Falling behind

[Vice President Mike Pence announced] on Thursday at the same time that NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a damning report depicting a space agency willing to accept serious delays and to pay Boeing hundreds of millions of dollars for cost overruns [...] "After years of being out of the launch business, we're going to be back. And before spring arrives next year, we're going to send American astronauts on American rockets, from American soil, back into space.

"We're going to have our own platforms to take us back, and we don't need to hitch a ride with the Russians any more," he said.

[...]

In light of the OIG report, Pence's deadline puts SpaceX - and more specifically Boeing - on notice that missed deadlines and cost overruns associated with NASA's Commercial Crew Program are no longer acceptable. The OIG report states that delivery of a reliable launch system - rocket and spacecraft - is already two years behind schedule.

[...]

The OIG asserted that the "schedule slippage" was because Boeing missed a milestone deadline by 13 months, "and due to Boeing seeking higher prices than those specified in its fixed price contract".

  alJazeera

I know why he made this announcement on Thursday - news came out that China had hit a milestone in its schedule to send an unmanned craft to Mars next year - but I don't know how he plans to make the Commercial Crew Program (who says private industry is better at this than a government agency?) make up two years plus by spring. I'd like to think the equipment will be sound and ready before they put people in it.

The NASA OIG report could not have come a more damaging time. NASA is already facing stiff resistance in the US House of Representatives, where members are baulking at its $22.6bn budget request for 2020.

Currently, the US government is being funded by a continuing resolution set to expire in seven days on November 21. While Congress is expected to pass another continuing resolution to keep the government open, NASA's need for the extra money, and its ability to spend it wisely, is unresolved.

The OIG found that for the Commercial Crew Program, NASA agreed to pay Boeing an extra $287.2m on top of a multibillion-dollar fixed price contract. The payments, according to the report, were intended to help the Seattle-based company take the necessary steps to make up for lost time.

[...]

Boeing [...] said that [a] renegotiated contract offered NASA better terms that, in effect, increased Boeing's financial risk.

I find it hard to accept that Boeing made a deal that increased its financial risk.

"The structure of the original contract would have increased cost and schedule uncertainty and would have limited NASA's flexibility in mission planning," the company said.

"Boeing is also now holding all of the up-front mission costs, which NASA will not have to pay until after each mission is officially ordered and given the Authority to Proceed," it said.

So, the risk is that NASA never gets that authority. That's not a zero risk.

Boeing's launch system, called the Crew Space Transportation (CST)-100 Starliner spacecraft, has been designed to be a reusable capsule capable of taking up to seven passengers, or a mix of crew and cargo, up into low earth orbit.

Not exactly on a par with landing on Mars - something that Trump trumpeted would be happening. I don't know why he quit talking about that. Maybe he got distracted with more personal concerns. But it could be a profitable commerical enterprise if it actually ever got underway and was safe. And if enough people could come up with the price of a ticket to just circle the earth in low orbit.

By 2014, NASA chose to award the second and final phase agreements to Boeing and SpaceX, which took the form of firm-fixed-price contracts, to pay for further development, test flights and, perhaps most notably, crewed missions to the ISS.

According to the OIG report, these second-phase contracts in May of this year were worth $6.8bn, with Boeing accounting for $4.3bn, and its competitor SpaceX garnering roughly $2.5bn.

In addition, NASA has paid up through 2020 an averageof $85.4m a seat to Roscosmos, formerly known as Russia's Federal Space Agency, to send its astronauts on 70 completed and planned missions to the ISS on board Soyuz rockets.

Since 2017, the year when Commercial Crew Program launches were originally scheduled, NASA has paid approximately $1bn for 12 seats to send US astronauts to the ISS on Soyuz rockets, according to the OIG report.

By the way...how's that Space Force coming along?

Congress has yet to authorize the establishment of a U.S. Space Force.

  Military.com

They've been downgraded to a branch of the Air Force.

Oh, well. They have a logo..  (A cheap-looking reference to Star Trek.)

And a website.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.