By Dave Ahearn
NASA selected Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., to receive up to $170 million in federal seed money to spur Orbital and its team of companies to develop a private space cargo vehicle to help supply the International Space Station.
That will become critical once the NASA space shuttle fleet hits its mandated retirement point in October 2010. The United States then won’t have any transportation system to take crew and cargo to low Earth orbit, and to the space station, until the next-generation spaceship system, Orion-Ares, flies its first manned mission in 2015.
Under the plan, Orbital would develop a spacecraft to haul up to six metric tons of cargo to the space station, where a robotic arm would grab the Orbital craft and move it to a berthing mechanism, rather than the craft having the ability to use a space station docking facility.
The company will launch from Wallops Island, Va., using an Orbital Taurus rocket.
Orbital will develop and demonstrate commercial orbital transportation services that could open new markets and pave the way for contracts to launch and deliver crew and cargo to the International Space Station.
NASA might buy up to eight missions a year from Orbital.
NASA and Orbital signed a funded Space Act Agreement under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Project, known as COTS.
NASA wishes to spur U.S. companies to develop private transportation services to take crew members and cargo to and from the International Space Station. Rocketplane Kistler in October was dropped from a similar seed money deal with NASA when the firm was unable to raise sufficient private capital to fund its spacecraft development program.
Rocketplane received about $32 million from NASA before it was eliminated from the COTS program. The $170 million that Orbital will receive is money that otherwise would have gone to Rocketplane.
Most of the cost of developing the spacecraft will be raised by Orbital.
NASA at that point requested proposals from other companies, and 13 of them responded in November, with Orbital besting the others to win the seed-money deal.
NASA briefers said a factor in selecting Orbital was that it had not only a technically feasible proposal, meaning the spacecraft looks like a workable plan, but Orbital also had a workable business plan, meaning it is likely to be able to come up with sufficient private capital.
Attempts to reach Orbital to ascertain how much money it is promising to raise were unsuccessful.
In Phase 1 of the agreement with Orbital, it will demonstrate one or more of four capabilities: external, unpressurized cargo delivery and disposal; internal, pressurized cargo delivery and disposal; internal, pressurized cargo delivery and return; and an option for crew transportation. NASA plans to purchase cargo resupply services competitively in Phase 2.