WASHINGTON — NASA is proposing a hybrid contract approach for procuring a vehicle to assist deorbit the International Space Station at the top of the last decade, combining elements of cost-plus and fixed-price contracts.
NASA released a draft request for proposals (RFP) May 4 for what the agency calls the US Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), a spacecraft that may dock to the station and perform a controlled reentry of it. NASA is in search of feedback on the draft through the top of the month before releasing a final RFP this summer.
One notable aspect of the draft RFP is the usage of what NASA calls a “hybrid” contract structure. NASA proposes to start out with a cost-plus contract, where the contractor is compensated for its costs plus an incentive fee, for the design of the deorbit vehicle through critical design review. Production of the vehicle and other activities can be covered by a fixed-price contract.
The agency didn’t elaborate on its selection of this hybrid approach within the draft RFP or related documents. The agency said it’s in search of feedback on points of that approach, including the “exit criteria” for going from the cost-plus to the fixed-price phases of the contract.
NASA requested $180 million in its fiscal yr 2024 budget proposal in March to start out work on the deorbit vehicle, which the agency says will offer redundancy to earlier plans to make use of Russian Progress cargo vehicles to deorbit the station at the top of its life.
Kathy Lueders, on the time NASA associate administrator for space operations, said in the course of the rollout of the budget proposal that NASA anticipated spending “a bit of bit in need of about $1 billion” on the deorbit vehicle. “We’re hoping to get a greater price than that” when industry submits its proposals, she added.
The publicly available documents don’t go into details concerning the technical specifications for the deorbit vehicle. Nonetheless, the agency said there have been no major changes to its plans for the reason that release of a request for information (RFI) last November.
NASA said then it anticipated launching the deorbit vehicle about one yr before reentry, docking to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module. The vehicle would primarily operate in the course of the final days before reentry, once the station’s orbit has decayed to an altitude of 220 kilometers. The vehicle would perform a number of “shaping” burns to lower the orbit’s perigee to 160 kilometers, followed by a final deorbit burn.
On the time of that RFI, NASA was considering options to acquire the deorbit vehicle as a service. Nonetheless, NASA now intends to take ownership of the deorbit vehicle and manage its operations. NASA will individually procure a medium-class launch of the deorbit vehicle, although the agency is asking firms within the draft RFP if their vehicles could be compatible with that class of launch.
Some in industry had seen the proposed deorbit vehicle as a chance to develop or display industrial systems for deorbiting or servicing spacecraft. Nonetheless, the choice to not pursue a services approach, in addition to specific technical requirements for deorbiting the ISS akin to the power to operate even after suffering two failures, made that less feasible.
NASA sees the deorbit vehicle as a one-off design intended exclusively for deorbiting the station. “NASA wants to emphasise that safety and reliability are paramount within the USDV requirements to make sure the protected decommissioning of the ISS,” it stated in the quilt letter accompanying the draft RFP. “This emphasis needs to be approached with the popularity that it would be a single-use vehicle.”
NASA is currently planning to operate the ISS to 2030. The opposite partners have also agreed to that timeline aside from Russia, which recently announced it will remain on the station to 2028.
The draft RFP indicates some flexibility within the timing of the station’s deorbit. NASA is asking prospective bidders if it is possible to deliver the finished deorbit vehicle by September 2027 to be launched as soon as January 2028, a “contingency” launch date. The draft RFP also includes options to increase the contract, set to run to March 2031, to as late as September 2035, suggesting NASA is reserving the power to increase the ISS beyond 2030.
NASA says it expects to release the ultimate RFP on or around July 12, with proposals due Aug. 28. It anticipates making a contract award in early January 2024.