Suffredini, SGT, and Post-ISS Comm'l LEO Platforms

[jongoff]

With Mike Suffredini retiring from NASA, I was wondering where he was headed next. I just saw an interview on Spaceflightnow with an answer to the question. Quoting Steven Clark's interview:

Suffredini says he hopes the International Space Station can prove there is a market for a commercial platform in low Earth orbit after its retirement. His next job is to study just that for SGT Inc., a consulting and engineering services firm based in suburban Washington, D.C.

SGT plans to set up a commercial space division, which Suffredini will head from Houston.

Here's the whole article: http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/09/05/one-on-one-with-nasas-chief-space-station-builder/

Does anyone here know much about SGT? This is the first I've heard of them, though with a little research it looks like they're a engineering services contractor out of Greenbelt, MD that does a lot of support engineering work for NASA, DoD, and the FAA. About 1700 people, doing about $350M/yr in contract engineering work for the gov't.

I can't say I'm surprised that Mike would get involved with helping develop a comm'l space facility--it's a good use of his talent and experience. I was a bit more surprised that he wasn't pursuing that through one of the usual suspects that are trying to develop space facilities and/or free-flyers (Bigelow, etc.). It'll be neat to see what they come up with once they set up this new division.

Anybody have any thoughts or comments? Is this the right area to put this discussion, or is there a better thread or subsection to merge this into or move this to?

~Jon

[Oli]

From the interview:

I foresee we’ll find you may never get to the point where you don’t want some capability in low Earth orbit, but we certainly may get to the point where we don’t want to pay for that anymore as a government. That’s why one of the most critical things for us going forward is to continue to become as efficient as we can doing research on-board and be getting potential commercial providers to the ISS inexpensively so they figure out what is going to make money and what won’t make money in low Earth orbit, so that somebody someday can sit down and show a business case to show you can make a profit from a low Earth orbit platform.

Probably the biggest challenge for commercial human spaceflight in the next 20 years.

He also says the ISS' lifetime could potentially be extended to 2032.

[jongoff]

From the interview:

I foresee we’ll find you may never get to the point where you don’t want some capability in low Earth orbit, but we certainly may get to the point where we don’t want to pay for that anymore as a government. That’s why one of the most critical things for us going forward is to continue to become as efficient as we can doing research on-board and be getting potential commercial providers to the ISS inexpensively so they figure out what is going to make money and what won’t make money in low Earth orbit, so that somebody someday can sit down and show a business case to show you can make a profit from a low Earth orbit platform.

Probably the biggest challenge for commercial human spaceflight in the next 20 years.

He also says the ISS' lifetime could potentially be extended to 2032.

I agree with his assessment. Commercial space facilities are going to need to be a lot more cost efficient to enable unsubsidized commercial orbital research to take off. Also, finding something that can be affordably manufactured in orbit that is worth the cost would also be huge. I think it's possible, especially using a tons more robotics (I'm biased), but I wonder how much of it will be learnable on ISS itself.

Right now we're spending $3-4B/yr to get ~2100 person-hours of research time performed. We're going to need to get the $/hr of research down significantly to enable unsubsidized space research to be profitable. Hopefully ISS can help in proving out some of those bits and pieces. They have shown more willingness to take more calculated risks lately. So there's hope.

~Jon

[billh]

Right now we're spending $3-4B/yr to get ~2100 person-hours of research time performed.

That's $2,000,000/hr. Wow!! $500/second. What do ISS researchers actually have to pay? Just their hardware costs? Or does NASA try to recoup any of its other expenses?

[sdsds]

I hope Suffredini and SGT can lead their clients towards a commercially successful LEO platform! Is it fair to assume their clients will be based in the United States? And thus would be relying on providers using launch sites in the US?

[jongoff]

Right now we're spending $3-4B/yr to get ~2100 person-hours of research time performed.

That's $2,000,000/hr. Wow!! $500/second. What do ISS researchers actually have to pay? Just their hardware costs? Or does NASA try to recoup any of its other expenses?

Well, that number isn't perfectly fair since there are plenty of experiments that don't have to be crew tended at every second. It just gives you an idea of how expensive research is on the ISS. When you fly to the ISS, you usually get free ride and free access to astronaut time (which NASA values at $55k/hr), but you're often better off going through a facilitator like NanoRacks. Free is sometimes more expensive.

~Jon