Main Engine Cut Off - T+255: NSSL Phase 3 Addendum

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

After the most recent show, I found a few nuggets of information in the NSSL Phase 3 documents, plus some more updates came out in a call that the Space Force had with some reporters.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 35 executive producers—Donald, Lee, The Astrogators at SEE, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut), Kris, Simon, Pat, Pat from KC, Russell, Matt, Fred, Stealth Julian, SmallSpark Space Systems, Tyler, Jan, Dawn Aerospace, Ryan, Theo and Violet, David, Harrison, Joel, Benjamin, Frank, Bob, Chris, Will, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Joonas, Steve, Lars from Agile Space, Warren, and four anonymous—and 835 other supporters.TopicsT+254: Mars Sample Return, Vulcan, NSSL Phase 3 (with Eric Berger) - Main Engine Cut OffNational Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 DRAFT Request for Proposals (RFPs) #2Space Force to select three providers of national security launch services - SpaceNewsSpace Force changed launch procurement plan due to concerns about capacity - SpaceNewsThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by ULAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to the Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and I wanted to put out a little addendum show to my most recent episode that I did with Eric Berger just a couple of days ago. We talked about the National Security Space Launch Program Phase 3. That's been in the news lately because the U.S. Space Force has been putting out updates to the draft RFP that is floating around. The real RFP won't be out until later this year with bids submitted after that, but they've been updating this paperwork and changing some of the criteria for this program

that contains a ton of launches. The reason this is such a topic from year to year, this is phase three with phase two, phase one, phase 1A have all been things I've focused on in the lifespan of Main Engine Cutoff, because it is such a big driver of the US space launch market. And because of the position that the launch providers in the US have globally, it is a fairly large driver of the global launch infrastructure, at least for the bigger ends of vehicles. So it's something that is important to notice because this is a huge batch of launches that get awarded over five years span. So the structure of that does kind of impact the market at a wider level.

And then now, you know, we're getting into this phase of the industry where the mega constellations that have been doing all of these purchases of different launch services are now starting to impact, you know, kind of going the other way now, where the scale of the industry and the commercial launches that are out there are starting to impact some of the criteria that the Space Force puts out in these documents. So Eric and I tackled some of the recent changes on that recent show. But even after we got off the call, I had been digging through these RFP documents still,

and I found a couple of nuggets that I missed previously in the Lane 1 documentation for Phase 3. Unbeknownst to me, there was a call going on that the US Space Force held with a bunch of journalists. I was unfortunately not on that call, so I didn't get to ask questions about it. But they were answering a bunch of questions about the Lane 2 side of things and talked about a couple of tidbits that, again, were buried in these PDFs that I did not find in the first pass. So just a couple of updated pieces of information that I think help shape the picture overall. So I'll do some stage setting to catch you up previously on National Security Space Launch Phase 3 and talk about some of the things I found and that they

talked about on that media call as well. You can find the writing. I've got links in the show notes to find the writing about the call from people that were actually there, but I'll do my best rundown here. So right now we are in phase two of the National Security Space Launch Program. That's what's currently being awarded out. Not too many launches have flown under phase two yet, but those are the contracts that when you see the Space Force awarding contracts to ULA and SpaceX, those are under the phase two contracting round, which was completed a couple years ago. The Space Force selected two providers to split 30-some launches between the ULA got 60% of those launches and SpaceX got 40% of those launches, and those are being doled out annually and launched as they're ready, effectively. Phase three, because these windows are about five years long,

they're always kind of working on the documentation for the next phase when the current one is being awarded. So phase 3 has had some major changes, and I've talked about this on the show before, so you can go back and listen to my initial thoughts, but here's an update. There are two lanes within phase 3 this time, rather than the way that phase 2 has been. Lane 2 is the same structure as phase two, which is launch providers are selected, missions are divided up amongst those selected and contracted out annually, assigned to the providers annually. And there are heavy requirements on what you need to do to be a lane two provider. You need to be able to hit all these different reference orbits that the Space Force put out there, from launching things

to low-Earth orbit, to polar orbits, to directly to geostationary orbits, which are the most taxing. So there are huge performance requirements needed, and all of those orbits come with certain mass ranges that you need to hit for those launches. You also need to be able to launch from both coasts, and there's a bunch of other guidelines in there about what you need to be able to do to be selected for a Lane 2 award. Lane 1, on the other hand, is a new thing that they're trying in the National Security Space Launch Program, which is to make some launches available for somewhat open competition. I've been calling it more in the NASA Commercial Lun payload services program style, which is the Space Force on ramps a bunch of available launch providers. So they say all of these people in this list have passed the check that they can provide us with service in this range.

When we have a launch to go out to industry and bid on, we will post the RFP for that particular mission. And everyone that is an on-ramp provider can bid for that individually. They need to provide us the full launch cost for that particular mission. There's no ongoing launch service support contracts annually, which pay for things that are special that the Space Force needs, like vertical integration or launch sites that a commercial company might not otherwise have opened, that kind of thing, right? These lane one launches are straight up, just like a commercial company would be going out to buy a launch. They post the documentation of what needs to be launched, when, to where, how it works, what the requirements are. Everybody submits bids and the Space Force would select

the winning bid based on a list of criteria. So this was intended to open up more launches to more competition rather than kind of pre-buying a bunch of launches on particular competitors. It's opening it up to making sure that the best competitive option wins. And furthermore, every single calendar year, the Space Force can on-ramp new competitors. So as new launch vehicles come online, they could get on-ramped into this program and bid on the following missions that are going to come out. The difference is that in this Lane 1, you have to have flown to orbit successfully with your launch vehicle,

and then you can be on-ramped and compete for the missions that come out in the future. So previously, the previous round of Phase 1, or Phase 3 lane one documentation had a pretty high cap on the performance required of these vehicles. were talking about it. We didn't have documentation yet. It sounded like this lane was going to open up not just to these missions to the people that are currently flying SpaceX, ULA, the ones that are soon to be flying like Blue Origin, ABL, Firefly, but it sounded like they didn't really have any payload capacity ranges on that. So we thought, okay, great. Like if they have a 100 kilogram satellite to launch, they can put it out for bid under this program, and everyone available could bid. So if that's a dedicated electron launch, or if it's a slot on a SpaceX rideshare, you know, there would be a lot of flexibility. When the documentation came out, it was actually much more limited than that.

And originally, it was, I think it was something around, I think it was around 10 tons, eight to 10 tons, Peter Beck told me at Space Symposium. And so that basically cut out the smaller launch vehicles, the one-ton launchers like ABL, Firefly, when Terran 1 was still a thing, down to Electron, RIP Virgin Orbit. The smaller competitors were cut out of that because of that baseline. So effectively, the only other options there that weren't in phase two were Blue Origin's New Glenn, soon-to-be Rocket Lab's Neutron, and Relativity's Terran R. There aren't a whole lot of other vehicles in that range in the works right now in the US. So it only expanded the market just a

little bit more. And that felt weird if the intention was to open up a lot more competition, especially with the Space Development Agency and some of these new constellations the Department of Defense is working on here, flying smaller and smaller vehicles that don't necessarily need 20 tons to orbit, but could probably do with, you know, again, it's going to be up for the actual individual competition between these awards, but it seems plausible that, you know, a one-ton launch vehicle would be useful in some of these missions that the Space Force might want to fly. Well, in the latest documentation, some of this has been tweaked. So now it shows that the launch systems that would be available for lane one or would be allowed into

lane one have to launch. And this is the part that is confusing. And I've sent a bunch of messages to people that might know about this thing. So it's weird because they also use varying weights or types of weight, right? They use pounds and kilograms all across this thing. So I'm going to read a little snippet here, and then we can talk about why I was confused. The offers proposed launch systems is capable of achieving at least 15,000 pounds mass to orbit, 500 nautical miles circular orbit, 63.4 degree inclination with orbital accuracy, probability, da-da-da-da-da-da-da, as defined in these other documents. this can be achieved with a single launch or multiple launches, minimum of 1,000 kilograms per launch and multiple launch configurations.

So they are now revising that target from, I think it was eight tons before is what Peter Beck told me, but now it's at 6.8 metric tons is that 15,000 pounds mass to orbit at that particular orbit. But then they say that this can be achieved over multiple launches, minimum of 1,000 kilograms per launch. So that effectively for certain configurations, right? Again, constellations is the one that comes to mind, like something like the Space Development Agencies, what is it, the Proliferated Warfighter Satellite System or whatever, the PWSF, I got to look that up. Constellations, the things that can be divided up along multiple launches, right? You can't have a six-ton satellite that gets launched in multiple launches if it's a single satellite. But if you have a plane of satellites that need to be launched and somebody comes in with a competitive offer to launch it over five launches, then, you know, that's something

that they can consider now. So they've dropped that to 1000 kilograms, which does open up, like I said, that that range of new launch vehicles, though it's getting trimmed with relativity having canceled Terran one, you still have Firefly Alpha in that range. You've got ABL's rocket in that range. And it's something that, you know, there is going to be a little bit of a new market there. It still cuts out, you know, Electron and the lower vehicles, but at least it does drop that minimum baseline down a bit. There are some clarifications I've heard about this since. This apparently came out of Industry Day that the Space Force had where people can go and ask questions from the industry if they're interested to offer us. That 1,000 kilogram minimum would be dependent on which particular mission. If the mission itself has a good reason

to put all of the satellites on one launch vehicle, they would not look at multiple launch options. If they do allow a split into multiple launches, all of the launches would have to be launched within a particular time period. So the mission might define kind of like what NASA had with the tropics missions that Astra was originally going to fly. You know, we need these three launches done over the course of eight weeks. And to do that, you need to be able to demonstrate that they have met that launch pace previously. So it's not completely open-ended. And someone could say, I will fly these vehicles over five launches. And you say, okay, how long would that take you? And it's like, I don't know, we've done two launches so far. We don't know how

long it will take us to do five. That kind of thing won't be entertained for this multiple launch. So again, like the lane one requirements are, I'm really curious to see if this actually works out overall in terms of opening up the market much wider for these national security launches. I kind of have an inkling that this is completely uninformed, by the way. I do talk to a lot of people on this side of the Department of Defense, but no one has said anything close to this. I'm not doing like the little birdie thing, just straight up. I have a little bit of a suspicion that lane one is a beachhead for a section of people within the Department of Defense to show that this is a viablehead for a section of people within the department of events to show that this is a viable mechanism for phase four right maybe phase four is we're getting to like marvel

territory here by the way maybe phase four is completely task order based they on-ramp providers with certain requirements and they have now proven that they can survive on a completely open architecture. And the point of all these restrictions and requirements around who can be on-ramped is to avoid something like NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, which in my eye has on-ramped too many competitors that make it really hard to win a task order by a legitimate company. So maybe their kind a test here is, can we write the right limitations on who can be on-ramped and then open it up to head-to-head competition for the whole thing? And is that a viable route forward for the future?

You know, and overall, there's going to be about 30 missions in lane one over five years. So that's a pretty good, pretty healthy amount, especially if you consider, you know, somebody's going to win a multiple launch configuration option here. Hopefully, then that's, you know, 35 launches at a minimum. Lane two, on the other hand, is going to have 58 missions per the latest documentation. So the scale is still much bigger on lane two. But again, is this enough of a test or a demonstration of how this sort of mechanism could work that when they get to phase four, they either go all in in this direction or bail on it entirely because it didn't quite work out? I don't want to totally knock the tight restrictions on it because at the same time, I criticize NASA's

commercial lunar payload services program for being too open-ended. So I want to be consistent and say that this is probably the way to create a healthy market. I think it's, and maybe if I had more insight into the payloads that were going to be assigned to this lane, I'd be more open to the thousand kilogram limitation over multiple launches rather than straight up a thousand kilograms as a baseline. Maybe they just don't have many missions that would fit in that for lane one because there are other launch programs within the Department of Defense. This isn't the only launch program. There is a small launch program, several of them, that exist elsewhere in the infrastructure. So, you know,

in that same vein, maybe this feels like encroaching on that and someone else already handles that. It's not our department, so it's useless to us anyway, so let's avoid it entirely. So that is the lane one tidbit, is that smaller multiple launch options will be entertained. How and how competitive can those be? Yet to be seen, and color me skeptical that, you know, five ABL launches is ever going to be competitive with a single launch on another provider. But I guess we shall see. Depends on what the criteria is for that particular task order. All right, before we get into the lane two conversation, I do want to say thank you to all of you who support Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com support. There are 870 of

you. We're getting pretty close to 900. We just need 30 of you out there who have not checked it out yet to jump on in. We can get to the 900 club, which would be pretty cool. 870 of you. We're getting pretty close to 900. We just need 30 of you out there who have not checked it out yet to jump on in. We can get to the 900 club, which would be pretty cool. 870 supporters, including 35 executive producers. Thanks to Donald Lee, the Astrogators at SCE, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Chris, Simon, Pat, Pat from KC, Russell, Matt, Fred, Stealth Julian, SmallSpark Space Systems, Tyler, Jan, Dawn Aerospace, Ryan, Theo and Violet, David, Harrison, Joel, Benjamin, Frank, Bob, Chris, Will, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Eunice, Tyler, Jan, Dawn Aerospace, Ryan, Theo and Violet, David, Harrison, Joel, Benjamin, Frank, Bob, Chris, Will, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Eunice, Steve, Lars from Agile Space, Warren, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for keeping me running here. This is a 100% listener-supported show. I could not do what I do without you all

out there. So, manageatcutoff.com slash support is where to go. Join the club. You can get access to Miko Headlines, which is another podcast I do about every week where I run through all the stories in the news, keep you up to date. You keep supporting me. I keep you up to date. It's a great deal. I think you'll love it. It's only $3 a month, people. That is a pretty good deal, especially in 2023. So I think you'll love it. Check it out. If you don't love it, I'll send you $3 back, however you prefer. I'll write an old-fashioned check if you want. I will get it back to you, I promise. All right, so the lane two side of things. I think pretty much, I don't have a lot of updates from what we talked about with Eric. There are just a couple of tidbits that we did miss. Number one is a huge increase in the number of launches that are going to be assigned

to lane two. I mentioned lane one has about 30 missions. Lane two now has 58. It was going to be in that 30th range. They added a whole bunch in this latest round. And then on the call, they explained, and this tracks with, I mentioned, I talked to a bunch of people within the DoD structure, tracks with some things I've heard from there, that one of the reasons for that big increase was that they had talked to other programs that use this National Security Space Launch Program, notably the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office was mentioned, and they have basically shifted some launches into lane two. I mentioned this the other day with Eric. There was some internal battling within this program from some

parties that they'd really like their missions to be in lane one because they think they're going to get better pricing there, and they're probably right. But now they've been shifted over to lane two. The NRO was called out specifically on this media call that was quoted in Space News, I believe. So that is where that increase came from. And the Space Force is effectively using that as cover for having added this third provider to Lane 2. Now, why am I saying they've used it as cover is because the Senate Armed Services Committee basically inserted this third provider provision into the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, that they were going to require the Space Force add a third provider. So everyone's seeing that as, you know, lobbying from Blue Origin

to get that third provider inserted into this program. And the Space Force is being, you know, good at politics by saying, yeah, yeah, but we have all these new launches now, we think it is a useful thing to add a third provider and make sure that, you know, we retain access to space because three launch providers is better than two. Even though previously they have said, no, we really only like two providers because we want to ensure that these two providers stay in business and stay available and that we think three providers waters down. Now they're saying, no, no, but now we have all these launches. We have so many more launches now. So this is a totally defensible strategy.

Now, I, in the conversation with Eric and right now, I actually stand for it, like, especially considering how I feel about lane one being quite limited. And these three companies are really going to be the ones that sweep up the lane one missions anyway. They just have to be competitive to do it. I think with the point of lane two being that assured access to space line, right, they're going to give each of these awards, each of these companies that are awarded, they're going to give them a launch service support

contract, which is an annual contract that can exceed $100 million to support some of the special configurations that they require, which is vertical integration for certain payloads. They do require a West Coast launch site. There are other requirements that these companies as commercial launch companies might not necessarily do because they don't need to. And they see this as a way of supporting that. Many people out there have called it subsidies in the past when it's applied to companies that they don't like and when it's applied to companies they like they reason about why it's useful i obviously fall somewhere in between though i find it more like yeah the the dod has a lot of special concerns that they like to pay people to ensure that they have what they need uh and you know i feel like

to some extent that is defensible. If it gets completely egregious, not defensible. Talking about any of those things, $100 million a year does not go very far for these launch companies. Certainly doesn't support the existence of a West Coast launch site. I'm sure it costs more money than that to just maintain that capability out there. So that's fairly significant, I would say. And relative to the launch costs, it's in some cases an extra launch worth of money per year that is being awarded to these companies that assures them money that they can continue to operate for this particular segment of their market. I think if the point of lane two is assured access, having a contract that pairs with that makes a lot of sense to me.

Now, the biggest thing that we missed is that, and this is because, again, I told you, there are so many documents. When you download this RFP, like if you have not yet and you're curious, go to the link in the show notes that you can download the RFP packages. Phase three, lane one has, let me count them, 21 items in it. PDFs, Excel sheets, the whole thing. Lane two has 22 items. They all reference each other. Unless you know which particular document has the thing that you're looking for, it's nearly impossible to find stuff. You got to just like do an I'm feeling lucky search of the document and hope that you found the word that they use to describe the thing that you're looking for. The lane one nugget that I found was in attachment eight evaluation criteria.

Some of the nuggets for lane two were in attachment 10, where the contract terms and conditions are. So in that, the third provider is going to be awarded seven particular missions, five GPS launches, and two launches that are direct to geostationary orbit. Those are all the launches that are going to be provided to that third provider. So previously, we didn't know what the split would be when we were talking, Eric and I. The phase two split is 60-40. I thought, all right, maybe it's 40-30-30. No, it's seven launches for the third provider, and the other 51 missions get split 60-40, just as they do today.

So it's a lot less than we all assumed when we saw this third provider thing coming online. I still think there are some other stipulations in here that make the, you know, obviously there is Blue Origin lobbying happening, right? We know where the senators that Blue Origin likes live, and those are the senators that are behind some of these things getting into these documents. But there are still some poison pill lines in this documentation. Notably, the whole phase three program is focused on October 1st, 2026, because that is the start of the fiscal year 2027 for the US government. That is when all this stuff needs to be ready. So they can select a launch company for phase three that isn't flying their vehicle yet,

as long as they have a credible plan and a credible path to flying by October 1st, 2026. I mentioned this on the show with Eric. There is a requirement in this documentation that these selected competitors in lane two have to have a launch site up and operating by October 1st, 2026. So that right there is a huge, a huge thing that Blue Origin has to handle because they don't have a launch site out in Vandenberg yet. They have a launch site out at Cape Canaveral. They do not site out in Vandenberg yet. They have a launch site out at Cape Canaveral. They do not have one at Vandenberg yet. SpaceX just got a lease on Space Launch Complex 6 out there, which was the former Delta 4 pad. I thought that would have been a good spot

for New Glenn. There was no way, even if that was true, there was no way that they were going to be ready in time with Space Launch Complex 6, which might explain why they didn't go for it, because they weren't going to get access to that until like 2025 sometime. They'd have one year to turn that pad around for New Glenn. That seems completely unrealistic. So maybe they do have another plan, but we haven't heard about it yet. And I have no idea what the timeline would be to actually hear about that. So very curious to find out what the plan is there. Can they get this thing dropped out of the final version of the RFP? Can they get that particular West Coast launch site date pushed back? Seems likely, right? I mean, if this is the 5D chess that I'm at at this point, one of the things that it says in documents is the reason that they're delimiting the third provider to seven missions is that it limits some of the, how do they put it, the integration studies that they have to do for that third provider. Guess what? Five GPS satellites and two direct-to-geo satellites don't have to launch from the West Coast. So this is, again, you know, if Blue Origin is that third

provider, if that's what they're going to win, they don't have to launch a West Coast launch for this entire program, unless they win one on lane one. So maybe that's something that they can work. And they say, actually, you know, you need to waive that because we don't have any launches for the West Coast. And bada bing, bada boom, you know, like, there it is. So there's going to be a battle between those two stipulations of the launches that are applied to the other provider, the West Coast launch date site. Something's going on there. We need to see how this sorts out in the final documentation. Now, the fallback on all this is that if any of the selected companies do not meet the October 2026 deadline, the missions for that year, the ones that are awarded out and doled out that year,

are assigned to the other competitors. And then when they go for assignment the next year, because they're assigning these missions annually every October, when they go for assignment next year, if they're flying by then, they would apply their missions to that provider. Otherwise, they missed the boat again, they move to the next year. So I think that that part is handled smoothly. Even right now in phase two, we're getting to the point with ULA and Vulcan delays being so long and we're still, guess what? We're still months out, like months out. It'll be getting warm again by the time Vulcan flies, based on what I'm hearing. It's warm now, it'll get cold, it'll get warm again by the time Vulcan is lighting its engines to fly off the launch pad. So we're in that situation now where if they go longer and longer, some of their missions could

be reassigned over to Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy if the Space Force deems that appropriate. So there is that out there for delays on these missions. But the launch site one and the way it conflicts with the missions they're getting, very interesting to me to see how that all shakes out. So that was the longest addendum. This was probably two to three X the length of time that we talked about National Security Space Launch Phase 3 on the show with Eric the other day, but it felt like there's enough going on. I had some thoughts on it, wanted to get it out there to you. So thanks again for listening. Thanks for your support, as always, mainenginecutoff.com slash support. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, anthonyatmainenginecutoff.com, on Twitter at wehavemiko, on Mastodon at miko at space.space. And otherwise, thanks again.

I'll talk to you soon.