to see if their service can meet NASA’s needs for flight experiments; those test flights included several experiments funded under NASA SBIRs.
“Tests aren’t yet complete, but project managers are confident that Zero-G can meet our needs,” Griffin said. “Thus, we’re planning for the transition of all microgravity flight activities from the NASA C-9 to commercial aircraft.” The C-9 will be retained for space shuttle training work, and as a backup to Zero-G, but Griffin said that “our primary path will be commercial.”
Griffin’s announcement of the commercialization of parabolic flight services came after he discussed another commercialization effort within NASA, purchasing suborbital flight services from emerging companies for scientific research or even astronaut training. Griffin spoke the same day as the deadline for two requests for information on human-tended suborbital science and other research. There has been some concern in the industry that NASA was dragging its heels on this, particularly after one of its biggest proponents, associate administrator Alan Stern, left NASA earlier this year. His replacement, Ed Weiler, appeared to some to be less than enthused about the concept.
Griffin, though, indicated that he continued to support the idea of purchasing such services when companies start flying. “When the capability becomes available, we will purchase seats for various science payloads, microgravity experiments, and perhaps even astronaut training,” he said. “We’re not interested in doing ‘junk science’ just to fly it, and we’re not interested in subsidizing suborbital space tourism development as we are, in the same fashion, doing with COTS… But we do plan to leverage this new capability when it emerges to improve the science that we can conduct as we do today on sounding rocket missions or to lower our costs. You should see more about this initiative in next year’s budget request.”
That interest in purchasing parabolic and suborbital flight services, though, does not extend to one popular proposal in the entrepreneurial space community: accelerating the option in the COTS program for crew transportation, known as Capability D. “I’ve been asked on many occasions for my opinion on commercial crew transportation to ISS,” Griffin said. He said that commercial cargo transportation is “our more critical need”, given the lack of cargo alternatives to the station once the shuttle is retired, but that NASA can continue to acquire crew transportation from Russia.
“While I certainly wish I had more money to invest in developing COTS crew capability—along with many other things I wish I had more money for—I think it’s unwise to raid other accounts to increase our bet on COTS crew capability,” he said. Advocates of COTS-D, though, will likely note that the $400 million NASA will spend on the two-year Mars Science Laboratory launch delay—to apparently be paid for by raiding the accounts of other Mars and planetary missions—would be more than enough to fund the Capability D option in SpaceX’s existing Space Act agreement.
Heaven forbid Griffin should cancel a project screaming for it in favor of a potential long-term economical manned/cargo LEO solution with more than double the maximum crew capacity of Soyuz, and nearly so of Orion.
Penny wise and pound foolish, as usual.
“He said that commercial cargo transportation is “our more critical needâ€, given the lack of cargo alternatives to the station once the shuttle is retired, but that NASA can continue to acquire crew transportation from Russia.”
Griffin’s statement is just factually incorrect. Even without COTS, there are multiple alternatives for ISS cargo transport existing and coming online: Progress, ATV, and HTV. COTS will add two more.
But without COTS D or its equivalent, there’s only one crew transport option, Soyuz. Given Soyuz’s recent reentry issues, given that Ares I/Orion continues to move to the right, and given that some ISS failure modes require a human presence onboard to prevent ISS loss, COTS D is arguably more critical to the ISS than COTS A-C.
Forget whether it’s the right thing to do from an industry perspective. It’s the right thing to do from an ISS perspective. Holding back COTS D just to preserve a rationale for Ares I/Orion puts the U.S. human space flight program at great and unnecessary risk.
FWIW…
We can only hope that the new NASA administrator will get behind COTS-D and cancell Ares for something less expensive such as Direct.
I see the children are out in force on this. Do you people actually understand anything in the real world ?
QUIT whining !
[…] addendum to yesterday’s post about NASA administrator Mike Griffin’s speech Friday on the space agen…. Since the speech was part of a ceremony recognizing Armadillo Aerospace for winning the largest […]
DocM
We should cancel MSL? So you would throw away a 1.6 billion investment just to save 400 million? Isn’t that penny-wise and pound foolish?
Anon
Is Griffin factually incorrect as you say? Or is ISS cargo truly the more critical need?
There are only two cargo craft currently operational besides the Shuttle today and both can only dock at the ISS Zvezda module, so neither one can transfer some of the bulky kinds of cargo to the ISS which the Shuttle can. Only the Japanese HTV which will berth at the ISS Harmony module can fill that role and the HTV has yet to fly.
So aside from the Shuttle, there is one vehicle operational today which can transport crew to the ISS and no vehicle which can transport all the cargo needs of the ISS. Sound to me like Griffin is right after all, cargo is the more critical need for ISS.
In conclusion
As much as I think Griffin screwed up the lunar architecture, it seems clear to me that Griffin never intended for Orion to support ISS. The Ares I + Orion is grossly oversized and inefficient for the ISS mission. I think that’s why Griffin supported COTS in the first place.
If Griffin were to continue as NASA administrator (unlikely as that might be) I believe he would support COTS D once the cargo-only COTS proves successfull. That way Griffin could save even more money from ISS support which he wants to divert to his lunar plan.
“We should cancel MSL? So you would throw away a 1.6 billion investment just to save 400 million? Isn’t that penny-wise and pound foolish?”
But he wants to spend the money on a paper project, and paper projects are always better than actual projects, so how can COTS-D fail?
“There are only two cargo craft currently operational besides the Shuttle today and both can only dock at the ISS Zvezda module, so neither one can transfer some of the bulky kinds of cargo to the ISS which the Shuttle can. Only the Japanese HTV which will berth at the ISS Harmony module can fill that role and the HTV has yet to fly.
So aside from the Shuttle, there is one vehicle operational today which can transport crew to the ISS and no vehicle which can transport all the cargo needs of the ISS.”
This is a red herring. HTV is scheduled start flying next year (2009). Even if delayed, HTV is very far along in development and is highly likely fly before or shortly after Shuttle is scheduled to retire in September 2010. (HTV can even launch on EELVs if the H-II launcher has issues.)
The same cannot be said about the lead times associated with a COTS D vehicle. Again, there are multiple capabilities existing and coming online for ISS cargo transport (to both the American and Russian sides). A backup for crew transport is still the gaping hole.
FWIW…
If you want to increase the flight rate for cargo launches, it would seem, that getting more humans into space would be the way to do it.
The more mouths to feed in space the more cargo launches needed to feed them. I would think COT-D would be a good start.
Bigelow will need both human and cargo launches, COTS and COTS-D, is not only a help to NASA, but it will help America develope space more in general.