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Commercial Crew

26 Comments

There’s going to be an announcement at 4PM on NASA TV. Jay Barbree says it’s going to be Boeing and SpaceX. Which if true means two capsules, no wings.

[Update a while later]

Here‘s another similar report from the WaPo.

[Update a few minutes later]

Joel Achenbach has more, including the (bizarre, to me) part of the story about ULA getting a new engine for the Atlas from Blue Origin.

[Late-morning update]

OK, now James Dean is reporting that there will be two full awards, not “leader-follower.” I wonder if they have the money for that with a CR?

[Update just before noon]

Alex Brown has a story at National Journal. Annoyingly, everyone is calling them space “taxis” when, at least for NASA, it’s more of a rental-car model (if you insisted on a new car every time you rented). Also, everyone’s regurgitating NASA’s 2017 date. I’d at least note that SpaceX could possibly fly as early as next year, unless there is something else on the critical path than abort tests. Final point:

Boeing’s program is reported to be further along in its development goals.

I think that Pasztor story is BS. How can Boeing be in the lead when they haven’t even flown anything? I love this:

But people familiar with the process said Boeing, with its greater experience as a NASA contractor, appears to have become the favorite partly because it has met earlier development goals in the same program on time and on budget.

Everyone hits their budget. It’s a fixed-price contract. And who cares if they’re hitting program goals, if those are trivial goals (like design reviews)? How anyone can think that a paper vehicle is ahead of one that’s going to have its abort tests in the next few months?

[Update a few minutes before the announcement]

Here’s the link.

[Update after the announcement]

Well, no surprises, except amounts. Here’s Eric Berger’s take.

[Update a while later]

Here is Jeff Foust’s story.

26 thoughts on “Commercial Crew”

  2. My take; it won’t be two awards. Oh, they’ll say it is, but it won’t be. It’ll be one and a bit; one contender gets the lion’s share, the other gets a partial measure for the appearance of maintaining competition.

    And, the real winner, the one to get the lion’s share of the funding, will be the worst choice of the three contenders; Boeing. (The contender that’s received the largest share of commercial crew funding, yet built nothing…). I’ve been predicting that Boeing would come out on top for quite some time now.

    I absolutely hope to be wrong on both counts, and if I am, I’ll be delighted to admit it.

  3. Figure that Boeing pays these journalists to put out these steaming love pieces? Or is it just laziness copying some Boeing press release verbatim on a topic the writer really isn’t interested in? The framing in those articles as to why Boeing may be favored is just ridiculous.

    I’ll be doing my heavy breathing too, to hold back my anticipated need to puke.

  4. well, Boeing and SpaceX as expected. I haven’t heard a breakout of contract ceilings yet, just the 6.8B$ total between the two of them.

    1. Ok, not bad.
      Boeing 4.2B$ contract ceiling
      SpaceX 2.6B$ contract ceiling

      Contracts have the same base requirements: 6 missions, at least 1 with a human on it; + special deliverables proposed by CTRs.

  5. Bolden sure is spending a lot of time reading off marketing materials for SLS and Orion, during a commercial crew press conference.

    1. That’s because Bolden wants to remind Senator Shelby, et al., that he is doing Congress’ bidding, while trying to also run a space launch program that is realistic.

      1. We should all thank him for doing it too. It’s worth almost any price to get this through. When SpaceX is ferrying crew regularly to the ISS and doing it cheaper and more reliably than anyone else, then it’ll be possible to leverage those realities to get some more sanity into the system. For now we need to take what we can get.

  6. The way Charlie Bolden is talking out his ass in the first five minutes of the press conference one would think it was Orion and the SLS that won the commercial crew contracts. What an idiot. I turned it off and this will be one press conference I won’t be tortured with any longer. When is NASA getting a real administrator again?

  8. $6.8 billion total, $6.7 billion for Boeing, and $100 million for SpaceX at a rate of $1 a year for 100 million years.

  9. Boeing wins 4.2 billion
    SpaceX wins 2.6 billion

    Each has to do 1 test flight and then 2 – 6 additional flights. Anyone want to hazard a guess on how many flights Boeing will have to do (2) and how many for SpaceX (6).

    1. Based on Kathy’s responses to questions it sounds like the milestone awards for the flights are per flight, and other awards based on meeting non-flight milestones, i.e. Boeing won’t get the full 4.2B$ if they don’t deliver all the flights + special studies.

      How the pre-flight milestone awards are structured between the two contracts will be interesting if it isn’t the same (in dollars) for both. I can see paying more for flight milestones commensurate with the cost of the launcher and capsule, but pre-flight design review and certification milestone awards shouldn’t be that different between the two contracts, in my layman’s estimation.

      TLDR: I wonder how front loaded these contracts are

    1. It’s similar to the SpaceX and Orbital CRS deal, they evaluated each proposition separately and decided whether they were worth funding and if so funded them. Which I think is fine, especially when they’re trying to initially procure systems.

  11. I almost wish SNC had gotten the money instead of SpaceX, since SpaceX is already pretty far along in development and has said that they intend to continue with or without NASA money.

  12. Boeing get $4.2b shuffling paper. ‘Nuff about them. Too bad for Dream Chaser which needed the money.

    What about SpaceX and the $2.6b award? Six flights leaves them about $2b which is not going into Dragon 2. They will probably use it for more launch facilities, finish up Raptor and tooling for the MCT.

  13. Doesn’t anyone recall that there was an unexercised COTS-D option back at the time of the original COTS awards (which SpaceX signed) that would have performed this very same demo as SpaceX will now get $2.6B for? What changed in the past 7 years to cause the price to balloon six fold or more? And even more for Boeing…

  14. “Prior to the announcement at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA faced conflicting pressures from the White House and senior House Republicans. From the time the Obama administration shook up NASA’s bureaucracy by proposing commercial space taxis, the agency has been keen to maintain competition. But over the years, congressional leaders have crafted legislative language and otherwise urged Mr. Bolden and his top managers to pick just one contractor for this phase of the effort, to avoid redundant spending.”
    Sigh.

  15. Seems that this would be an good opportunity for SpaceX to clean Boeing’s clock, if (as most of us believe) they have a much better product. What’s going to happen in two years when SpaceX has an operational crew ship and Boeing is still writing reports?

      1. Ken, that just might work; a paper CST-100 would work very well, IMHO, with an engineless launch vehicle (Atlas5); there would be no performance hit whatsoever.

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