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ULA and SpaceX trade jabs

Jeff Foust — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 13:45:55 +0000

While there have been no major developments in the legal, political, and public relations battles among SpaceX, United Launch Alliance (ULA), and the Air Force regarding competition for Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) class launches, the two companies traded jabs on Thursday in the form of court filings and advertisements.

A spokesperson for SpaceX said Thursday that the company filed a motion with the Court of Federal Claims on Wednesday regarding its suit against the Air Force, seeking to amend their original complaint. The amendment deals with allegations of inflated prices for RD-180 engines raised by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in a statement last Friday.

SpaceX argues, in its motion, that McCain’s statement shows that ULA and the Air Force failed to provide and certify EELV costs before the Air Force awarded a “block buy” EELV contract to the company in late 2013. “Had ULA complied with its legal obligation to provide certified cost and pricing data for the RD-180 engines and other rocket component parts, it would have been forced to confront the fact that at least one of its suppliers is fleecing the United States taxpayer,” SpaceX states in its motion. “The Air Force would not have been able to determine that ULA’s prices were fair and reasonable, and the Air Force would have rejected ULA’s proposal and not entered into the December 2013 sole source contract.”

ULA, meanwhile, is responding in the court of public opinion, so to speak, with a series of advertisements emphasizing the company’s track record in launching critical government satellites. The company released the second in that series, which it calls “Reliability over Recognition.” (The first, released last week, was dubbed “Results over Rhetoric.”)

“As ULA CEO Mr. [Michael] Gass has publicly stated,” ULA spokesperson Jessica Rye wrote in an email accompanying the ad, “there has been misinformation and we want to make clear that there is a lot at stake when launch services provide critical national security support to our military and first responders and help predict dangerous weather events.”

SpaceX court filings offer new details on EELV protest

Jeff Foust — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 12:48:14 +0000

While SpaceX decided not to post its official court filing on its “Freedom To Launch” website, as originally promised, the document was available through the court’s filing system by early Tuesday. A copy of the 36-page document is available here.

The document reiterates many of the points made by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Friday when he announced the suit, from concerns about being locked out of competing for EELV contracts to concerns about reliance on United Launch Alliance’s (ULA’s) Atlas V rocket and its Russian-made RD-180 engine. “The ULA monopoly has led to murky contracts, reliance on Russian suppliers, and spiraling costs,” the document states.

It does, though, offer some additional details and clarifications, particularly regarding the timing of SpaceX’s action. While Musk said Friday that SpaceX learned of the block buy contract only last month, the filing acknowledges that the block buy contract was executed back in December. Instead, the filing says several recent events triggered the suit, including what it claims is a move by the Air Force not to compete future “single core” EELV launches because of the block buy. “[O]n April 17,2014, SpaceX learned that the Air Force decided not to compete future Single Core Launch Vehicles that SpaceX is qualified to launch because the Air Force has an ‘existing 36-core contractual requirement’ with ULA,” the filing states.

SpaceX believes that its Falcon 9 rocket, which is now eligible to compete for EELV launches since it has delivered the data for all three of its certification launches (although is not yet formally certified), could launch many of the payloads that would be launched under the block buy contract. “But for the Air Force’s improper actions set forth in this Complaint, SpaceX would compete for and win many, if not all, full and open competitions for Single Core Launch Vehicles, including those that the Air Force plans to order in FY20l5,” it states.

SpaceX acknowledges that it doesn’t know what those payloads are, but argues that since the Air Force hasn’t disclosed what missions will launch on the vehicles purchased under the block buy, the service can’t block SpaceX from competing for them. It notes that the Air Force has set aside seven launches in fiscal years 2017â€“19 for SpaceX, but has not formally explained why SpaceX is not qualified for the estimated 15 other EELV single-core launches planned during that period. “The fact is SpaceX is qualified to compete today for all of the Single Core Launch Vehicle missions scheduled to launch in FY2017-FY2019,” it claims (emphasis in original).

In the filing, SpaceX asks the Court of Federal Claims to find that the Air Force’s sole-source award to ULA violates federal mandates for “full and open competition,” and that it “permanently enjoin the Air Force from procuring any Single Core Launch Vehicles on a sole source basis without first releasing to the public a valid justification and approval determination for the specific launch vehicle to be ordered.” The Air Force, it argues “would suffer no hardship – indeed it would benefit – by promoting competition” while SpaceX would suffer “great hardship” if it is unable to compete for those launches.

NASA authorization bill clears Science Committee, but with a few changes

Jeff Foust — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 14:19:51 +0000

The outcome was never really in doubt: the House Science Committee approved HR 2687, the NASA Authorization Act of 2013, on a straight party-line vote. All 22 Republican members voted for the legislation, and all but one Democrat voted against it (Rep. Frederica Wilson of Florida did not vote.) The vote came after Democrats proposed a series of amendments to change various aspects of the bill, including several to increase authorized funding levels for various parts of the agency, as well as another bid by Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) to replace the bill with a Democratic-backed version. Nearly all of those amendments were defeated.

“I want to make clear that I donâ€™t object to the bill simply because it is a Republican bill,” said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), ranking member of the full committee. “This Committee has a long history of bipartisan support for NASA, and Republican Members have in the past been fierce advocates for a robust and ambitious space program for the nation. Yet this NASA Authorization bill breaks with that proud tradition, and I frankly am at a loss to understand why.”

“The NASA Authorization Act offers us the opportunity to set goals and establish priorities for the greatest space program in the world. That is our responsibilityâ€”to take the initiative, make decisions and govern,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the committee. He reiterated previous statements by other Republican members of the committee that the authorization bill should adhere to spending caps, an argument that Democrats have rejected.

A few amendments did get approved, mostly covering relatively minor topics rather than bigger policy issues. Smith introduced, and won passage on a voice vote, a package of amendments that includes a revised Section 215, which in the original version of the bill called for the use of “cost-type” contracts for future rounds of the commercial crew program. That provision had raised the ire of committee vice-chair Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who also worried the section gave advisory committees like the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) too much power. The revised Section 215 focuses exclusively on ASAP, asking NASA to submit a report on what ASAP advice it intends or doesn’t intend to follow, and why. Other items in that same amendment call for greater use of the ISS for science and technology development, as well as calling for a student content to name NASA’s overall space exploration program and the Space Launch System specifically.

Democrats did win one victory in the amendments: one proposed by Rep. Johnson to remove Section 711 passed on a 20-to-19 vote. That section would have fixed a six-year term for the NASA administrator, and allow the deputy administrator to serve as acting administrator for no more than 45 days. Three Republicansâ€”Rohrabacher, James Sensenbrenner (WI), and Steve Stockman (TX)â€”joined 17 Democrats in approving the amendment.

Perhaps the most controversial amendment proposed by committee members never made it to a vote. Edwards withdrew her amendment to create a Center Realignment and Closure Commission with an emphasis on studying whether the Marshall Space Flight Center should be closed. After describing her amendment late in the markup, which she said was prompted by the lower funding levels in the overall bill, she said she would be withdrawing it. She denied the amendments were designed to be “deeply personal” to members of the committee, such as Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), whose district includes Marshall, and instead called on House members to take a more bipartisan approach like that in the Senate.

Brooks got the last word on the topic a little later in the markup, saying that Goddard had “swollen” in recent years. “I believe this gentlelady is proposing this amendment in response on perceived attacks on her district, but this is just not true,” he said, referring to cuts in Earth sciences funding in the authorization bill. The Edwards amendment “should have been, and in my judgement would have been, rejected.”

NASA budget: asteroid mission efforts, funding commercial crew, and restructuring education

Jeff Foust — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:05:21 +0000

At first glance, the administration’s fiscal year 2014 budget proposal doesn’t look that different from the agency’s 2013 proposal: both request nearly the same amount of money ($17.715 billion in FY14 versus $17.711B in FY13) with only modest variations amount the key accounts. (OF course, NASA ended up with considerably less than it requested: about $16.6 billion overall once the final accounting for sequestration and rescission is taken into account.) Here’s the budget at a glance:

Account	FY14 request ($M)
Science	$5,017.8
Space Technology	$742.6
Aeronautics	$565.7
Exploration	$3,915.5
Space Operations	$3,882.9
Education	$94.2
Cross Agency Support	$2,850.3
Construction	$609.4
Inspector General	$37.0
TOTAL	$17,715.4

The highest profile initiative is beginning work on a mission to retrieve a small asteroid and return it to cislunar space, where it will be visited by astronauts on an SLS/Orion mission, possibly the already scheduled EM-2 mission in 2021. The overall asteroid mission initiative gets $105 million in the budget request, although only $78 million would be directly related the mission itself: $38 million in space technology to work the solar electric propulsion system the robotic retrieval spacecraft would use, and $40 million in advanced research and development in exploration to encounter asteroids, including dealing with “uncooperative targets”. In addition, there is $7 million in space technology to study asteroid impact mitigation strategies, and $20 million in science to improve asteroid searches.

The program is spread out over three directorates, rather than consolidated into one, because the program is still in its earliest stages. “We decided to preferentially invest in the kinds of technologies we needed anyway,” a senior NASA official, speaking on background, said prior to the budget’s public rollout. Solar electric propulsion, dealing with uncooperative targets, and asteroid searches were individually key programs, the official explained, that could be used for other applications regardless of how the asteroid retrieval mission pans out. The official added NASA hopes to get the overall cost of the mission below the $2.6-billion estimate in the Keck Institute for Space Studies report last year, but declined to say by how much, noting that NASA has not yet performed a mission concept review, planned for this summer.

The budget also includes “full funding” for both the SLS and Orion programs, as well as for Commercial Crew, where NASA is seeking $821 million. In the last two budgets, NASA has sought over $800 million for the program but received only a fraction of that: $406 million in FY12 and under $490 million (post-rescission and -sequestration) in FY13. The NASA official emphasized that this full funding was needed in FY14 in order to keep the program on track for beginning flights in 2017. “You can’t hold 2017 at $525 [million]” in 2014 and beyond, the official said, referring to the amount Congress provided for the program in FY13 before rescission and sequestration.

One other change in the FY14 budget is a revamp of the agency’s education program. As part of a broader administration initiative in STEM education, NASA’s education efforts are being consolidated with about a dozen other agencies, with the Department of Education, NSF, and the Smithsonian taking lead roles. That results in a lower topline for the programâ€”$94 million versus a pre-sequester $125 million for FY13â€”but the official said there would still be a strong emphasis on education programs at NASA, and expected other agencies to make use of NASA capabilities. “They’re not only going to want to partner with us, they’re going to need to,” the official said. NASA believes it could end up with a more effective program in the long run by taking advantage of the broader reach of those other agencies under this initiative.

Senate Commerce Committee to revisit commercial spaceflight next week

Jeff Foust — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:30:48 +0000

Last month’s successful test flight by SpaceX to the International Space Station was a major milestone for commercial spaceflight, and also for public and political perceptions of the industry. The Senate Commerce Committee will reexamine the industry in a hearing Wednesday, June 20, titled “Risks, Opportunities, and Oversight of Commercial Space”. The hearing, according to the committee’s announcement, will examine the commercial space industry and review ISS commercial cargo and crew efforts. Scheduled witness include:

Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations;
Pam Melroy, a former NASA astronaut who now works at the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation;
Gerald Dillingham of the Government Accountability Office;
Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace; and
Michael Lopez-Alegria, another former astronaut who is now president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

This likely won’t be the only hearing on commercial spaceflight this summer. Last week, in a statement praising the agreement between NASA and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), a key House appropriator, on the future of NASA’s commercial crew program, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), chairman of the House Science Committee, said his committee would hold an oversight hearing on that program “later this summer”.

Could a contracting change jeopardize commercial crew?

Jeff Foust — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:57:58 +0000

[Based on a longer post at NewSpace Journal]

NASA’s Commercial Crew Development, or CCDev, program has so far relied on Space Act Agreements (SAAs), giving both the agency and participating companies greater flexibility to make progress on those systems. However, NASA officials indicated Wednesday that in future CCDev rounds they may shift to a somewhat more traditional contract, a move that has alarmed industry.

At a commercial crew forum held by NASA at the Kennedy Space Center yesterday, CCDev program officials talked about their plans for the next phase of the program, which would come next year. The “Integrated Design” phase would last two years and bring participating companies up through the critical design review on their systems, the last step before starting actual construction. This two-year phase would be followed by a Development, Test, Evaluation, and Certification (DTEC) phase, which would also include the initial flights to the International Space Station.

NASA’s original intent, according to Brent Jett, a former astronaut serving as deputy program manager for NASA’s commercial crew program, was to use an SAA again for the Integrated Design phase. “As the team dug a little bit further into the Space Act Agreement, we did find several key limitations,” he said. The biggest one, he said, is that NASA cannot mandate requirements under an SAA, including for crew safety, but only provide them as a reference for industry. “Even if industry chose to design to those requirements, NASA is not allowed to tie any of the milestones in an SAA to compliance with those requirements,” he said. “That means NASA cannot accept the verification of those requirements and certify the system the way we need to for commercial crew under a Space Act Agreement.” (COTS used something of a loophole in those rules that allow the agency to levy safety requirements when a NASA facility—the ISS—was involved; it would not apply for other phases of flight, including launch and reentry.)

NASA’s proposed new approach for the next CCDev round, according to commercial crew program manager Ed Mango, “combines the best elements of an SAA with the features of a contract that wil allow NASA to approve the tailoring of requirements and the certification of a vehicle.” This “non-traditional contract” would continue to use milestone-based payments and also exempt companies from the cost accounting standards of the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR). “We believe that we are much closer to an SAA in our approach than we are to a traditional contract,” he said.

Representatives of industry present at the forum strongly objected to this proposed approach, though, largely out of concerns that, even with the cost accounting exception, adhering to the FAR would be very expensive. “Instead of taking an American flag to the station, we should have taken the FAR to the station and left it up there,” said Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace, referring to an American flag flown on the first shuttle mission that was left behind by the last shuttle crew, to be retrieved by the first commercial crew vehicle to visit the station. “You can’t take a traditional approach and expect anything but the traditional results, which has been broken budgets and not fielding any flight hardware.”

Others challenged the NASA conclusion that an SAA could not be used for commercial crew. Bobby Block of SpaceX noted that his company had an option on its COTS award—not exercised by NASA—to develop a crew capability as part of an SAA. Brett Alexander, former president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said NASA should provide more documentation to support its conclusion that an SAA would not work for CCDev, given that past analyses, by both NASA’s Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office, have concluded that SAAs are suitable for this. “[NASA’s Office of the] General Counsel has not divulged what its legal reasoning is,” he said, “and I think they need to do that—not a couple charts, not things that you brief, but a legal brief that says, ‘here’s why,’ so that we can have that discussion.”

Mango and Jett said they were open to suggestions and feedback from industry on their proposed strategy for the next CCDev round. At the same time, NASA released yesterday a “Sources Sought Synopsis”, required under the FAR as the first step in the next phase of the CCDev program if they proceed under their proposed contract strategy. “I don’t want people to think that we’re locked in to this idea of a contract,” he said, but “we need to work in parallel so that we can continue to move forward.”

Bill Nelson and a third shuttle mission

Jeff Foust — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 12:38:38 +0000

In comments yesterday, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) suggested that NASA might have to forego the additional shuttle mission included in the NASA authorization bill because of problems with the external tank currently mated to the shuttle Discovery. “They do have an extra tank, because they always have that third shuttle flight that we have authorized in the NASA bill,” he said to reporters yesterday in a brief exchange about the status of the mission (video of which is available from Central Florida News 13.) “And if worst came to worst, and they felt like that this tank was not safe, they would stand down and, at that point, would only fly two more shuttle flights instead of the three that are authorized.”

NASA shuttle managers will provide an update on the status the next shuttle mission this afternoon, although there’s been no indication that they are considering such a tank swap, instead electing to reinforce aluminum brackets in the tank, where several cracks had been discovered.

Op-eds say the darndest things

Jeff Foust — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 11:41:11 +0000

Homer Hickam claims he knows how to fix NASA in three easy steps, as he describes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. First, he says, “suck it up and fund SpaceX” and other companies to take over access to low Earth orbit. Second, “convince the president to install new management at NASA.” Why? Hickam believes the president “has opted out of the decision-making process” and turned things over to presidential science advisor John Holdren and the administrator and deputy administrator of NASA, people Hickam clearly isn’t happy with. (He curiously claims that NASA administrator Charles Bolden, a former astronaut, “has never led anything more complex than a six-person shuttle crew”; he and the Journal’s editors may have forgotten that Bolden is a retired two-star Marine Corps general whose last posting was as commander of the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, which presumably is more complex than a shuttle crew.) The third step: “order up a mission beyond Earth orbit” analogous to the Apollo missions to the Moon; he specifically suggests a base at the Moon’s south pole. How much will that cost? “You don’t have to add a cent to the paltry amount NASA gets,” he claims, just point it in the right direction “and watch its excellent engineers pull it off.” He notably doesn’t give a specific timetable for establishing that base on NASA’s current budget.

North of the border, Matt Gurney of Canada’s National Post is worried the US is risking the expertise NASA has built up over the years with its current plans and funding levels. “Under President Obama, NASA has become an afterthought. There is no plan in place to return to the moon or Mars, no manned missions planned to the asteroid belt,” he claims (although the president did set a goal of a human mission to a near Earth asteroid by 2025 in his April 15 speech at the Kennedy Space Center). He also oddly warns that “NASA might need a continuing resolution to stay afloat”: NASA, like the rest of the federal government, has in fact had to use CRs to “stay float” since the fiscal year started almost two and a half months ago. Unlike Hickam, Gurney doesn’t offer a three-step (or any-step, for that matter) solution to the perceived problem, beyond worrying that the current policy is “crippling Americaâ€™s ability to explore – and if necessary, wage war in – space.”

Senate hearing on implementation of NASA authorization act today

Jeff Foust — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 10:46:36 +0000

The Senate Commerce Committee is moving ahead with plans for a hearing this morning titled “Transition and Implementation: The NASA Authorization Act of 2010″. Presidential science advisor John Holdren is scheduled to testify initially, followed by a panel featuring NASA CFO Beth Robinson and GAO’s Cristina Chaplain and Susan A. Poling. The committee hasn’t released any other information about the hearing topics.

Florida Today is hoping that the hearing emphasizes the need to fully fund NASA in FY2011. $300 million, the approximate difference in the agency’s overall budget between 2010 and 2011, “is less than a pittance in the mammoth federal budget” the editorial claims, but for the agency “it’s a must-have down payment on its future.” However, as the Orlando Sentinel reports, “almost no one thinks NASA will get the full $19 billion” in the original budget proposal (and authorization act); the only question is how big the cuts are, and how they’re distributed.

NASA authorization bill postponed, and other reaction

Jeff Foust — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:13:32 +0000

Space News reported late this morning that a vote on the NASA authorization bill by the full House now appears unlikely before the August recess. While individual lobbying may have helped play a role, other factors also contributed, including a letter by 13 House members from California–all Democrats–to science committee chairman Rep. Bart Gordon that technology development and commercial crew program funding be restored in the bill. The bill also required some modifications, replacing a $100-million-a-year loan guarantee program for commercial crew with a similarly-sized grant program after the Congressional Budget Office raised concerns about the long-term cost of the loan guarantee program. Making those changes while still moving the bill through under suspension of the rules may not have been possible, Space News reports, because of opposition from California and other House members.

While action on the bill may be postponed, organizations and companies continue to take stances both in favor and against the legislation. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) released a letter supporting the House NASA authorization bill, calling it a “viable way forward for NASA and America’s human space flight program”, while at the same time the union’s web site posted a note citing a recent report that it claims “slams space privatization”. However, two other unions, the American Federation of Government Employees and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, opposed the bill in a joint letter, in part because of plans to bring it to the floor with minimal debate. “This kind of process pushes the arrogant perspective that parliamentary tactics can be used to supplant thoughtful legislative deliberation.”

Meanwhile, despite considerable differences between the House and Senate versions of the NASA authorization legislation, Lockheed Martin indicates that it supports both bills. There’s a good reason for that, of course: both include funding for a crewed vehicle much like, if not identical to, Orion. “We commend the cooperation between Congress and the Administration in achieving this important step to assure continued U.S. leadership in space,” Lockheed’s John Karas said in a statement. Just how much cooperation there is between the two branches of government, or even between the House and Senate, is an open question.