Interview: NASA’s New Rules for Manned Private Spaceflight

We do want to do this commercially. So we wanted to mirror as many of the positive features that we saw as part of the Space Act Agreements as we could, recognizing that we are now in a contract relationship as opposed to a Space Act Agreement.

So what are those unique features? The primary one is that this contract is going to enable contractor-owned-and-operated systems. Almost all of our RFPs, certainly all of the ones for human space systems, NASA has owned and operated the system. We own the design, we make the decisions about the design choices?whether you?re going to use a 7-amp fuse or a 4-amp fuse. We make all those decisions and we sign off on all of those. For the space shuttle, in the latter part of its history we did outsource the operation to the United Space Alliance, but we still owned the design. The shuttles were ours, the design decisions and any kind of changes were all NASA?s.

In this commercial-crew RFP, we are enabling and allowing for contractor-owned-and-operated systems. So that?s a big difference. They?re going to own these systems; they?re going to be able to sell the capability not just to NASA but to other customers as well. And that?s what we?re really trying to get out of this. We want these systems to be available to all range of public and private users and be affordable to not just NASA but to other customers as well. So we?re really hoping that this will spur the development of a new industry for the United States.

The other thing that we?re doing is enabling performance-based milestones. In a typical RFP, we have a statement of work with a work breakdown structure and a very, very detailed-level list of requirements that they have to meet and documents that they have to produce. In this case we said, hey, you only have to have four milestones that we are requiring. And any other milestones that you want, you propose them. And if you want to go beyond the critical design review, which is the third of the four milestones, have at it. You know? Go as far as you want, as fast as you think you can get in this process.

So we?re really letting industry, to a large extent, define the content of their proposals. And that?s what we had in the SAAs. We had these broad objectives. We said, you know, we want to do commercial cargo delivery and you guys come in and say exactly what milestones you are going to propose in order to get there. So we?re doing that to a large extent here; we do have three or four specific milestones that they have to meet. But beyond that the content, the work content, is really up to the contractors to define.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/nasa/interview-nasas-new-rules-for-private-companies-and-their-human-carrying-spacecraft?src=rss

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