Space Access Update #137 Followup 12/08/14
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Commercial Crew Funding
We noted in Update #137 that NASA’s
funding requirement for the final (CCtCap) phase of Commercial Crew vehicle
development is likely to increase radically over the next two years, and that
this could be a problem.
The current Federal Fiscal
Year 2015 (underway since October 1st) is the first of three critical funding
years leading to first CCtCap flights in 2017.
FY’15 at that point seemed unlikely to see any significant Commercial
Crew increase over the roughly $800 million Congress had planned before
election politics last summer shut down the normal FY’15 appropriations-bill
process.
Given $800 million for FY’15,
our ballpark estimate of CCtCap funding needs (with the selected contractors)
for FY’16 and FY’17 was on the (very) rough order of $1.3 billion a year. (NASA has not yet released any detail on how
the two CCtCap contracts break down within the overall totals given. To get ballpark numbers we assumed half of
each contract is for development, half for the six operational flights included
in the totals.)
Put another way, between now
and next October Congress will very likely need to approve an increase of 50% or more to fully fund the current
Commercial Crew program. In the ongoing
tight funding climate, this could take some seriously heavy lifting.
The problem has now gotten
modestly worse, since the current plan to enact a Continuing Resolution for
most of the government for the remainder of FY’15 would limit CCtCap this year
to the same $696 million appropriated for Commercial Crew in FY’14. This will both further limit the amount of
work NASA can pay for this year, and add another hundred million or so to the
funding increase needed over the next two years.
We expect this will all
result in a great deal of pressure to either stretch the program out (very
bad), or to reduce the Commercial Crew program to one contractor (also very
bad). We expect to be writing a lot more
about this over the coming year.
One interesting related item
– Boeing has already completed
their first CCtCap milestone, a “Certification Baseline Review”,
and has presumably billed NASA for it.
It occurs to us that, were we Boeing, we might have been tempted to
frontload our CCtCap proposal with quickly-achievable paperwork milestones in
order to soak up as much as possible of the (predictably limited) FY’15 CCtCap funding as early as
possible. In a year with insufficient
overall CCtCap funding, the result could be a shortfall later in the year,
possibly one felt disproportionately by the competitor slower off the mark in
billing for completed milestones.
This is speculation based on
one data point, of course. Time will
tell if there’s anything to it. But
regardless of whether this year’s shortfall hits one competitor or the other
disproportionately, it is near certain it will slow down the overall
program. Achieving first test flights in
2017 means getting rolling full-speed NOW, and as someone said back in the early
days of all this, “no bucks, no Buck Rogers.”
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New Space Access ’15 Conference Dates
We asked you all for feedback
on two possible timeslots for our next Space Access Conference, April 1-3 and
April 23-25. We’d like to thank everyone
who responded. Unfortunately the results
boiled down to, about a 60-40 split in favor of the later dates, but
significant numbers of people who’d have problems making one or the other, and
significant conflicts with other interesting events in both cases.
We’re now looking at Thursday April 30th through Saturday May
2nd 2015 for our next Space Access Conference (in, as usual, Phoenix
Arizona.) Two of the hotels we’ve been
talking to say they can do this. Our
preliminary poll of those who responded the first time came back over 90% in
favor. And nobody’s spotted any
significant conflicts with other events (yet.)
So, this is your chance if you haven’t already responded. Would the new dates work for you? And do you know of any significant conflicts
with other events?
Email us at [email protected]
with your feedback ASAP, as we want to make a
final decision this week, then get on with nailing down a hotel contract and
lining up a great cast of speakers.
As for conference funding,
we’re now up to forty-one hundred of the ten thousand we need to make this
conference fly. Thanks! And keep those checks coming. If you believe that Space Access conferences
are useful to this community, and that keeping conference prices as low as
possible for all of us who are still students, hungry amateurs, or tight-budget
startup pros is still the way to go, help, please. Send a donation of whatever size – ten, a
hundred, a thousand, it all helps – via check still for now (credit cards
online are nearing the top of the to-do list, but aren’t quite there yet) to:
Space Access Society, PO Box 16034, Phoenix AZ 85011.
Note that this is NOT
tax-deductible, as we are not a 501c-anything.
It is however entirely confidential, as we have never and will never
share or disclose in any way our supporters’ names. Unless you want to be listed as a conference
sponsor – we’ll be glad to give credit where it’s desired. (We’ll list you if wanted as an SA’15
“Sponsor” for a thousand or more, “Co-Sponsor” for five
hundred, “Supporter” for a hundred – and of course, our ongoing
gratitude goes out to all who’ve supported us over the years and who continue
to help.)
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Space Access Society
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