Main Engine Cut Off - T+73: Commercial Crew Contingency Plans, and the End of ISS

Episode Date: February 23, 2018

NASA recently began talking about some contingency planning for potential Commercial Crew delays, and the end-of-ISS discussion is heating up. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 27 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Laszlo, and six anonymous—and 135 other supporters on Patreon. NASA’s Continued Focus on Returning U.S. Human Spaceflight Launches - Commercial Crew Program NASA studying commercial crew contingency plans - SpaceNews.com How the private space industry could take over lower Earth orbit — and make money off it - The Verge Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Welcome to the Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and we've got some ISS drama to talk about today. Two varieties. We've got some commercial crew things that I've been thinking about for like two weeks, but we haven't gotten around to it. And some ISS decommissioning. I guess I can use this for the first time. Hot drama!

We've got our actual hot drama alarm for the first time, thanks to Jake. The decommissioning stuff has been the hottest drama that we've seen in a while, so I'm going to get to that. But first I want to tackle the commercial crew situation. You'll remember a couple of weeks ago, I was talking about commercial crew had their day in front of Congress. We had representatives from SpaceX and Boeing there. We had the GAO and all these people talking about the current state of commercial crew. And the long and the short of it was that right now they're scheduled for an uncrewed test in August and then a crewed test in December. They're both scheduled for the same time, Boeing and SpaceX. So one of those will shift, certainly. But the GAO and

even some commercial crew program managers said that there's a good likelihood that they would slip into 2019. And given that they're right up to December 2018, I would imagine that that flight does slip into 2019. And that presents a bit of an issue for NASA because they've only got Soyuz flights to the ISS through to the end of 2019. So they've got to get these test flights up off the ground. Then they've got to do, you know,

pounds of government paperwork to certify the launch vehicles, the crew capsules, and actually begin operational flights before we run out of Soyuz seats. So there's been a lot of thoughts about how we're going to handle this situation, what we're going to do in the event that commercial crew is delayed beyond the end of our Soyuz seats, which according to GAO is exactly what is going to happen. of our Soyuz seats, which, according to GAO, is exactly what is going to happen. So NASA's been looking into some contingency plans here, and they did start talking about this at the beginning of February.

February 8th, there was a blog post on the Commercial Crew blog that explains some of their thinking. So the gist of what they're thinking, and they put a lot more words around this in their blog post, the gist of what they're thinking is that they would turn the second test flight, which is the first one with crew, into an operational mission of some sort. So they would extend the length of that mission. Right now they're planned for two weeks. extend the length of that mission. Right now they're planned for two weeks. They would extend the length, as they put it, to something longer than two weeks, but less than six months, which is very specific. And I guess they're giving themselves leeway to kind of patch whatever kind of gap they would have in the crew schedule that they would fly a mission for as long as they needed

to, to either patch over to the next Soyuz flight or to the next flight of the other crew provider. They're just kind of saying, we would extend it as needed. And that by doing so, they could add an extra crew member to that flight. For all intents and purposes, the test flight becomes an operational flight. And, you know, it might just be a test flight by name, but I think you and I would know that that is an operational flight. And I find this very interesting for a couple of reasons. First is that in the past, I don't know, you can put whatever time bound you want on this, but decade or more, you know, people in general, I specifically, and I'm sure a lot of you out there,

have been critical of NASA for a certain sense of being risk averse and sometimes detrimentally so. So we, I think, have assessed that in certain cases, you need to take risks to do anything interesting in space because space is risky like almost anything else in the world. Now, there's certain times when we look at something that NASA is thinking about doing and we say, well, that risk is not worth it because the payoff is so low. The best example of that would be if you remember way back when last year, EM-1, there was this deliberation whether EM-1 should have crew fly on it. And a lot of people thought this was the new presidential administration trying to shake things up a bit or whatever it may be.

But, you know, I even said on this podcast, the payoff for that risk is so not worth it. It's so little payoff that that is a dumb risk to take. And, you know, then there are situations like this where if NASA is up against a wall of not being able to put crew on the ISS, that is something that is worth taking a risk for. So by, you know, accelerating a crew plan on one of these missions and turning it into an operational mission, because you're extending the length of it, it is more risky. I don't know if, you know, if you get down into the details, each individual component of flight is more risky than the first operational mission would have been. But by extending the duration, you're obviously extending your exposure to space and yada yada, increasing risk to some extent. So I think this is the first time in recent memory, in the post-shuttle era, definitely, and even then, maybe the post-Columbia era,

when, well, maybe not the Hubble flight of some sort. But that might be a good example. Since the Hubble flight, this is the first example of NASA going out there and saying, here's something that is worth increased risk. And I think that is a good sign. I agree with what their plan would be here. I question whether it will be needed, not only because I do think that crew can be flying in 2019 if we're sufficiently motivated, but also I'm not so sure the Russians wouldn't sell us more Soyuz seats if it came to that. You know, when we started buying seats from them, it was $50 million. The last figure I've seen is $80 million per seat, which I think the last figure I saw was a single seat that NASA buys from Russia funds 5% of their annual space budget.

So if NASA came, you know, hat in hand to the doorstep of Star City and said, hey, we need a seat, we're really in a tough spot here. We need one of your seats. You know, there's obviously some work to do to change out some flight seats and some flight suits and whatnot. But I think the Russians would say, yeah, sure. You know, it's an easy 100 million, 200 million because we'd be in a tough spot there and we would need to put a crew member on board.

So I don't count it out that, you know, that is not a contingency that NASA is planning for as well. But I do think this is a good sign that they're willing to take some extra risk here and, you know, patch whatever they need. You know, they have to put all this all this construct around the way that they phrase this to not say we're taking a little more risk here. They talk a lot about how it's a benefit operationally and how it would be a better test. And they even go on to say, we've done this in the past. We put some cargo on SpaceX's demo missions for cargo dragon. And, you know, that's a little bit apples and oranges. I think you're literally putting apples and oranges on a cargo flight instead of a human um but it's it's a good sign you can tell that they're still walking on glass and trying to be very careful here but it is encouraging to see

them finally getting to the point where they say we are flying crew we need to take more risks sometimes and this is one of those times. So it's an important thing to note. We'll see if any of that does come to pass, if we need this, if they do take themselves up on this and institute this plan. I don't know, but I guess we won't really know until next year. But it's interesting to keep an eye on because until this point, we've had no indication on how they're going to handle the commercial crew delays the end of Soyuz and everything that goes with it there all right so before I dive into the ISS decommissioning drama I do want to say a very

very big thank you to all the supporters at patreon.com slash miko there are 162 of you supporting over there and this episode of main engine cutoff was produced by 27 executive producers pat chris matt george brad ryan jameson nadim peter donald lee jasper chris warren bob brian russell john moritz tyler laszlo and six anonymous executive producers. They made this episode of the show possible. I could not do it without their support. Everyone else over at patreon.com slash Miko. You might have heard me laughing during that list of names, and that's because I'm actually

doing this episode live to the off-nominal Discord. That is one of the perks you can get at Patreon. If you are a $5 and up a month supporter, you get access to the all phenomenal Discord. And it's a great place to hang out with a bunch of awesome people. And from time to time, I do shows live into a live chat in Discord. So we've got some people in there as a little bit of a peanut gallery today for this recording. And the other awesome thing to check out at Patreon is $3 and up a month, you get access to the Miko Headlines show every single Friday. I run through the

headlines of the week, all the boring stories, all the big stories, and it goes right into your feed. It's a great way to stay up with Space News. So if you want any of that stuff, that extra stuff, or if you just want to help support out the show, head over to patreon.com slash Miko and do it there. So let's dive into the hot drama, the ISS decommissioning. Or this is a really weird one in general, because for the last, what was it, the last four, no, two, three years or so, the ISS end date has been 2024. So NASA has agreed to fund the ISS through 2024. Russia has agreed to be part of the ISS through 2024. ESA, JAXA, the Canadian Space Agency, all these different entities that are taking part in the ISS program have agreed that it will go through 2024.

that it will go through 2024. Now, in the fiscal year 2019 budget request, the Trump administration stuck to that. They said, you know what? We are not going to up the ISS for another four years. We're not going to take this to 2028. We want to stop funding the ISS at the end of 2024, decommissioning it in 2025, which has been the plan all along.

People have been thinking that we would extend it to 2028 because there have been some assessments that say the hardware can make it until 2028. So, you know, like a lot of things with the Trump administration's space policy, nothing has changed, yet the positioning of the policy creates a lot of drama, a lot of arguments, and a lot of discussions. But in this case, I think this is a good one to kick off. You know, I do think that somebody needs to really hold ourselves to what we've already said and get us talking about what we're going to do with the ISS into the future, because it can't fly forever. I think that's well determined. So at some point between now and the end of time, the ISS will come down and it will end up in the, you know,

spacecraft cemetery, whatever we call it, in the Pacific Ocean there. So at some point, we are going to have to have this conversation. And quite honestly, you know, seven or eight years from the initial decommissioning or 10 years from the extended decommissioning, that is a pretty good timeframe to have this sort of discussion. So I find it very interesting to see a lot of the upheaval that there is over this. And the other thing to mention here is that budget requests are just that. They are not binding. They don't want to... They want to make a statement with the budget request,

but it still has to go through Congress. They still have to appropriate money. They still have to decide what to do with the policy statements that the administration set out. And all of that process still has to happen here. And honestly, all of that process still has to happen for 2018. We don't even have that budget yet. So this is the projection forward for 2019. But nonetheless, the budget request is kicking off a lot of conversation. And I've got a couple of problems with a couple of things I hear out there about the ISS being decommissioned in 2025. So the first main thing that I've had an

issue with in the reaction to ending ISS in 2025 is this argument that, well, oh, I should have mentioned up front that part of the budget request was that up to like a billion dollars would be spent in the next couple of years to get a commercial alternative to the ISS or a commercial extension of the ISS ready by 2025. So that either means commercial stations that are on their own or someone taking over the ISS, which is incredibly unlikely and I don't think would ever happen, but some sort of alternative to the ISS beyond 2025. And the reaction I've seen is, oh, well, there are no commercial companies that are going to be ready by 2025. So we have to at least kick this out to 2028. And at that base level, I can't wrap my mind around this analysis of that.

Seven years between now and then is not enough time to get a commercial station together. But for some reason, 10 is the magic number. And by 2028 or 2029, we would be super ready to have a commercial station up and running. I don't know what happens. You know, is it eight years from now? Is it 2026, 2027? Or, oh, all of a sudden, boom, 2028, we're ready to go. I don't know what that is about it. It feels a lot like the same kicking the can down the road of, well, Mars is always 10 or 20 years away. Feels a lot like that. But seven years is a long time, lot like that. But seven years is a long time, especially given the pace of the commercial space industry today. Set your mind back seven years, and we're in 2011. We're in shuttle era. Think about how different things are now than they were then. So seven years is a very, very long time. And with that, the other part of that is that something that, you know,

I've talked about it a lot on here, but Jeffrey Manber of NanoRacks has said in Congress, he has said that quite honestly, the commercial industry, and he put this in nicer words than I would have if I was in Congress, but he said very honestly to them, the commercial industry does not actually care what the arbitrary date chosen is. They just need an arbitrary date chosen because they need to be able to line up funding. They need to be able to put together business plans. They need to be able to get into motion whatever it is that they need to replace what the ISS serves by said arbitrary date. the ISS serves by said arbitrary date. The exact date does not alter what their plans would be that much, but they can't do anything in that way until they know what the date is, because that matters

a lot to when they get investment money, when people are expecting to see results by, and all of those business-y things, all the business case things that come into it there. Because the ISS existence, its mere existence, completely alters the market, completely warps the view on what commercial stations are, could be, or need to be. So knowing, you know,

having this, you know, unknown state of things and saying, we're going to launch a commercial station in 2022 and not knowing whether you're going to be the only show in town by 2024 or 2028, that is a drastically different situation. So there just needs to be some sort of certainty in such an uncertain market for a company to really put together a commercial station that is attractive.

And to go along with this, my other big pet peeve of an argument with ending the station is that people say that the ISS does so much for the commercial space industry that it would be disastrous to remove it from the landscape. And I understand where that vibe comes from. And I personally have always said that the greatest legacy of the ISS is the kind of kick-starting that it's done of these aspects of commercial space

that we're seeing today. You know, it led to SpaceX being the commercial launch provider they today. It led to SpaceX being the commercial launch provider they are. It led to NanoRacks thriving the way they have. It gave Made in Space a place to work out their initial products. And there's tons of other examples of this. There was a lot of companies out there that saw what the ISS was, that took advantage of it, out there that saw what the ISS was, that took advantage of it, and that became real businesses out of it. But the thought that the ISS is the only thing propping up those businesses is extremely harmful to the idea of a commercial space industry. If you need a $3 billion government project to prop up an industry, that's not a real industry.

government project to prop up an industry. That's not a real industry. You're propping up this fake market. And quite honestly, is that worth $3 billion to NASA? That's a huge chunk of money. And I don't think that NASA's goal is to prop up some sort of commercial space industry. So there's a lot of that kind of thinking tied into this, when in reality, I think the way that we should be coming about this is a lot different. We should be looking at what is the basis there for the commercial space industry to replace the ISS into the future. Well, we've got dropping launch costs, which is really the linchpin to a lot of this stuff. We've got several companies that are operating on the station today and obviously with the way that NanoRacks has been out

in public about it in Congress they think that they can do it without the ISS and they're raring to get going on putting together a business plan that involves not using the ISS we've got companies like Bigelow and Axiom and even you know we've had this in the past with SpaceX and Dragon Lab.

We've got companies with ideas of what to put up there. But right now it's all kind of weighed down by the idea that ISS is going to live forever and that ISS is the end-all be-all in low Earth orbit. But when you look and you see that kind of commercial activity, it should at least give you some hope that if this is a market that is viable and you want it to be a market that, you know, at some point mother bird has to push the baby bird out of the nest and not all of them are going to fly right away. There's going to be some that land on the ground pretty hard, but that's kind of the way of things. And the other main thing, I think the thing that gets lost in all this, because we start talking about, you know, commercial industry and international cooperation and all that. But from a strictly NASA perspective, if NASA thinks that they have more work to be done

on the ISS, if they have the research that they need to have done on the ISS, uniquely on the ISS, that they can't do in whatever their future roadmap is, if they're not finished yet, then they should keep flying the ISS. But if NASA as an agency is ready to move on, and if their research that they need to do can and should happen elsewhere, like this, what's the worst name ever? Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway? If that's where they need to go and they need to do some research out there, if the work they need to do can and should and they want for it to happen elsewhere, then they are ready to move on from the ISS. Untangling all

the international partnerships, the commercial partnerships, all of that is work to be done. But I don't think those alone are reasons to keep the ISS as their main focus. $3 billion is a ton of money. And I don't know that to NASA itself, cold hard facts wise, if these international partnerships and those commercial partnerships are worth $3 billion a year when they are so strapped for cash because of the decisions being made around them. And I don't know, like, you know, scientists out there, if you could say, hey, we might be able to fund WFIRST instead of canceling it. Or we might be able to fund another flagship to Mars. Or any of those things, you know. Those are really, right now we are in a zero-sum game in terms of the budget. That's what we saw this year with this budget request.

So yeah, there's a lot going into this. There's a lot of untangling to be done. But I think some of these reasons to not end the ISS are a bit silly, like propping up a commercial market, or seven years isn't enough to get a replacement going. So it's just been bugging me a little bit some of that reasoning behind it because man seven years is a long time and in all honesty it's like good timing to really start thinking about this now because we've got some proven launch costs down we've got some proven hardware on the ISS. So if not now, when? When do

we talk about this? When do we have this conversation? Because otherwise, it's just kicking the can down the road, like every other space decision and space conversation we've had in the last 50 years. And that's kind of disappointing to me, if that's what we're going to do with ISS as well. All right, that's about all I've got for you today. As always, thanks again to everyone supporting Main Engine Cutoff over on Patreon. Thanks again for listening, and I will talk to you next week.