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Can Commercial Space Flights Handle NASA's New Wave of Supply Contracts?

So far supply missions are launching in a trickle.
Image: the SpaceX Dragon/Wikimedia

Earlier this year, the International Space Station was given a life extension. The football field-sized habitat orbiting 250 miles above our heads will now stay up there until at least 2024. The decision has raised some new problems, however, namely how NASA will keep sending cargo to the station. With its current commercial resupply contracts set to expire in a little less than two years, the agency is starting to look at the next wave of low Earth orbital cargo launches, focusing on two companies who haven’t yet met the terms of their original contracts.

Some background: In 2010, President Obama cancelled the Constellation program, the project begun under the Bush Administration to focus NASA’s efforts on returning astronauts to the Moon. With the lunar program gone, Obama instead focused the agency’s energies on getting humans to Mars. In the mean time, commercial partners would take over transport of astronauts and cargo to low Earth orbit, specifically to the International Space Station.

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The first contracts for these commercial Earth orbital launches, properly the Space Station Commercial Resupply Services Contracts, were awarded in 2008. And they went to two familiar companies: the Orbital Science Corporation and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX).

Both of these contracts took effect on January 1, 2009, and both laid out a clear expectation of what each company would have to deliver. NASA ordered eight flights valued at about $1.9 billion from Orbital Sciences and 12 flights valued at about $1.6 billion from SpaceX.

So far, SpaceX has launched two CRS missions under its contract with NASA. The company launched its CRS-1 mission on October 8, 2012, where a Dragon spacecraft rendezvoused and berthed with the ISS, delivering 882 pounds of supplies and experimental hardware to the crew. As per contract, the spacecraft also returned 1,673 pounds of material from orbit. SpaceX’s CRS-2 mission followed on March 1, 2013 with 1,268 pounds of cargo for the astronauts on board the ISS. The third SpaceX CRS mission is set to launch in a little less than two weeks, on March 16, taking about 5,000 pounds of cargo to the ISS.

Orbital Sciences’ Orb-1 mission launched on Jan. 9, 2014 with 3,230 pounds of cargo.

So, only three CRS flights have launched since the contracts were awarded out of the 20 total that both companies have to launch by the time the contracts end on Dec. 31, 2016. That means a lot of commercial resupply flights have to fly in the next three years. And even without these contracts being close to fulfilled, NASA is starting to look at the next wave of commercial resupply deals; on Feb. 21, the agency released a Request for Information for industry leaders to share ideas on how the United States can retain its low Earth orbit cargo delivery capability.

These CRS2 contracts, which will award $1 and $1.4 billion per year to private companies, will basically build on the first CRS contract batch. They don’t preclude NASA simply extending the existing CRS contracts with Orbital Sciences and SpaceX. But whatever companies eventually win the new CRS2 contracts, they must show NASA that they can get payload into and down from orbit with four or five missions each year from 2017 to 2024 using existing launch facilities and ground support services.

The lower overall contract funding and high rate of launches have presumably been set under the assumption that both Orbital Sciences and SpaceX will be pressing forward with more frequent missions. SpaceX certainly seems poised for a high launch volume; including the CRS-3 flight this month, the company has 14 launches planned for 2014 alone. There’s no reason to believe that SpaceX won’t be able to reliably launch four to five missions for NASA each year starting in 2017. But in the (at this point very rare) event that neither SpaceX nor Orbital Sciences manages to complete their CRS contract and NASA selects new companies, the ISS could be in trouble. With limited spacecraft able to reach the station at the moment, years of development for a commercial resupply system could limit activity on the station.

Whatever happens, cost is the firmest part of NASA’s CRS2 contract. Keeping the station in orbit until 2024 is a financial burden in itself, and more money to keep it stocked isn’t something NASA’s has.