Opportunities and Challenges for Supporting Commercial Space at NASA

NASA has committed to help fostering a vibrant US commercial space industry for public benefit, and to help achieve affordably and sustainable space exploration. One of NASA’s largest activities in this regard is the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Program (COTS) where NASA plans an investment of $500M over five years, starting in 2007. The goal of the COTS program is to provide commercial transportation demonstrations of cargo, and potentially crew, to and from the International Space Station (ISS). The intent is that following successful flight demonstrations, NASA will be able to compete contracts for cargo and potentially crew transport to and from ISS. Thereby achieving this service at a much lower cost than government transportation options, and allowing significant cost savings that can then be applied to the exploration program. COTS is managed out of NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) is providing direct support to JSC for the program execution, and also technical support to its commercial partners. Currently there are two funded partner organizations selected from a national COTS competition with over 20 respondents: SpaceX and Rocket-Plane/Kistler. Both of these companies are planning major flight demonstrations for 2008, and both companies plan ISS cargo transport capabilities by 2009-2010, with crew transport to follow. This paper discusses current events and activities important to the development of the emerging commercial space industry, including the establishment of the Space Portal at NASA Ames. The Space Portal was formed to facilitate access and support for emerging and nontraditional space companies interested in working with NASA. Personnel from the Space Portal help provide the strategic and programmatic foundation for the COTS program, and currently are engaged with personnel from JSC in promoting export of the COTS approach to other program areas at NASA. Obstacles and opportunities identified for the emerging commercial space industry are discussed, as well as opportunities for exporting the COTS approach to other NASA program areas. The paper concludes with a brief historical perspective on similarities of the current emerging space industry with the emerging aviation industry a century ago. Obstacles for Space Use Figure 1 shows a principle challenge for the US space industry – the number of launches performed has declined considerably since the early years of the space program in the 1960’s and 70’s, and at this point there are more US based space companies vying business then there are launches. What has brought this about? First a number of obstacles have combined to limit the use of space including: 1) Failure of the Space Shuttle to make space access affordable and routine 2) NASA efforts to develop launch systems to replace Shuttle (e.g., NASP, RLV, X-33, X34, X-37, X-38, Gen 1-3, SLI, OSP) have constrained funds for space payloads, dampening demand 3) Business collapse of ambitious low-Earth orbiting satellite constellations in the late 1990’s (Iridium, Global-Star) seriously limited commercial investment AIAA SPACE 2007 Conference & Exposition 18 20 September 2007, Long Beach, California AIAA 2007-6154 This material is declared a work of the U.S. Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States.