WASHINGTON — NASA partnerships announced June 15 would support development of recent industrial capabilities that include a Blue Origin crewed spacecraft and a Starship-derived space station from SpaceX.
NASA announced the choice of seven corporations for unfunded Space Act Agreements as a part of its Collaborations for Business Space Capabilities-2 (CCSC-2) initiative. NASA will provide the chosen corporations with technical expertise, assessments and data to help the businesses in the event of recent capabilities.
“The businesses can leverage NASA’s vast knowledge and experience, and the agency is usually a customer for the capabilities included within the agreements in the longer term,” Phil McAlister, director of economic spaceflight at NASA Headquarters, said in an announcement in regards to the selections. “Ultimately, these agreements will foster more competition for services and more providers for modern space capabilities.”
NASA isn’t providing any funding to the businesses under the agreements. The agency said within the announcement that offering its expertise to the businesses requires only “minimal government resources.”
Amongst the businesses receiving CCSC-2 agreements is Blue Origin. That company will use the agreement to work on an “integrated industrial space transportation capability that ensures protected, inexpensive, and high-frequency U.S. access to orbit for crew and other missions.” The statement provided no further details and Blue Origin didn’t immediately reply to questions on those plans.
That statement suggests Blue Origin is working on a crewed spacecraft. The corporate began work on such a vehicle greater than a decade ago with two funded Space Act Agreements within the initial phases of NASA’s Business Crew Development program. Those awards supported initial designs of what the corporate called a “Space Vehicle,” a biconic design intended for launch initially on the Atlas 5. Blue Origin elected to not compete in later phases of this system.
SpaceX received a CCSC-2 agreement to work on an “integrated low Earth orbit architecture” involving each its Dragon and Starship vehicles. “This architecture includes Starship as a transportation and in-space low-Earth orbit destination element supported by Super Heavy, Dragon, and Starlink,” the announcement stated.
SpaceX has not previously discussed using Starship as a LEO destination, but others within the industry have suggested the massive volume that Starship offers could make it an option as a industrial space station.
“SpaceX’s Starship is so large and in addition so cost-effective that it could possibly be a station itself,” said Chad Anderson, founder and managing capital of Space Capital, during a session of the Investing in Space conference June 6. He suggested that it could disrupt business models for other industrial space stations.
An example he gave was a hotel company outfitting the inside of Starship for purchasers. “They might launch a gaggle of individuals and stay nevertheless long they need with the accommodations they need, and so they could do all of it for lower than the associated fee of 1 seat to the space station today.”
Other corporations working on space stations also received CCSC-2 agreements. Sierra Space will work with NASA on its “industrial low Earth orbit ecosystem” that features the Dream Chaser spacecraft and LIFE expandable modules. ThinkOrbital received an agreement to refine its plans for big in-space platforms for research, manufacturing and crewed applications. Vast will work with NASA to support its plans, announced in May, for the Haven-1 module and crewed missions to it.
Other CCSC-2 awards went to Northrop Grumman for an autonomous spacecraft called “Persistent Platform”, based on its Cygnus vehicle, for industrial research and manaufacturing, and to Special Aerospace Services for an in-space servicing technology called the Autonomous Maneuvering Unit.
The CCSC-2 agreements come nine years after the primary such agreements NASA made with 4 corporations. Final Fronter Design received an award to work on a pressure suit, Orbital ATK (now a part of Northrop Grumman) received one for its Mission Extension Vehicle satellite servicing spacecraft, SpaceX for technologies needed for deep space missions that included methane-oxygen propulsion used on Starship, and United Launch Alliance for a wide range of technologies for its Vulcan launch vehicle.