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It's about routine, affordable, and safe access to and from space...
Space Transportation Systems Operations
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"-ilities" - Affordability, Reliability, Safety, Maintainability, Operability, Complexity, Sustainability & Responsiveness
- Models - Costs
- Simulations - Processes
- Data
- Spaceports
- Supply Chain Management
- Space Solar Power
- Highly Reusable Space Transportation (HRST) Study
- Reusable Booster Systems
Above: The 2009 Review of Human Space Flight Plans Committee Report
Above: The 2005 NASA Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS)
Above: The 2008 NASA Cost Estimating Handbook
Above: The 1994 Commercial Space Transportation Study - Full Text as Searchable .pdf, 661 Pages, 42MB (or shorter Executive Summary)
Above: Within Reach, Within Us (video)
Click Images Below for Past Programs
NASA Kennedy Space Center
How can we achieve routine, affordable, and safe transportation to and from space? It is the goal of this site to assist in answering that question.
Enabling future space transportation systems growth requires improving multiple elements and their processes. This includes the flight vehicle, the spaceport, and the organization. It requires all of these be optimized, together. Customers, developers, designers and operators working from a whole systems perspective, building on the lessons of the past - that is our emphasis in the next generation of designs for access to space.
May 7, 2013
- [Paper .pdf] [Presentation .pdf] "New Approaches in Reusable Booster System Life Cycle Cost Modeling", presented at the 2013 Joint Army Navy NASA Air Force (JANNAF) conference, April 29-May 3, Colorado Springs, CO, by E. Zapata, NASA Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
1990: “Overhead costs were neither visible nor understood, so common practice was to use poorly documented (sometimes proprietary) factors to "burden" the labor estimates. The practice has persisted, even though direct manufacturing labor has nearly disappeared as a cost driver, and overhead has grown to represent more than half the cost of defense systems, and may rise to represent two-thirds of these costs."
-"Trends in a Sample of Defense Aircraft Contractors Costs”, James McCullough, Stephen Balut, Institute for Defense Analysis.
1991: “Experience at these firms indicates that overhead had grown from about 38 percent of total business in 1973 to about 49 percent by 1987. Extrapolation of this trend indicates that overhead will reach about 54 percent by the year 2000.”
-"Estimating Fixed and Variable Costs of Airframe Manufacturers”, Stephen J. Balut, Thomas P. Frazier, James Bui.
2011: “About three-quarters of the 84 recommendations in the EELV should-cost review are associated with overhead and indirect costs”. [link]
July 27, 2012
United States Government Accountability
Office, GAO-12-822 (.pdf) "EVOLVED
EXPENDABLE LAUNCH VEHICLE - DOD Is Addressing Knowledge Gaps in Its
New Acquisition Strategy", Report to Congressional Committees,
July 2012.
"On May 2, 2007, the Air Force waived the requirement for Boeing to provide certified cost or pricing data for a significant amount of hardware associated with the production contract. The hardware is still being used, and the waiver, while officials believe it afforded DOD a reduced price, has limited government insight into cost or pricing data on a large lot of launch vehicle hardware, including engines, purchased at that time. The lack of certified cost or pricing data for this hardware has contributed to years of Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) reports that consistently find ULA proposals inadequate for government evaluation and contract negotiation." Pg. 13.
July 24, 2012
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Sally Ride – quote - “I think it’s fair to say that our review group drew the short straw, and I drew the shortest by having to actually do this presentation”.
Her introduction to “Scenario Affordability Analysis” in 2009.
May 25, 2012
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Increasingly affordable and reliable transportation to and from space is linked to an increasingly competitive and encouraging economic environment. Shown below, the Dragon spacecraft nearby to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 25. 2012.
May 18, 2012
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See "Competition and EELV: Challenges and Opportunities in New Launch Vehicle Acquisition", by Stewart Money, May 9, 2012, at the Future In-Space Operations archive site.
May 11, 2012
In "Reusable Booster Systems"...>
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"Making the Case for Reusable Booster Systems: The Operations Perspective" (.pdf), presented to the Aeronautics & Space Engineering Board, National Research Council, Committee for the Reusable Booster System: Review and Assessment, May 7, 2012, Washington DC, by E. Zapata, NASA Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
April 3, 2012
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Increasingly affordable and reliable transportation to and from space is linked to an increasingly competitive and encouraging economic environment.
Demand is the other side of supply.
"Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study" (.pdf), 2 April 2012, Prepared for the Keck Institute for Space Studies, California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA.
Planetary Resources website - "Planetary Resources is establishing a new paradigm for resource discovery and utilization that will bring the solar system into humanity’s sphere of influence."
