Innovation through Partnership : A COTS Solution for Manned Space Flight?
September 6, 2006
A recent article on TheOnion.com lampoons the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with the satirical headline ‘NASA Announces Plan to Launch $700 Million into Space.’ As the article explains, the Denarius IV rocket, "the fourth in a series of unmanned monetary dispersal probes, will leave Earth’s atmosphere at 36,500 miles per hour - the highest velocity at which money has ever departed the planet."
Not quite as amusing is the GAO report released last month criticizing NASA’s acquisition strategy for the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) - a planned replacement for the retiring Space Shuttle, which is designed to fulfill President Bush’s mandate for missions to the Moon and Mars. The strategy, says the report, "places the project at risk of significant cost overruns, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls." Having already spent nearly $4.5 billion on failed programs aimed at replacing the costly Shuttle, NASA is under intense political pressure to make good on President Bush’s ambitious new Vision for Space Exploration, without a significant increase in funding.
Faced with the same dilemma as many other agency heads - an expanding mandate and a shrinking or stagnant budget - NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has taken a small but potentially revolutionary step toward a fiscally efficient new way of fulfilling his agency’s mission. As Bob Stephan noted in his PodCast interview with GCA.com, "strategic planners [think], ‘how can every dollar of my budget be spent to leverage ten dollars or a hundred dollars of somebody else’s money across the country?’" Griffin, who considers himself "one of the change agents," has embraced this concept in his new plan.
The Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program will dole out nearly $500 million of NASA’s money to two private entrepreneurial space firms over the next four years. Pooled with private investors’ funds, the program aims to kick-start the burgeoning entrepreneurial space industry, creating a competitive marketplace in which NASA can purchase space lift services at a cost far below that of a government-run program.
"Rather than bankrolling entire projects as it has in the past," explains Ashley Vance in her article in The Register, "NASA has embraced a quasi venture capitalist role." If successful, this new approach will allow NASA to "buy the ride, and not the rocket" for its smaller manned and unmanned missions and allow it to focus development efforts on loftier goals such as the Moon and Mars. The private firms, in turn, will be given access to NASA facilities and expertise to help them develop their technologies, and will be allowed to market their services to other private companies in addition to the federal government. This potential win-win scenario has excited many in the public and private space industry. Despite its small size, COTS may well be harbinger of things to come.
We have already received input from readers on other innovative partnerships between the public and private sectors, which will be featured in future posts. As always, we invite your input and feedback.
Thoughts or reactions? Please send them to us.