With Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) proposals finally in
hand, NASA is expected to decide by early fall whether it will be Lockheed
Martin or the team of Northrop Grumman and Boeing that helps the U.S. space
agency design and build the key element of its next human space transportation
system.
The Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman-Boeing teams have
been under contract since July when NASA gave each team $28 million to help refine
their respective CEV concepts. A follow-up solicitation was issued in January
and both teams submitted their final proposals to NASA by the March 20
deadline.
NASA has not said how much it expects the CEV to cost, but
the agency has included over $20 billion in its latest five-year budget for
Constellation Systems, the program that encompasses development of the CEV, two
new launch vehicles and other hardware NASA needs to return to the Moon by
2020.
Jeffrey Hanley, manager of NASA's Constellation Program,
said the agency expects to select a single CEV contractor team by early fall.
While Lockheed Martin has announced
publicly where it would locate its CEV work force if it wins the
competition, Northrop Grumman has provided its CEV work-force plan only to
NASA.
Lockheed Martin announced in
late February that if it wins, it would do final assembly and checkout of
the vehicle at Kennedy Space Center, bringing about 300 to 400 new jobs to
Florida.
The firm followed up its Florida announcement with a March
24 announcement
that it would put about 1,200 mostly engineering jobs in Houston in order to be
close to Johnson Space Center, the NASA center running the CEV program. John
Karas, Lockheed Martin's vice president of space exploration, said in an interview
prior to the announcement that a CEV win would mean about 300 to 400 new jobs
at the company's facilities in Denver.
CEV evolution
Since giving the two teams Phase 1 contracts last summer to help
refine their CEV concepts, NASA has decreed that the CEV will be a ballistic
entry capsule that NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has dubbed "Apollo on steroids."
NASA also has established that the CEV will be launched atop
a taller, more powerful version of the solid-rocket booster that helps launch
the space shuttle. NASA hopes to start flight testing the CEV and its launcher
around the end of the decade and to put the new system in service no later than
2014.
When Griffin took office last year, he was determined to
accelerate the development of CEV in order to field the new system as close to
the space shuttle's planned 2010 retirement as possible. Budget realities,
however, have since forced Griffin to ease back on the throttle.
While the budget for Constellation Systems - the program
that encompasses development of the CEV, two new launch vehicles and related
systems - would jump 76 percent to $3 billion under NASA's 2007 spending
request and continue to grow through the end of the decade, NASA says it
probably cannot afford to field the CEV and its shuttle-derived launcher in
2012 as previously forecast. NASA is back to shooting for 2014, the original
date President George W. Bush set in his landmark Vision for Space Exploration
speech at NASA headquarters here in January 2004.
Other efforts
While the CEV competition is the highest profile part of
NASA's effort to field its first new human transportation system since the
space shuttle, it is not the only part.
Design of the Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV) is under way at
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. NASA early this year
selected ATK Thiokol to help develop the Crew Launch Vehicle's first stage,
which will be based on the space shuttle solid-rocket boosters the Promontory,
Utah-based company has been building for the past quarter century.
Thiokol spokesman George Torres said the company is
"helping NASA design the CLV by doing analysis on the requirements to
support adapting the [reusable solid-rocket motors] for the CLV first
stage." A contract is expected later this year.
NASA also is preparing to go out with a solicitation for the
Crew Launch Vehicle's upper stage. Marshall Space Flight Center issued a
request for information March 20 seeking input from industry meant to help the
agency decide how to structure the CLV upper-stage acquisition. NASA plans to
power the upper stage with an updated version of the J-2 engine originally
designed for the Saturn 5, the workhorse of the Apollo program.
Commercial ISS flights
In parallel to the NASA-led CEV development, the agency
plans to spend $500 million over the next five years on a demonstration program
meant to coax into existence a low-cost alternative to the CEV for International
Space Station resupply and crew rotation missions.
Proposals were due March 3. NASA is expected to announce its
selections in early June.
NASA spokeswoman Dolores Beasley said the agency received
proposals "from a wide variety of organizations across the full spectrum
of industry." While declining to say how many proposals NASA received, she
said the agency was "pleased with industry's response" to the solicitation.
Sources following the Commercial Orbital
Transportation Services competition said NASA received about 20 proposals.
These same sources said NASA plans to inform the field of competitors in early
April whether they made the short list for further consideration. Beasley would
not confirm that a preliminary down-select was under way, saying that internal
milestones and other such information is considered "competition
sensitive" and would not be released.
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