I am new here (hello everyone) and I have a question for your consideration. Your answers will help me to generate points to research for an upcoming article related to this topic.
My question is: What are the opportunities and risks presented by consolidating launch acquisition into one, brand new agency? The agency would be charged with all launch acquisition (Military and Civilian, Manned and Unmanned).
My initial thoughts include the potential for significant cost savings by potentially harmonizing the acquisition activities between NASA and the AF.
However, I am finding it hard to come up with concrete areas of possible impacts (good and bad) that might occur.
Any thoughts of yours would be greatly appreciated.
DoD pretty much drives unmanned systems, NASA uses EELV under the launch services program. As for manned craft, NASA has unique requirements that require a large amount of modifications to the baseline LV, which in the past was disallowed by the DoD but with the commercial crew development it looks like that has changed. EELV will launch DoD and NASA payloads in the future including manned s/c.
Too many differences in the level of services between the different users. NRO has a 5 year integration template and NASA 30 months. NASA can use different parts of the FAR vs the DOD. Security issues exist.