NASA awards $270M to spacecraft builders

Florida Today: NASA awards $270M to spacecraft builders

NASA on Monday awarded almost $270 million to developers of four U.S. spacecraft that are the frontrunners to fly astronauts after the shuttle.

Two capsules, a space plane and a gumdrop-shaped spacecraft were selected under a program seeking to develop commercial vehicles to taxi astronauts to the International Space Station or other destinations by the middle of the decade.

After two more shuttle flights, NASA will rely on Russian spacecraft for rides to the space station until a U.S. commercial service becomes available.

"We're committed to safely transporting U.S. astronauts on American-made spacecraft and ending the outsourcing of this work to foreign governments," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "These agreements are significant milestones in NASA's plans to take advantage of American ingenuity to get to low-Earth orbit, so we can concentrate our resources on deep space exploration."

NASA hopes privately run crew transportation will cost less than a government-run system, allow the agency to focus on building a giant rocket and capsule for exploration and help spur a market for commercial spaceflight.

The agency last year began its commercial crew development program, known as "CCDev," with $50 million in federal stimulus funds split among five companies.

The highly anticipated second round spread more than five times as much funding among fewer companies, hoping to accelerate progress on commercial systems.

After winnowing 22 proposals to eight finalists, NASA made the following awards:


$92.3 million to The Boeing Co. of Houston, Texas, to continue work on the Apollo-style CST-100 capsule, which the company hopes will also visit private stations launched by Bigelow Aerospace.


$80 million to Sierra Nevada Corp. of Louisville, Colo., developer of the Dream Chaser spacecraft, which resembles a small space shuttle orbiter.


$75 million to SpaceX of Hawthorne, Calif., whose Dragon spacecraft has completed one orbital test flight under a NASA program readying it for cargo deliveries to the space station.


$22 million to Blue Origin of Kent. Wash., a start-up backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos that will work on its gumdrop-shaped New Shepard spacecraft and an escape system.

Each of the spacecraft - all able to carry up to seven people - would launch from the Space Coast on United Launch Alliance's Atlas V or Delta IV rockets or SpaceX's Falcon 9, and the program will be managed at Kennedy Space Center.

The new funding will likely bring some jobs to Brevard County, though the numbers initially would be very small compared to the thousands being lost as the shuttle program nears retirement.

NASA did not specify when it would open a competition to select the vehicles that will ultimately fly crews, saying plans could be released by late this summer.

Philip McAlister, acting director of the Commercial Spaceflight Development program at NASA headquarters, said the field of competitors also won't be limited to Monday's winners, which did not include any launch vehicle providers.

Among the four finalists that lost out Monday were ULA, which won $6.7 million in the program's first round to work on an emergency detection system, and ATK, which sought to repurpose a solid rocket booster developed under NASA's canceled Constellation program as the first stage of a crew launcher.

The other two were Orbital Sciences Corp., which has a contract to deliver cargo and had proposed a space plane to carry crews, and Excalibur Almaz, which is upgrading old Soviet-designed systems.

Also overlooked Monday was a proposal by lead shuttle contractor United Space Alliance to study the viability of flying the shuttle commercially.

McAlister said a selection panel weighed how much technical progress could be made in a year and how much the proposals would advance availability of a commercial crew system given the funding available.

It's not clear how soon any of those systems will fly missions, with NASA citing only a "middle of the decade" target.

SpaceX has said it could be ready to fly crews within three years of being awarded a contract. Boeing said Monday it remained on track to fly by 2015, with test flights in 2014, if funding continued to ramp up.

"We'll be well along within a year," said Keith Riley, deputy manager for Boeing's commercial crew programs.

While the second round of commercial crew development funding was significantly bigger than the first, it's a fraction of the at least $3 billion budgeted in 2011 to work on a heavy-lift rocket and the Orion capsule for exploration.

NASA has requested $850 million to accelerate commercial crew efforts in 2012, but many in Congress are insisting NASA focus more resources on the heavy-lift project that by law is expected to be ready to fly by 2016.

Still, the commercial spaceflight advocates called Monday "a landmark day."

"This is a big step towards opening up the space frontier," said John Gedmark, executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. "Leveraging private investment is the only way NASA can make its dollars go farther in these times of belt tightening."

The program differs from traditional NASA contracts in that companies will only be paid upon meeting negotiated milestones, and they must invest in their projects. That investment ranges from 10 percent to 20 percent over the next year, NASA said.

"The next American-flagged vehicle to carry our astronauts into space is going to be a U.S. commercial provider," said Ed Mango, manager of the Commercial Crew Program based at KSC.