Commercial LEO Destinations Development

[AmigaClone]

The ISS can clearly accommodate 12+ month missions because it has already done so.  Yet, no long duration missions are currently planned on the ISS.  Why? – because it costs too much money.  NASA studied ways to provide long duration missions on ISS, and there were several ways to do it safely and effectively.  NASA rejected them all because it didn’t have enough money.

The cheapest way for a "year-long mission" would be launch a Crew Dragon with 4 NASA or international astronauts. Midway through that mission, an Axiom mission would be launched with the crew of that mission returning on the Dragon that has been in orbit nearly six months. In effect, it would take a page out of the Soviet/Russian use of visiting expeditions to perform spacecraft exchanges.

[vp.]

The cheapest way for a "year-long mission" would be ...

not to mention the Dragon cargo ships for food, water and clothing, the Progress ships to regularly reassemble the station; all the ground crews to manage the station, etc.

[daedalus1]

7 people in space permanently costs the same no matter how long an individual is there.
But 12 month flights need less crew transports than 6 month missions  - a big saving.
Also less temporary crew handovers which require more consumables.
The Russians have recently reduced their Soyuz launches from 2 per year to 3 every two years. That is purely to save money.

[yg1968]

Phil McAlister is not holding back, this is a glorious read: No Changes Allowed

Interesting read! Thanks for posting it. There was complaints by contractors of NASA' excessive requirements under the public-private partnership model but it wasn't clear what programs they were referring to. Now we know. I suspect that the same can be said for other public-private programs such as the spacesuits program but I admit that I don't know that for sure.

[thespacecow]

Pam Melroy was on Payload Space podcast recently, defending her view wrt CLD: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-case-for-continuity-with-pam-melroy-former/id1627049050?i=1000723842023

Haven't finished listening to it, there's a lot to disagree with but this one takes the cake:

So, the requirements, process, you know, it's interesting. It's been a long time since NASA did that kind of deep requirements process. Probably the last time they did it was during Constellation, which was the human spaceflight program back in the early 2000s.

And a huge amount of effort went into it. And there was a lot of thinking through of an architecture where all the pieces were optimized to fit together. Frankly, we haven't really done a lot of that since.

...

We tried to do the same thing with commercial LEO destinations, didn't have enough time to get it as far down the road as possible.

So the best example for requirement process she can come up with is the trainwreck that is Constellation? Not COTS, not CRS, not Commercial Crew?

And they try to replicate Constellation - a cost plus program - requirement process on CLD, a commercial partnership? Looks like we found the root cause of the problem with CLD...

[Vultur]

Using Constellation as a positive example is somewhat unusual.

[edzieba]

I don't think it was being used as a "positive example" just as a 'this was the last time we underwent such a complex requirements analysis'.

[StraumliBlight]

SAM.gov: Commercial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Development Program Phase 2 - SAA [Sep 5]

The purpose of this modification is to post the C3DO Draft Announcement for Partnership Proposal (AFPP).

Potential Participants are invited to submit written comments and questions regarding all aspects of the draft AFPP, see additional information in the attached cover letter.

SAM.gov: Commercial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Destination Contract (CLDC) Technical Library [Sep 3]

This modification 3 is to notify industry of Data Drop 3 to the CLDC Technical Library.

[StraumliBlight]

Aviation Week [Sep 29]

NASA is delaying plans to issue a solicitation for the next phase of a public-private partnership program to spur development of one or more new space stations in low Earth orbit (LEO) while it assesses feedback from industry.

[yg1968]

T+311: Phil McAlister on Commercial LEO and NASA’s Human Spaceflight Budget:
https://mainenginecutoff.com/podcast/311

https://twitter.com/WeHaveMECO/status/1976700316549591186