As the press release announcing the launch date indicates, this will be, as SpaceX long desired, a combined “C2/C3″ mission incorporating milestones originally planned for two separate demonstration flights. The Dragon spacecraft will initially approach and fly by the station at a distance of a little over three kilometers (two miles) to demonstrate its systems and its ability to abort a rendezvous. If successful, Dragon will then closely approach the ISS, allowing the station’s robotic arm to grapple the spacecraft and berth it to the Earth-facing port of the station’s Harmony module. Later, the arm will undock the spacecraft, allowing to fly away and return to Earth.

Later at the Seattle event, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell indicated that NASA and SpaceX made the decision about the launch date just the day before. “We had some discussions with [NASA ISS program manager] Mike Suffredini yesterday to determine a launch date. We decided that February 7 was the right day to shoot for,” she said. “That really kind of focuses all the activities for the next 60 days. We’re thrilled to get there, we’re thrilled that NASA is letting us get there.”

The announcement puts an end to months of uncertainty about when SpaceX would fly its second COTS mission an uncertainty created in part because of discussions with NASA, and the other ISS partners, particularly Russia, about allowing a combined C2/C3 mission. (The delay, presumably, also allowed SpaceX to get its technical ducks in a row for its next mission.) With Friday’s announcement, one assumes all of the necessary international coordination has been resolved to allow NASA to set a launch date.

In an article in the latest issue of Space Quarterly magazine, I wrote an article (freely available here) about how the next several months would be “crunch time” for the overall COTS program, given the upcoming demonstration flights by SpaceX and the other COTS awardee, Orbital Sciences. A lot will be riding on those flights, not just for the companies, but for the future of the ISS as well as NASA’s commercial crew plans. We’ll soon see what the future of commercial spaceflight will look like.

Not quite. As SpaceX itself stated in an updated posted on its web site Monday, “NASA has agreed in principle” to allow SpaceX to combine its planned “C2″ and “C3″ COTS flights into a single mission that would launch on November 30. However, NASA hasn’t given a final approval for the combined mission, as it evaluates SpaceX’s plans to carry secondary payloads (including two ORBCOMM communications satellites) on that mission. “NASA will grant formal approval for the combined COTS missions pending resolution of any potential risks associated with these secondary payloads,” SpaceX said in its update.

If all that sounds familiar, it should. Last month, at a press conference after the final shuttle landing, NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier said the agency “technically had agreed” to combine the C2 and C3 COTS flights but had yet to give formal approval—effectively the same situation as today. That statement came right after an Aviation Week week article that reported on plans for the combined C2/C3 mission with a November 30 launch. That AvWeek article said that plan depended on how SpaceX would handle the secondary satellite deployment.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything new in the latest SpaceX update. The company says it carried out a “wet dress rehearsal” of the Falcon 9 that will launch Dragon on the C2/C3 mission last week, erecting the launch vehicle (minus Dragon) on the pad and fueling it. The update also includes some photos of the Dragon that will fly that mission, as well as components for the following Falcon 9 launch, intended for the first operational cargo mission to the ISS next year.

SpaceX has, for some time, been working to get NASA to agree to combine their second and third COTS missions (their first successfully flew last December), allowing them to both approach and berth with the station on the same flight. Last Wednesday Aviation Week reported that NASA has tentatively agreed to combine the two flights, pending resolution of some issues, including the planned deployment of two small satellites during that mission. If approved, the mission would launch as soon as November 30, berthing at the ISS on December 7.

The following day, at the STS-135 post-landing press conference at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier confirmed that NASA was close to working out a deal to combine the two SpaceX flights, designed C2 and C3. “We technically have agreed with SpaceX that we want to combine those flights, but we haven’t given them formal approval yet,” he said. “We still want to go through some more analysis” on various technical aspects of the mission, he added, but said that if those issues can be worked out, combining the C2 and C3 flights made the most sense. “Overall, what we want to do is get to cargo delivery as fast as we can, and if the systems are mature enough and the design is mature enough, combining those two flights is that best way to get cargo to the ISS in the fastest manner possible.”

(While that news took place last week, there was very little notice of it then, perhaps as it was lost in the attention about the final shuttle landing. But when SpaceX tweeted effectively the same news Tuesday, although with a nine-day gap between launch and berthing, instead of seven from the AvWeek announcement, it got a lot more attention.)

The news is a little different for the other COTS awardee, Orbital Sciences. Its original plans called for a single demonstration mission of its Taurus 2 launch vehicle and Cygnus spacecraft in late 2010; like SpaceX, it suffered delays, pushing that mission back to later this year. Last Thursday, company officials announced that they were delaying that mission further, into next year. “We are targeting a test firing of the full stack in November, with a test launch, with a non-Cygnus payload on the top, in late December,” said Orbital senior vice president Frank Culbertson at an AIAA commercial space panel on Capitol Hill. The official COTS demo flight is now planned for late February 2012, he said, with full-fledged cargo flights to follow in the spring.

In a briefing with financial analysts earlier that day to talk about the company’s second quarter earnings, company executives blamed the delay on development of the launch site infrastructure at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island, Virginia. “Work related to installing and checking out the Wallops launch complex’s propellant and pressurization management systems has taken longer than we previously anticipated, delaying the turnover of the launch pad to us by some 6 to 8 weeks from the planned date,” Dave Thompson, chairman and CEO, said.

Another issue for the Taurus 2 was a problem last month during a test firing of one of the AJ-26 engines that powers the rocket’s first stage. During the test, at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, a metal fuel line ruptured, “badly damaging” the engine on the test stand, according to a Space News account of the test.

“Orbital, Aerojet, and NASA have substantially completed our analysis of the cause of this test failure,” Thompson said on Thursday’s call, and were now screening the remaining AJ-26 engines that Aerojet has. Thompson said it appears that two-thirds of the engines can be used “as-is”, but one third “will require some level of rework or repair.” That two thirds, though, would be enough to avoid any schedule delays.

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.”

Now, through, one of those proposed spaceports may have found new life. A recent article in the McAllen (Tx.) Monitor (which is actually a reprint of one last week in the Valley Morning Star in the Rio Grande Valley) reports that Willacy County officials have found a new tenant for their proposed spaceport. According to the county judge John F. Gonzales Jr., an unnamed aerospace company is planning to lease 50 acres spread across two sites; it would invest up to $50 million for its facilities and hire 100 to 200 people. At least one site would be on the coast, apparently to be used for launches over the Gulf into orbit.

Judge Gonzales, though, declined to disclose the name of the interested company, saying that he was bound by a confidentiality agreement. He did say that the company did test its rockets in December and it “recovered a reusable container similar to 1960s-type space capsules”, according to the article. “They’re the first private company to have successfully launched a low-altitude space flight and successfully recovered it,” Gonzales said. All those comments make the company in question sound like SpaceX: it launched a Falcon 9 in December from Cape Canaveral, placing the Dragon capsule in orbit. That capsule returned to Earth later the same day, making SpaceX the first non-government entity to recover a spacecraft from orbit. However, it’s not clear why SpaceX would have any interest in the Texas site, given its investment in developing its Cape Canaveral site.

Some have suggested that the company in question could be Blue Origin, which already has a test site in west Texas, north of the town of Van Horn. As RLV and Space Transport News pointed out earlier this year, Blue Origin has a patent for a “Sea Landing of Space Launch Vehicles and Associated Systems and Methods”, which covered the powered landing of a booster stage on a barge or other ship in the ocean after launch from a coastal launch site. However, what we know of Blue Origin’s activities don’t seem to match what Gonzales said in the article, but then, there’s a lot about Blue Origin we don’t know about.

The reaction to the upcoming launch varies considerably. At one extreme is an editorial in the Orange County Register, which is excited about the prospects of commercializing spaceflight (beyond, presumably, the commercial launch activity that exists today for communications and other satellites, not mentioned in the editorial.) Even if the launch fails, the editorial argues, “another launch will succeed, and the transition of space travel from a strictly government endeavor to one dominated by private companies will have advanced an important step.”

At another extreme is an op-ed by Examiner.com reported Jason Rhian, who was less than impressed with Shotwell’s performance at Monday’s press conference. He criticized as “flippant and haughty” her response to a reporter’s question about cost: “We don’t really talk about cost at SpaceX.” Rhian: “Given the status that Obama has given to SpaceX above all others, including NASA itself; Shotwell should be required to talk about cost.” Besides confusing the difference between “price” and “cost” (which was the point of Shotwell’s comments; as she noted, SpaceX publishes launch prices on its web site, which other major commercial launch providers do not), it’s worth noting that both the COTS development award and the CRS cargo contract are not traditional cost-plus contracts, where understanding a company’s costs is important. For this week’s launch NASA is not paying SpaceX specifically for a launch but instead has been providing SpaceX with funding as the company met milestones for development of the Falcon 9 and Dragon under its COTS award. (The launch is one of the milestones in the award, but only a token amount of funding is associated with it, as most of the money—$253 million of the $287 million, NASA’s Alan Lindenmoyer said Monday—has already been awarded to SpaceX for achieving earlier milestones.)