What happens next with NASA’s plan to replace the ISS? Source: “It could get ugly”

"It reminds me of sort of Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football."

See full article...

 

[lurknomore]

Shelve Gateway that is already designed (if corroded), then complain about the end of ISS...
Is there any specific reason Gateway couldn't be launched to LEO to bridge the gap? It's a new space station, and almost ready to go. Does its Moon planned orbit require it to have a special Earth orbit ?

Also : If the commercial providers don't want to deal with ISS docking safety, how are they going to get NASA to agree to send astronauts to dock with them? A lot of the "approach ISS" rules have to overlap with "dragon approaches you" rules.

 

[Statistical]

Not really. “Privatization” in this particular case just refers to how NASA structures its contracts to buy stuff it needs. There’s two options:

1) Traditional: NASA makes a cost-plus contract detailing an extremely specific equipment design that industry builds. NASA has a ton of control over the design, and they end up owning it.

2) Commercial: NASA puts out a contract for the services it needs (launch this there, host experiments and astronauts on orbit here for this long), and industry does its own design and retains ownership of the equipment. NASA agrees to pay a fixed-fee up front for their use of the equipment, and often has some fixed payments when development milestones are reached. Company can sell services to others with the same equipment to recoup some of their dev costs.

If the market for CLD isn’t really there outside of nasa, that doesn’t prevent you from doing Option #2. It just means NASA (Congress, really) needs to guarantee a high enough fixed-fee that it’s worth it for companies to build the station.

Exactly. I am surprised people are confused by this. CLD is just as commercial as commercial resupply services and commercial crew. Even today the few non-NASA Dragon 2 Crew missions would not produce enough revenue to warrant development of Dragon had NASA not funded it. However it does mean some additional revenue. SpaceX is free to sell flights to anyone who is willing to pay (a few exceptions aside). A commercial station would have NASA as their largest customer but they could rent space and services to non-NASA customers as well.

 

[beb01]

One way to make this viable is to make part of the station a fuel depot. Instead of refueling rocket-to-rocket, have the rockets offload fuel while they're docked and offloading people and cargo. Now you've got a place to put supplies along with your fuel for the next mission to the moon or Mars. It's not so much a space station as a supply yard. Even if it's just storing liquid oxygen instead of all the different fuel variants, it's still a significant reduction in launch payload to refuel from a stable point in orbit.

Too much of an explosion risk.

 

[Statistical]

Shelve Gateway that is already designed (if corroded), then complain about the end of ISS...
Is there any specific reason Gateway couldn't be launched to LEO to bridge the gap? It's a new space station, and almost ready to go. Does its Moon planned orbit require it to have a special Earth orbit ?

Also : If the commercial providers don't want to deal with ISS docking safety, how are they going to get NASA to agree to send astronauts to dock with them? A lot of the "approach ISS" rules have to overlap with "dragon approaches you" rules.

NRHO is very cold. LEO is very hot. It would require extensive rework to make gateway modules work in LEO. The spaceflight history of "just take this thing and change it to make it do something else" has a pretty terrible track record. STS -> Ares -> SLS. Orion crew vehicle for Constellation -> Orion for ISS -> Orion for SLS. They tend to up being decade long billion dollar boondoggles and you have limitations that a clean sheet design wouldn't have.

 

[Statistical]

Hand waving assumption that the NRO has the bandwidth to spare

Those are a bunch of words but I have no clue what they mean or what you think they mean.

 

[adam.i]

This doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the safety of the proposed commercial space stations.

The statement is referring to the cost and effort of certifying that they can berth with and interoperate with ISS. That's like adding the costs of certifying a new commercial cargo vehicle. As a free flyer station they'd be the passive target for crew/cargo vehicles - now they'd be the active element too.

 

[beb01]

NRHO is very cold. LEO is very hot. It would require extensive rework to make gateway modules work in LEO. The spaceflight history of "just take this thing and change it to make it do something else" has a pretty terrible track record. STS -> Ares -> SLS. Orion crew vehicle for Constellation -> Orion for ISS -> Orion for SLS. They tend to up being decade long billion dollar boondoggles and you have limitations that a clean sheet design wouldn't have.

I was wondering why not repurpose Gateway to LEO. Thanks for explaining why it won;t work / too expensive.

 

[Statistical]

The NRO have a job to do, this require data to be transmitted. Would like to take a guess why there's lots of NRO satellites transmitting data over Russia. Wild stab in the dark here but the people paying for it might actually get a say in how it's used. Same old story with you space fanatics, you hand wave away inconvenient facts.

Those are more words but still no clue what the hell you are talking about. Nobody is saying commercial stations would use NRO sats. Next time read the whole post the NRO portion of TDRSS was just a fun fact. It has nothing to do with how commercial stations would communicate.

 

[Hamlet_Jr]

I’d love to read the actual studies that say “These are the customers, this is how much they say they will pay, and this is how often they say they will pay it.”.

And why haven’t they signed contracts? Or letters of intent? With rocket development they start selling launches way before they get to where these companies are now.

There isn’t a huge 10yr backlog of customers lining up to pay for Dragon missions. And the Axion ISS trips aren’t exactly selling like hotcakes.

 

[adam.i]

NRHO is very cold. LEO is very hot. It would require extensive rework to make gateway modules work in LEO. The spaceflight history of "just take this thing and change it to make it do something else" has a pretty terrible track record. STS -> Ares -> SLS. Orion crew vehicle for Constellation -> Orion for ISS -> Orion for SLS. They tend to up being decade long billion dollar boondoggles and you have limitations that a clean sheet design wouldn't have.

I'd bet that we could add ARM -> PPE -> SR-1 to that list in a couple years.

 

[Statistical]

There isn’t a huge 10yr backlog of customers lining up to pay for Dragon missions.

Exactly and yet Dragon would be considered a success story for commercial crew. NASA is likely going to pay 90%+ of the revenue for a commercial station the same way it has paid 90% of the revenue for Crew Dragon. It being "privately" operated though means there could be other tenants. ESA or JAXA or hell a group of Middle Eastern countries which want to do something more than have more mega yachts.

 

[beb01]

I never understood the idea of NASA being an "anchor store" to a privately built space station. That sounds so much like the mall concept down on earth, which has largely fallen away because the anchor stores (Sears, Penny's, etc.) have mostly died. If NASA wants a space station they alone have the money to build it. And should.

 

[beb01]

Considering the success SpaceX has had with building Starship out of stainless steel I wonder if it would be cheaper and faster to build space station modules out of steel.

 

[Statistical]

I never understood the idea of NASA being an "anchor store" to a privately built space station. That sounds so much like the mall concept down on earth, which has largely fallen away because the anchor stores (Sears, Penny's, etc.) have mostly died. If NASA wants a space station they alone have the money to build it. And should.

If NASA wants supplies delivered to the ISS they have the money to build it in house and they should.

If NASA wants crew transport for LEO they have the money to build it in house and they should.

If NASA wants a human landing system for the moon they have the money to build it in house and they should.

Is CLD really that much different than Commercial Resupply, Commercial Crew, or HLS?

In all cases commercial refers to the acquisition method not an expectation that there would be an endless stream of non-NASA customers from day one. Most people would consider commercial crew a success yet overall NASA has provided >95% of the total revenue. It isn't commercial in the sense there are daily Dragon flights and billions upon billions on non NASA money but there are some commercial uses which is a step in the right direction. NASA commercial projects are laying the foundations for future economics in space and ensure American companies are at that forefront. That is true even if a robust private sector market doesn't materialize for decades.

Nothing NASA has built in house (which still involves outside companies just pork loaded cost plus) has ever been on time or on budget especially in HSF to include the ISS.

 

[adam.i]

@EricBerger
Any word of what's happening with Lunar Terrain Vehicles? Seemed to me like they were going to do a rug-pull on current efforts in the day 1 presentation with more to come in day 2, but I can't find any streams of day 2 sessions.

 

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

I never understood the idea of NASA being an "anchor store" to a privately built space station. That sounds so much like the mall concept down on earth, which has largely fallen away because the anchor stores (Sears, Penny's, etc.) have mostly died. If NASA wants a space station they alone have the money to build it. And should.

The problem is Congress's spending habits. If NASA owns the station then Congress has fine control over where and how the money is spent and it inevitably goes to pork. By outsourcing ownership, even though it's more expensive than an in-house station should cost, the bulk of the money will at least go to actually building and operating the station.

 

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

This doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the safety of the proposed commercial space stations.

NASA still has to certify the final product as fit to use. All this does is avoid the cost-plus friendly (read: gratuitously slow and expensive) procurement process that in-house projects use.

 

[Tactical Finesse]

The problem is Congress's spending habits. If NASA owns the station then Congress has fine control over where and how the money is spent and it inevitably goes to pork. By outsourcing ownership, even though it's more expensive than an in-house station should cost, the bulk of the money will at least go to actually building and operating the station.

Or, more likely:

1. It'll never be built because there's no profit in it. Same as that time ANWR was leased to oil companies in Trump's 1st term and no drilling ever happens. Or;
2. The people who "build it" will make like Verizon in New Jersey, and take the billions and knowingly and intentionally never deliver the product.

 

[BCGeiger]

NASA is fumbling building a space station in LEO when they have decades of experience with the existing one. This doesn’t inspire confidence they will be able to build a lunar station a quarter million miles away, in an environment they have never tried to do any kind of construction or long term habitation in.

 

[RZetopan]

Sure, bubbles occur even in the private sector, because no one is perfectly prescient. Will LLMs do what they are promised? We can't know until the experiment is run.

But what the private sector does is respond to the evidence of success or failure. Efforts that don't work are brutally pruned away. This is unlike in the public sector, where failure can persist for decades, even generations, even with unambiguous evidence the approach has failed. Just look at NASA for ample evidence of this.

How many, and for how long, do we need to run experiments to determine that a stochastic parrot is not really a reliable source of information? A Magic 8-Ball with billions of possible answers is not more accurate than one with only two, YES or NO answers.

 

[nucrash]

All of a sudden that $20 billion for a Moonbase is starting to look a lot less realistic.

 

[EllPeaTea]

Considering the success SpaceX has had with building Starship out of stainless steel I wonder if it would be cheaper and faster to build space station modules out of steel.

VAST were looking to build their first station using stainless. It was mentioned in the video tour NSF did with them a while ago. They switched to using aluminium instead because of an unexplained reason.

 

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

Or, more likely:

1. It'll never be built because there's no profit in it. Same as that time ANWR was leased to oil companies in Trump's 1st term and no drilling ever happens. Or;
2. The people who "build it" will make like Verizon in New Jersey, and take the billions and knowingly and intentionally never deliver the product.

1) A contract with NASA would be profitable if NASA had the budget for it. Even if NASA was the only customer it would still be cheaper than the current arrangement.
2) Flight hardware is currently under construction.

The problem is that A) NASA can't get enough funding for CLD development while ISS is still flying and B) the ISS contingent don't want to let go.

 

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

VAST were looking to build their first station using stainless. It was mentioned in the video tour NSF did with them a while ago. They switched to using aluminium instead because of an unexplained reason.

Probably gauge limited. A steel hull that size would be too thin and fragile but aluminum is less dense so they can make it thicker for the same weight.

 

[InvariantCapitalist]

Oh I know--my point was that there are negative consequences for establishing this, presuming for argument they can do it. At the moment there's no reason any commercial entity would do this. Maybe sometime in the future they might. It depends on how skeptical or cynical you are about the Moon landing/base efforts.

BUT, there are consequences.

Namely that I can guarantee you that if this commercialization effort is successful--everyone will be unhappy about it. Just like people are rather upset at PG&E for killing more people as a result of wildfires due to their deferred maintenance practices than even prolific serial killers. Oh, and LOL ERCOT. And UHC had to hire a new CEO because--well you know. What has commercial rocketry gotten us? Some rich jerks going to space and shouting YAHOO when they landed--and a whole lot of nothing for anyone else.

How about reducing launch costs to 95% less per ton than the Shuttle? Increasing US launch cadence to over 200 a year? Increasing launch success rates to highest level ever?

That’s nothing?

The fact is commercial space stations need to be far less expensive than the ISS to make sense. And that should be very possible given the ISS was massively expensive, maybe the most expensive object in human history. It was almost entirely constructed using cost plus contracts and the most expensive launch system in history.

The New Space era that gave us the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, RocketLab, New Glenn, Starlink, booster recovery, etc only blossomed when the Shuttle was ended and it stopped sucking the oxygen, er payloads, out of the launch market.

Same thing likely needs to happen with ISS. It’s old, harder to maintain every year and at its end of life, ready for deorbiting. We may have to go a few years before new space stations are available and suffer through the uncertainty of what will take shape (just like the decade post shuttle), but our best option for advancing to better and cheaper space stations and orbital habitats is to transition NASA from building and maintaining its own to buying time on commercial replacements.

 

[InvariantCapitalist]

Think of the gained efficiencies in all manner of human endeavors if we removed the profit component, allowing all resources to be thrown at the core issue on hand.

If you stripped out all of Boeings profits from the $30B SLS, it still costs at least $20B, and is still by far the most expensive and least economic launch vehicle if this century.

The problem with government projects is that the lack of profits can never overcome the terrible incentives that make them so inefficient.

 

[2021spaceodyssey]

I don’t know, what NASA said all sounded about right to me, and refreshingly honest. Seems like a free-flying module would be more difficult than one that just has to connect to an existing functioning station.

 

[Grogger]

Think of the gained efficiencies in all manner of human endeavors if we removed the profit component, allowing all resources to be thrown at the core issue on hand.

Yes. Think of how awesome things will be when the one reliable driver of efficiency and innovation is removed.

Pretty sure you get SLS - where alternative drivers such as local politics, government-chosen winners and losers, where poor solutions are continuously sought because important people have attached their reputations to them and refuse to take a loss of face (this is the hidden weapon of SpaceX - since Musk is shameless, they actually will give up a bad idea and don't care about loss of face.)

 

[Insomnomaniac]

"Flying J in Space"

If I may offer a modest counter-proposal...

 

[InvariantCapitalist]

The issue is people at NASA looked at the financial numbers for a commercial space station and they don't add up. The cost of developing a space station is more than private investment and NASA subsidies can afford. The cost of operating a space station is significantly more than any likely (or even unlikely) revenue streams.

NASA doesn't want to fund a space station that will quickly go broke. And NASA does want a LEO presence. A program that looks like certain failure is not appealing.

I’d argue that a private station that goes broke is far superior to NASA building another cost plus monstrosity. In the first case NASA is out a couple billion, maybe, in prepayments for station time. In the second case we have to invest another hundred billion on a station that requires billions a year in maintenance and operations.

And I doubt any private space station with a NASA contract goes broke. Their construction and operating costs are certain to be far lower than the ISS to start with.

 

[InvariantCapitalist]

It’s worse than that. Q1 thinking believes that basic research comes from other people. Privatization here is incredibly shortsighted.

Yes basic research comes from people. Actually useful basic research comes from well led and motivated people trying to solve achievable tasks.

How many nuclear research programs has NASA had over the last 80 years and how many nuclear engines and power plants has it produced?

How many manned mars landing research projects has NASA funded and how many have been thrown out when they start the next ones from scratch? All of them?

So here is a basic research project. Determine how to build and maintain orbital space stations that are significantly more capable than the ISS for a fraction of its enormous cost.

Your options are:

A) Have NASA design it, and give Boeing & Lockheed risk free contracts to build all the test rigs up to building the actual station. Risk free meaning if specifications change or schedules slip, and both will, Boeing and Lockheed get paid more to cover the additional costs. If it’s not risk free to the contractors, NASA can’t build its brilliant new ideas because contractors won’t take risks to help and NASA doesn’t have the resources or talent for actual construction.

B) NASA offers to pay to lease time on any space station that meets its requirements. Now far smaller and far more focused organizations compete to get those contracts. The best run programs will win the contracts, the worst will fail.

 

[Dan Corcoran]

This week is the best reporting of the year, especially liking the deep dive on data centers and then this article, the best article of the year.

I especially appreciated how informative the article was on the changed direction of commercial space stations, and the added context from industry reactions the day after Ignite, made it even stronger. It was genuinely enjoyable to read and felt worth the wait for the deeper reporting.

 

[graylshaped]

Pretty sure you get SLS - where alternative drivers such as local politics, government-chosen winners and losers, where poor solutions are continuously sought because important people have attached their reputations to them and refuse to take a loss of face (this is the hidden weapon of SpaceX - since Musk is shameless, they actually will give up a bad idea and don't care about loss of face.)

Pretty sure you don't have to go to one stupid extreme because the other extreme is also stupid.

 

[Feniks]

Replacing a project of-relative- selfless international cooperation.
It is depressingly on brand for the current US.

And it won't work. Corporations don't give a fuck about science. They only care about the products. This is why governmentents fund universities and researchers in the first place!

 

[raschumacher]

If I may offer a modest counter-proposal...


View attachment 131598

The cleanest bathrooms in LEO!

 

[GoodGodLemon]

The short story is: NASA doesn't have the money for two LEO providers because everything is going into the lunar base. When you don't have the funds, then you stress how iffy the case is for the viability of commercial space stations.

The CLPS program is another example only with a twist. NASA didn't have enough money for a fleet of landers and rovers built the traditional way because it was spending so much on SLS and Orion. NASA argued that industry was asking them to do a CLPS program. And that companies were mature enough to handle the job. Results so far: one success, two failures and one partial failure. And Masten went through $75.9 million and then went bankrupt.

NASA now wants to expand CLPS despite the poor record. It seems to be betting that companies will learn from their failures and improve their success rate. If they don't, the dollar amounts for lost payloads will continue to rise.

Congress has stuck it with using SLS through Artemis V. The agency also has to pour money into building a Moon base. So, NASA doesn't have the funds to fully support robotic exploration of the Moon and commercial LEO stations.

 

[LuminarySunburst]

Yeah, you’ve nailed the critical point here I think - there’s no way giving NASA more ownership and control will make things cheaper or faster. If they can’t afford to put an RFP for a station out for bids, they can’t afford to build the core of it themselves either. Doesn’t make sense.

I’m thinking it’s really one of two things:

1) Favoritism to Axiom Space. From the article:


2) Some sort of deal made with Congress in order to get the SLS changes through - maybe part of that deal behind the scenes was to issue a traditional cost-plus pork contract for old space to make the core module?

It definitely seems true that Congress isn’t giving CLD enough funding to succeed. Maybe this new plan is the only thing they could get by Congress.

3) Without excluding either of the above, perhaps the CLD changes could also have been part of a broader "deal" with NASA JSC stakeholders to secure JSC buy-in for the Gateway cancellation "pause". Cancelling both space stations (ISS and Gateway, one in operation and one in advanced stages of development) and exchanging them with just a "powerpoint Moon Base" would be high-risk for JSC. Now, in exchange for surrendering Gateway, JSC gets to (maybe?) keep the ISS going for longer, and (maybe? if not cancelled by next Administration?) a new, shiny and exciting Moon Base.