Commercial Crew - Discussion Thread 1

[jak Kennedy]

Why do so many people whichever side they are on seem to want to amortize the cost of commercial crew through to 2024. These investments will be used after the ISS (hopefully )
What would be worse would be in 2024 and still no ability for the US to fly it's own missions but having to rely on the Russians, Chinese or Indians to get into space.

[kdhilliard]

Also on Monday 31 August 2015, David Livingston of The Space Show interviewed Kathy Lueders (NASA's Commercial Crew Program Manager).  He had Rand Simberg and Leonard David with him to asked questions as well.  Given Simberg's Safe Is Not an Option views, it is not surprising that much of the discussion dealt with the program's risk and safety philosophy, and Lueders delved much deeper into the subject than I had heard her do elsewhere.

  Show description: http://thespaceshow.com/detail.asp?q=2545
  Direct link to audio: http://archived.thespaceshow.com/shows/2545-BWB-2015-09-03.mp3
  Show's blog entry: https://thespaceshow.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/kathy-lueders-dr-heidi-fearn-thursday-9-3-15/

This is not a normal Space Show program with callers, etc. because of David's attendance at AIAA Space 2015, but instead is a pair of interview segments.  His 45 minute interview with Kathy Lueders runs from 06:50 - 51:40.  That segment is followed by a tour of Dr. James Woodward's Cal St. Fullerton lab, hosted by his Mach effect co-researcher, Dr. Heidi Fearn (which runs from 51:45 through the end at 1:45:15).

Unfortunately, David Livingston forbids transcripts of his shows, so the best I can do is an outline.

06:50  Introduction
07:29  Commercial Crew Program Overview
08:20  Continued support to Sierra Nevada and Blue Origin
09:40  Budget concerns
12:04  Prioritizing milestones
15:55  Loss of IDA and C2V2 radio on SpaceX CRS-7
17:09  Quantifying safety; probabilistic risk assessment vs. fault tolerance
23:15  Origin of 1/270 chance LOC requirement
27:02  Risk vs. value of mission
28:20  Program design philosophy
30:45  Government insight/oversight vs. proprietary information & maintaining competitive advantage
34:03  Intent vs. standards
39:15  Variance to requirements
42:50  Commercial Crew Astronauts / Crew cadre selection
45:23  Reusability
50:06  Closing comments
51:40  End

I found this interview much more interesting than the panel discussion.

~Kirk

[woods170]

Also on Monday 31 August 2015, David Livingston of The Space Show interviewed Kathy Lueders (NASA's Commercial Crew Program Manager). 

A few technical tidbits from this interview:

- Orbital demonstration test from Boeing CST-100 will carry two people: one from Boeing and one from NASA.
- Demonstration mission from SpaceX Dragon 2 will carry two people: both from NASA
- LIDAR's are constantly being re-used on current SpaceX CRS missions, so the (flight) history of the LIDAR hardware is well known.
- Boeing proposed and plans to re-use it's CST-100 spacecraft on CCP missions.
- SpaceX proposed new Dragon 2 for each mission, with re-use of specific components being discussed.
- SpaceX proposed propulsive landing for CCP missions but NASA declined. Kathy expects not to see propulsive landings on CCP missions for the foreseeable future.

About that last point: that means that for the foreseeable future the Dragon 2 CCP missions will end in a water landing. That's probably also the reason why SpaceX proposed new vehicles for each CCP mission. Re-use of Dragon 2 vehicles will probably only be done with land-landed vehicles given the destructive effects of immersion in salt-water on structures and electronics.

[abaddon]

Re-use of Dragon 2 vehicles will probably only be done with land-landed vehicles given the destructive effects of immersion in salt-water on structures and electronics.

Didn't we just hear that SpaceX plans to reuse the pressure vessel from a previously used Dragon 1?  And they've already reused components from previous Dragon flights.  Obviously that's not as good as just flying it again full stop.  But reusing the pressure vessel has to save a good amount of $$ I would think.

Reentry is also quite destructive on the outside of the capsule, so I would expect even with a reused capsule (CST-100 and eventually Dragon 2, I would guess for the first re-bid of crewed transport) that it would require a fair amount of work.

[yg1968]

Also on Monday 31 August 2015, David Livingston of The Space Show interviewed Kathy Lueders (NASA's Commercial Crew Program Manager). 

A few technical tidbits from this interview:

- Orbital demonstration test from Boeing CST-100 will carry two people: one from Boeing and one from NASA.
- Demonstration mission from SpaceX Dragon 2 will carry two people: both from NASA
- LIDAR's are constantly being re-used on current SpaceX CRS missions, so the (flight) history of the LIDAR hardware is well known.
- Boeing proposed and plans to re-use it's CST-100 spacecraft on CCP missions.
- SpaceX proposed new Dragon 2 for each mission, with re-use of specific components being discussed.
- SpaceX proposed propulsive landing for CCP missions but NASA declined. Kathy expects not to see propulsive landings on CCP missions for the foreseeable future.

About that last point: that means that for the foreseeable future the Dragon 2 CCP missions will end in a water landing. That's probably also the reason why SpaceX proposed new vehicles for each CCP mission. Re-use of Dragon 2 vehicles will probably only be done with land-landed vehicles given the destructive effects of immersion in salt-water on structures and electronics.

Did she say why NASA declined propulsive landing? Safety reasons? Perhaps, SpaceX should have offered propulsive landing assisted by parachutes. That would have seemed like a reasonable compromise. It's not that different from Soyuz and to the extent that the landing would still work even without the propulsive landing, it shouldn't be much of a safety concern.

[baldusi]

Probably a "not until proven" position. And we know pretty well that for ISS programs "always in motion the future is".

[yg1968]

Also on Monday 31 August 2015, David Livingston of The Space Show interviewed Kathy Lueders (NASA's Commercial Crew Program Manager). 

A few technical tidbits from this interview:

- Orbital demonstration test from Boeing CST-100 will carry two people: one from Boeing and one from NASA.
- Demonstration mission from SpaceX Dragon 2 will carry two people: both from NASA
- LIDAR's are constantly being re-used on current SpaceX CRS missions, so the (flight) history of the LIDAR hardware is well known.
- Boeing proposed and plans to re-use it's CST-100 spacecraft on CCP missions.
- SpaceX proposed new Dragon 2 for each mission, with re-use of specific components being discussed.
- SpaceX proposed propulsive landing for CCP missions but NASA declined. Kathy expects not to see propulsive landings on CCP missions for the foreseeable future.

About that last point: that means that for the foreseeable future the Dragon 2 CCP missions will end in a water landing. That's probably also the reason why SpaceX proposed new vehicles for each CCP mission. Re-use of Dragon 2 vehicles will probably only be done with land-landed vehicles given the destructive effects of immersion in salt-water on structures and electronics.

Correction. I just listened to the part about propulsive landing. NASA never said that they were opposed to it. Lueders said that SpaceX is looking at propulsive landing in the future and she said that she could see that happenning in the future. It's at the 49-50 minute mark of the show.

[kdhilliard]

A few technical tidbits from this interview:
[snip]
- SpaceX proposed propulsive landing for CCP missions but NASA declined. Kathy expects not to see propulsive landings on CCP missions for the foreseeable future.

About that last point: that means that for the foreseeable future the Dragon 2 CCP missions will end in a water landing. That's probably also the reason why SpaceX proposed new vehicles for each CCP mission. Re-use of Dragon 2 vehicles will probably only be done with land-landed vehicles given the destructive effects of immersion in salt-water on structures and electronics.

Correction. I just listened to the part about propulsive landing. NASA never said that they were opposed to it. Lueders said that SpaceX is looking at propulsive landing in the future and she said that she could see that happenning in the future. It's at the 49-50 minute mark of the show.

It not perfectly clear, but I agree with you, yg.  Starting at 49:30 I hear her say:

You know, we'd had a little bit of a discussion at the beginning, because they were, SpaceX was really looking at, and they would still like to go eventually to a capsule that does a propulsive landing.  Instead of the landing, the water landing under parachutes, they would like to move toward a propulsive land landing.  And when you do that then, guess what, it kind of opens up some options from a reusability standpoint, and so I wouldn't -- I would see that happening in our future.  But that will be something we'll work through.

I can't swear that second one was a "would" and not a "wouldn't", but it sounds like "would" to me, and I think that fits the sentence better.  I suspect that she started to say something like "and so I wouldn't rule that out" and stopped after the "wouldn't" and changed that to a more affirmative "I would see that happening in our future."

~Kirk
 

[yg1968]

I heard exactly what you heard. The second verb is a "would" (not a "wouldn't").

[yg1968]

I finished listening to the entire interview. It's worth listening in its entirety. Lueders was very candid in her responses during the interview. She knows her stuff. There was an interesting discussion about safety. Rand Simberg asked whether the 1 in 270 loss of crew ratio was arbitrary. She said that the ratio came from Constellation. They initially wanted to have a 1 in a 1000 ratio Under Constellation (to be 10 time safer than the Shuttle) but realized that this ratio was not possible at a practical level.   Lueders also mentionned that there was a lot of pushback from both providers on the commercial crew requirements and that NASA explained why it was important that they meet these requirements. NASA did allow the providers to propose alternate ways of meeting the intent of their requirements through alternate standards. She thought that there was a healthy tension between NASA and the providers on these requirements. She said that double fault tolerance is required for the operations close to the ISS and for certain parts of ascent and descent. On reusability, she said that they learned during the Shuttle program that material fatigue was mission specific.

[AnalogMan]

The following notes shed a little more light on the LOC/LOM figures for Commercial crew.  They are from the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) May 2015 Meeting Minutes.

Commercial Crew Program Loss of Crew/Loss of Mission

Mr. John Frost reported on the briefing by Mr. Justin Kerr, Manager of the Spacecraft Office in the CCP. Loss of Crew (LOC)/Loss of Mission (LOM) has been a topic of great interest to the ASAP for years. The LOC is loss of crew probability—how likely there will be loss of crew on a given mission. It is a top level metric that tells how safe the system is overall. It is a theoretical number, evaluated by a probabilistic risk assessment. The Panel is interested in ensuring that the bar is set high enough to drive designers and engineers to provide the safest vehicle possible.

Mr. Frost provided some background on the topic. The Panel had understood at an earlier meeting that the LOC requirement was being reduced fairly significantly. There was a lot of detailed information provided by Mr. Kerr, and the “change” in requirement is not as bad as the Panel originally thought. The Space Shuttle at end-of-life had LOC of about 1 in 90. The follow on Constellation (that was originally envisioned to replace Shuttle) had a goal of 10 times better (1 in 1000), based on a 2005 study, which at that time was thought possible and was consistent with the request from the Astronaut Office. As the Constellation system design began and the program started looking at hazards and threats, in particular the very significant Micrometeoroid and Orbital Debris (MMOD) threat, they found that 1 in 1000 was going to be an impossible number to meet. The Agency decided toward the end of that program to reduce the LOC number to 1 in 270 (or 3 times better than Shuttle at end-of-life).

The Panel had a concern with that LOC number at prior meetings and asked NASA to relook at it. They did and felt it was the best that could be done. When the CCP came along, the HEOMD chose that same number to keep an even playing field (commercial crew should be as safe as Constellation would have been), and the requirement of 1 in 270 was set for commercial crew.  Most felt that the contract was clear that the requirement was to be met without any inspection on orbit. As the contractors started producing their designs and analyses started coming in, NASA learned that both commercial providers were relying on inspection on orbit, which was not intended by the Program.

That triggered more studies and analyses, which finally led the CCP to conclude that even the 1 in 270 couldn’t be met, primarily because of MMOD hazard. The CCP wanted to focus the contractors’ attention on the things that they could do. The approach that NASA took was to take the requirement, reduce it slightly to what was believed to be the most safety that could be attained without operational mitigations (1 in 200), and clearly made the contractors understand that no inspection could be counted on—they had to meet that number on their own. It is now clear that coupled with that, NASA has a made commitment to find other operational control mechanisms that will make up the gap between 1 in 200 and 1 in 270. The kinds of things that can be done on orbit include: inspection by ExtraVehicular Activity (EVA) or robotic arm, docking procedures and location of docking port, and reducing time on orbit. All of these will be examined. The CCP has committed to studies to determine which of those make the most sense and to implement them. Mr. Frost cautioned that some of those operational constraints, such as EVA inspection, carry their own risk. NASA needs to be careful as it picks what the controls will be and to be smart about how to make up the gap. Bottom line, there is still a 1 in 270 requirement; some of that has been allocated to the contractors and some to the Program. The Panel believes NASA is moving forward in an orderly and well-thought-through process.

See page 5 in the following document@
http://oiir.hq.nasa.gov/asap/documents/ASAP_Second_Quarterly_Meeting_2015.pdf

[AnalogMan]

A follow-up comment by ASAP on LOM/LOC at their last meeting (Aug 2015)

[... complimenting new CCP openess]  "One item he drew attention to was the probability of loss of crew that the Panel had focused upon in the past. At the last ASAP meeting, the Panel had a “deep dive” into the changes to the LOC number that was allocated to the contractors. At the end of that review, the Panel understood what had been done. The contractors had been allocated a different amount of the risk, and the Program would make up the gap by procedures, orientation, orbit, or other changes. NASA further addressed the topic at this fact-finding meeting. It has become clear that it may be harder to do than they thought it would be. Currently, they are looking at all options. They are also pursuing “buying” some of that risk back through vehicle design. The Panel needs to keep close attention on that issue. The Panel’s concern last quarter was that it might be hard to buy risk back, and NASA might end up with a lower LOC than what was initially desired."

See page 13/14 of the following document:
http://oiir.hq.nasa.gov/asap/documents/ASAP_Third_Quarterly_Meeting_2015.pdf

[woods170]

Uh oh...

http://spacenews.com/first-crewed-orion-mission-may-slip-to-2023/

One key member of Congress swiftly criticized the administration for not providing Orion with enough funding to support a 2021 launch. “Once again, the Obama administration is choosing to delay deep space exploration priorities such as Orion and the Space Launch System that will take U.S. astronauts to the Moon, Mars, and beyond,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science Committee, in a Sept. 16 statement.

Maybe I'm a pessimist but I feel another shifting of funds from CCP to Orion/SLS coming up in the next budget cycle.

[yg1968]

This isn't new but I can't remember if it has been posted before:

NASA has no plans to downselect the number of partners in response to lower-than-requested funding levels. As experience has shown with cargo, NASA’s plan to establish a redundant crew transportation capability is critically important for robust, safe ISS operations.

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/McAlister_Commerical_Crew_Program_Status_TAGGED.pdf

Mr. McAlister explained that NASA has no plans to down-select the number of partners in response to a lower-than-requested funding level. He asserted that redundant, crew transportation capability is critically important for robust, safe ISS operations.

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/HEO_Minutes_2015_7_27_29_FINALrev1_Bowersox_Comments_100415.pdf

[ngilmore]

NASA Orders SpaceX Crew Mission to International Space Station

NASA took a significant step Friday toward expanding research opportunities aboard the International Space Station with its first mission order from Hawthorne, California based-company SpaceX to launch astronauts from U.S. soil. This is the second in a series of four guaranteed orders NASA will make under the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contracts. The Boeing Company of Houston received its first crew mission order in May. “It’s really exciting to see SpaceX and Boeing with hardware in flow for their first crew rotation missions,” said Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. “It is important to have at least two healthy and robust capabilities from U.S.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew/2015/11/20/nasa-orders-spacex-crew-mission-to-international-space-station/

edit: Added this quote:
“Commercial crew launches are really important for helping us meet the demand for research on the space station because it allows us to increase the crew to seven,” said Julie Robinson, International Space Station chief scientist. “Over the long term, it also sets the foundation for scientific access to future commercial research platforms in low- Earth orbit.”
http://go.nasa.gov/1N0L2TX

[yg1968]

Here is an update on commercial crew:

[yg1968]

One thing that was mentionned by Kathy Lueders is that NASA is close to ordering a second Boeing post-certification mission.

Another thing is that NASA is working with the FAA in order to add language that adds a definition of government astronaut in the Commercial Space Launch Act (at the 21 minute mark). It seeks to ensure that the governmental role is understood by both the companies and NASA as they move in the post certification phase.

[yg1968]

Presentation by Luders at the NAC on certification:

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/6-Status_of_CCP.pdf

[getitdoneinspace]

The Q&A has been truncated from ALL of the ISPCS 2015 videos on Youtube that I have found. I find the Q&A sometimes the most interesting and informative portions of the conversation. Does anyone know if the Q&A is available anywhere?

[yg1968]

The Q&A has been truncated from ALL of the ISPCS 2015 videos on Youtube that I have found. I find the Q&A sometimes the most interesting and informative portions of the conversation. Does anyone know if the Q&A is available anywhere?

I don't think that it's available but there may have been tweets on them.