NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on Thursday called the slip of an estimated contract award date for the second Cargo Resupply Services effort (CRS-2) a “good news story” due to an “abundance of proposals.”
“The first time, I think we had two or three,” Bolden told Defense Daily after a presentation in downtown Washington celebrating 25 years of the Hubble Space Telescope. “This time, we had a number of (proposals), it takes the team more time to evaluate.”
The estimated contract award was pushed back from June to Sept. 16, according to NASA. Proposals were due Dec. 12. According to the request for proposals (RFP) issued in September, the guaranteed minimum value for any awarded contract is six missions and the total maximum value of any awarded contract is $14 billion.
Bolden also called on industry and NASA to ensure its robotic technology is keeping pace or “out front a little bit” to take the risk off humans. During his presentation, Bolden said the things the civil space agency had to do to service Hubble “(NASA) would have loved to do robotically.
“We can’t stop trying to find new ways to offload the human being from the very risky things we do in space,” Bolden told Defense Daily after his presentation.
Bolden said “an army of robots” will build the habitats that humans move into when they first land on Mars because NASA won’t use humans to “burrow into the surface” to build homes. Bolden, as an example, said the Defense Department doesn’t use soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines to prepare habitats and mess halls. It uses contractors.
“The robots are going to be our contractors,” he said. “That’s what I mean about being constantly staying hungry and developing new technologies that offload the risk to human beings.”
Boeing [BA]; Orbital ATK [OA]; Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX); Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Sierra Nevada (SNC) have submitted bids for CRS-2. Lockheed Martin’s offer includes an exoliner from Thales Alenia Space used on the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) and a robotic arm built by Canada’s MDA. SpaceX and Orbital ATK are incumbents from the ongoing original CRS.
SNC is offering its Dream Chaser Cargo System, which includes a folding-wing design that allows the spacecraft to fit inside existing fairings and be used with a suite of launch vehicles, according to a company statement. Boeing is pitching a modified version of its CST-100 space capsule.
According to the draft RFP, though the first CRS-2 mission does not have to be launched in 2017, ISS does have a requirement for CRS missions in 2017 that must be satisfied. Thus, an offeror that is able to provide services to meet the program requirements beginning in 2017 would be more advantageous to NASA. SpaceX President and CEO Gwynne Shotwell said in March the company should be ready for CRS-2 launches in 2017 (Defense Daily, March 17).