The first and second rounds of CCDev, as well as the earlier Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) cargo program, have been run as Space Act Agreements (SAA), a form of contracting known in bureaucratic lingo as other transactional authority (OTA). SAAs do not have the same contracting overhead as a traditional contract, be it fixed-price or cost-plus. The COTS and CCDev SAAs have been milestone-based, meaning that NASA provides payments to participating companies based on the progress they make—which also means that NASA doesn’t pay up if companies don’t achieve their stated milestones, and can cancel those agreements if necessary, as happened with Rocketplane Kistler in the original COTS round.

At a commercial crew forum held by NASA at the Kennedy Space Center yesterday, CCDev program officials talked about their plans for the next phase of the program, which would come next year. The “Integrated Design” phase would last two years and bring participating companies up through the critical design review on their systems, the last step before starting actual construction. This two-year phase would be followed by a Development, Test, Evaluation, and Certification (DTEC) phase, which would also include the initial flights to the International Space Station.

NASA’s original intent, according to Brent Jett, a former astronaut serving as deputy program manager for NASA’s commercial crew program, was to use an SAA again for the Integrated Design phase. “As the team dug a little bit further into the Space Act Agreement, we did find several key limitations,” he said. The biggest one, he said, is that NASA cannot mandate requirements under an SAA, including for crew safety, but only provide them as a reference for industry. “Even if industry chose to design to those requirements, NASA is not allowed to tie any of the milestones in an SAA to compliance with those requirements,” he said. “That means NASA cannot accept the verification of those requirements and certify the system the way we need to for commercial crew under a Space Act Agreement.”

Jett noted that, under COTS, NASA was able to exploit something of a loophole in those rules, which allow the agency to levy safety requirements when a NASA facility—the ISS—was involved. NASA could do the same for CCDev, but only for operations at the ISS. “We would not be able to levy any requirements concerning ascent, entry” or any other portions of the flight not directly dealing with approaching and docking with the ISS.

NASA’s proposed approach for the next CCDev round, according to commercial crew program manager Ed Mango, “combines the best elements of an SAA with the features of a contract that wil allow NASA to approve the tailoring of requirements and the certification of a vehicle.” This “non-traditional contract” would continue to use milestone-based payments and also exempt companies from the cost accounting standards of the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR). “We believe that we are much closer to an SAA in our approach than we are to a traditional contract,” he said.

Representatives of industry present at the forum strongly objected to this proposed approach, though, largely out of concerns that, even with the cost accounting exception, adhering to the FAR would be very expensive. “Instead of taking an American flag to the station, we should have taken the FAR to the station and left it up there,” said Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace, referring to an American flag flown on the first shuttle mission that was left behind by the last shuttle crew, to be retrieved by the first commercial crew vehicle to visit the station. “You can’t take a traditional approach and expect anything but the traditional results, which has been broken budgets and not fielding any flight hardware.”

Others challenged the NASA conclusion that an SAA could not be used for commercial crew. Bobby Block of SpaceX noted that his company had an option on its COTS award—not exercised by NASA—to develop a crew capability as part of an SAA. Brett Alexander, former president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said NASA should provide more documentation to support its conclusion that an SAA would not work for CCDev, given that past analyses, by both NASA’s Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office, have concluded that SAAs are suitable for this. “[NASA's Office of the] General Counsel has not divulged what its legal reasoning is,” he said, “and I think they need to do that—not a couple charts, not things that you brief, but a legal brief that says, ‘here’s why,’ so that we can have that discussion.”

Mango and Jett said they were open to suggestions and feedback from industry on their proposed strategy for the next CCDev round. At the same time, NASA released yesterday a “Sources Sought Synopsis”, required under the FAR as the first step in the next phase of the CCDev program if they proceed under their proposed contract strategy. “I don’t want people to think that we’re locked in to this idea of a contract,” he said, but “we need to work in parallel so that we can continue to move forward.”

Some other notes of interest from the conference sessions:

• In a session on the microgravity research market, Andrew Nelson of XCOR said that he believes that, by 2016, there will be an annual market for suborbital flight services of $3.3 billion. Only $800 million of that will be flying people (primarily for tourism), with $1.1 billion for flying payloads and $1.4 billion for launching smallsats.
• In a panel on orbital crew capsules, Robert Bigelow said Bigelow Aerospace had been in discussions with Lockheed Martin back in 2004-2005 on crew transportation systems, and even awarded the company a million-dollar contract to design an “Orion Lite” version that would be a scaled-down version of the Orion spacecraft for NASA. However, asked later what he thought of the potential competition between Orion and commercially-developed systems for ISS crew transportation, Bigelow said bluntly that “I think Orion is unnecessary”: commercial systems could handle access to LEO while spacecraft larger than Orion should be developed for deep-space exploration.
• On that same panel Lockheed’s Kenneth Reightler defended the development of Orion, but also indicated that the company had attracted “quite a bit of interest” from other customers, and that Lockheed had “invested a lot of out corporate money” into the program.
• In a panel late in the day on spaceports, Rick Homans of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority said that the development of Spaceport America is now in a “very complex” phase, as it transitions from construction to operations over the next year. The authority will soon issue a series of RFPs for operational-related activities, from security to visitor services, and is actively seeking a deputy director who will be responsible for spaceport operations.
• Stu Witt of Mojave Air and Space Port, on the same panel, advised Homans and others running spaceports to be ready to deal with both “normal and abnormal” operations, citing from his own experience in Mojave events ranging from plane crashes to the SpaceShipTwo engine development accident in 2007 that killed three people to even the windstorm that prematurely ended the SS2 rollout event last December and toppled tents—after everyone had been evacuated, fortunately. “You’ve got to be planning and planning and planning,” Witt advised.

On Friday the big event, of course, is the dedication of the runway at Spaceport America, which will feature appearances by Sir Richard Branson and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson as well as a flyover by WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo.

• In a session titled “Closing the credibility gap”, speakers from Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, and Armadillo Aerospace discussed the importance of testing to demonstrate to customers, investors, regulators, and others that their ventures are, in fact, credible. During her presentation Virgin Galactic operations manager Julia Tizard mentioned that “full scale hot firing” of the rocket motors for SpaceShipTwo is underway in preparation for powered flight tests next year. (It should be noted that the log of RocketMotorTwo test firings was last updated in August.)
• Neil Milburn of Armadillo Aerospace said in another panel that the company plans to bring out two vehicles, Super Mod and the “tube vehicle”, to Spaceport America by the end of this year for test flights under NASA’s CRuSR program, pending FAA approval. Super Mod will be able to fly to at least 40 kilometers, and perhaps as high as 60 kilometers, while the tube vehicle (Milburn admitted that vehicle needs a better name) could go all the way to 100 kilometers.
• Earlier, Milburn said that Project M, a low-profile NASA project Armadillo had been associated with, has changed its name to Project Morpheus. The project had originally sought to land a humanoid rover (based on the Robonaut that will be going to the ISS on the next shuttle mission) on the Moon within 1,000 days (hence M, the Roman numeral for 1,000). The name change reflects a change in focus on the program for more terrestrial technology development.
• Tim Pickens, the founder or Orion Propulsion who now works for Dynetics, said Dynetics’s role in projects like the Rocket City Space Pioneers Google Lunar X PRIZE team is part of an internal investment by the company to become one known for building space hardware. He added that in “the next few weeks” you would see some major investments by the company along those lines.
• Bigelow Aerospace’s Robert Bigelow said despite the ongoing construction of a 185,000-square-foot factory in Las Vegas devoted to the production of expandable modules, he still considered the company to be in R&D mode. The company is looking for customers, and recently signed several memoranda of understanding with countries interested in leasing modules, but he said the company would not take any money from customers until at least 2012, pending the state of crew transportation development. (The company has a considerable presence at the conference; more on that in a later post.)

On Thursday morning Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures, will announce the company’s “New Venture”, according to the title of his talk. This is likely to be the exclusive marketing agreement with Armadillo Aerospace the company announced last month; at the time the company said they would announce additional details at ISDC. We’ll hopefully learn more about the deal and why Space Adventures, which had de-emphasized suborbital space tourism in recent years in favor of orbital spaceflight, is jumping back into this market.

Virgin Galactic will be represented by its new CEO, George Whitesides, who returned to the company earlier this month after roughly 18 months at NASA in several roles, including chief of staff to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. With Virgin and Scaled continuing their captive carry flights of WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo, hopefully we’ll get some updated details about their plans for upcoming tests and introduction of commercial service. Whitesides is scheduled to speak late Saturday afternoon.

On Friday morning there will be updates about the progress of XCOR Aerospace and Bigelow Aerospace by XCOR CEO Jeff Greason and Bigelow DC Operations Director Mike Gold, respectively. XCOR is working on its Lynx suborbital vehicle, so we may learn more details about the progress they’re making on their prototype. Bigelow, as Aviation Week reported earlier this month, is ramping up its marketing efforts for its inflatable orbital habitats. Bigelow will also benefit from the new interest in commercial crew transportation as part of the NASA fiscal year 2011 budget proposal. On Friday afternoon Masten Space Systems president and CEO Dave Masten will talk about winning $1.15 million in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge last year, and presumably their ongoing efforts as well.

There are also several other talks from representatives of the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation, Spaceport America, and several other NewSpace companies, including a panel Saturday morning on “The ‘NewSpace’ Paradigm”. So the next few days should offer a good opportunity to see where much of the NewSpace industry stands as of 2010 and what companies think their prospects are.

The site is claiming an “exclusive first”: that Robert Bigelow and Donald Trump are “close to a deal” to put Trump’s name on Bigelow Aerospace’s current and future expandable spacecraft. Sounds intriguing, except when you get into the details, like this: “…the TRUMP name on Bigalow’s [sic] Genesis I and II and perhaps III and more that will host the weary space traveler for the night.” Besides the misspelling of Bigelow’s name (which is consistently misspelled throughout the article), there is no Genesis 3 spacecraft planned (the company is moving ahead with Sundancer around 2010). Moreover, Bigelow and other company officials have emphatically stated on a number of occasions that they are nor in the hotel business, although they would be willing to lease their modules to companies that would operate them as tourist destinations. And, of course, neither Genesis 1 nor Genesis 2 are designed for human habitation.

A commenter on RLV and Space Transport News got a comment from Bigelow spokesman Chris Reed, who said that he had “heard nothing on my end about any negotiations between our company and Donald Trump,” and also reiterated that there would be no Genesis 3 mission.

“Lots of details to be worked out but it sound [sic] pretty spacey to us!” the report notes. Spacey? Maybe spaced out, instead. In its quest to separate “credibility from clutter”, this new publication is in danger of falling into the latter category.

Speaking of Bigelow, the current issue of Wired magazine has a feature article about Bigelow Aerospace (which I read on the flight to New Mexico earlier this week and subsequently found online). The article doesn’t have much in the way of new insights on the company or Bigelow himself, and focused a lot on things like his fascination with UFOs and company secrecy (nevermind that the company is a lot less secretive now than a few years ago.)

• The Washington Post profiles Space Adventures and its role in shaping the space tourism industry. The article includes a quote from current ISS tourist Charles Simonyi, who contacted the reporter “in an e-mail from space”. Not a description you see in any ordinary Post article…
• Speaking of Simonyi, he calls the ISS both “cozy” and “complicated” in a video broadcast. He has made a number of amateur radio contacts, including one with a ham in Honolulu who got to speak with both Simonyi and NASA astronaut Sunita Williams.
• The Washington Times provides a breezy overview of the current state of the space tourism industry, from Simonyi to Virgin Galactic to future plans. The article claims that there is a “space tourism office at the United Nations”, but I have never heard of an office specifically devoted to space tourism there (there is the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, but that is not devoted to space tourism per se.)
• In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I review last week’s Bigelow announcement. Bigelow states, “We consider ourselves wholesalers of destinations that we build and we don’t consider ourselves as space hotel folks.” He does go on to say, however, that he would be willing to lease his facilities to companies that operate space hotels, including Virgin Galactic; Alex Tai of Virgin later said, “We can certainly look into that.”

One big question about his plans is what sort of transportation will be available to and from the modules. By 2015, Bigelow estimates that his company will need up to 30 launches a year to ferry passengers to and from the modules (as well as launching new modules). Bigelow admits that transportation is “the long pole in the tent” with a lot of uncertainty about who will be able to provide that level of activity: he did seem willing to work with any potential providers, provided that they meet his preferences, such as flying 6-8 people at a time and have a dry landing versus a splashdown. A second question is just how big the market is for this, particularly for prime clients: how many companies are interested in leasing a space lab? Bigelow admitted that they’re just now ramping up their sales and marketing efforts, and have yet to start talking with potential customers. What other major obstacles do you think are out there for Bigelow’s plan?

What about getting to and from the space stations? Bigelow said his company would contract for flight services with various transportation providers, agreeing to buy a certain number of flights per quarter or year. In his first full year of operations, he anticipates requiring 12-14 flights, increasing to three flights a month by 2016. Bigelow would buy from a number of companies, including COTS companies SpaceX and Rocketplane (which announced its letter of intent with Bigelow at the Space Access conference last month), and even Soyuz and Shenzhou flights from Russia and China, respectively.

What will the modules be used for? Bigelow said they would be able to support “a variety of functions or variety of uses”, but he explicitly said he doesn’t consider his stations “space hotels”. “We have been identified as the space hotel folks and that’s not the case — that really never has been the case.” As for what exactly he has in mind, we’ll have to wait until Tuesday—or maybe even later.