Destroying the ISS

In late 1998 I took an hour out of my day to go to a bar and watch the Russians launch the first component of the International Space Station (ISS), the Zarya module, which was a self-contained unit with its own propulsion, power, storage, and navigation systems, plus multiple docking points. No other part of the ISS has ever had (or needed) all those capabilities but it was the key for starting work on the ISS, and in fact it had to orbit autonomously for two years instead of the planned six months because of delays in the Russians building the next key module that would allow crews to board, which started in late 2000, since when the ISS has been continually occupied.

From the Zarya core other units were added in many successive spaceflights, most done by the Space Shuttles, until it was finally completed in 2011 with the final Shuttle flight (the loss of Columbia in 2003 stalled the whole project for two and half years). From the original 20 tonne Zarya the ISS expanded to about 450 tonnes, the largest object ever flown in space.

And now, after twenty five years it’s getting old and will have to be de-orbited (destroyed) by 2030. How time passes eh? Some units are newer of course, but it’s all tied together and still needs those first key units, bombarded as they have been by radiation, solar wind and atomic particles.

Here’s a very good, 20m video from Scottish Space Nerd, Scott Manley, about how the ISS is going to be destroyed but more about all the private sector space station plans that are afoot to replace it – including hardware already built by serious players. It also includes the NASA video showing how the ISS was built in the first place (talk about a Lego set). None of the new stations are going to be built that way, although they will have bits and bobs added to them over time.

The plan is to use a spacecraft to push the ISS out of orbit in a controlled fashion that will see it crash into the ocean – probably the vast, lonely area of the SouthEast Pacific, east of New Zealand, where many other spacecraft have been dumped over the decades. Dismantling the station in orbit would take too long and there’s no machines capable of doing so anyway.

The SpaceX Monopoly Grows

But this solution has resulted in an intriguing situation. SpaceX won the contract to build this one-off spacecraft, which will be basically one of their Dragon cargo ships with extra fuel tanks and rockets – a lot of rockets (see Manley’s video above). Given SpaceX’s successes the contract win is not surprising. What is surprising is that they had almost no competition in the NASA bidding process:

SpaceX faced just a single serious competitor in this process, Northrop Grumman. And in all three categories—price, mission suitability, and past performance—SpaceX significantly outclassed Northrop.
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SpaceX’s bid price was $680 million… Based on NASA’s budget request [to Congress for $1.5 billion], Northrop’s bid was likely approximately twice as high.
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But SpaceX did not just win on price. Its “mission suitability” score, effectively its technical ability to design, develop, and fly a vehicle capable of deorbiting the space station, was 822, compared to Northrop’s score of 589. SpaceX’s approach had one weakness, compared to seven weaknesses in Northrop’s bid, according to NASA evaluators
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Finally, the selection was also based on past performance by the contractors. SpaceX’s performance was rated as “very high,” given how it has delivered with the Cargo and Crew Dragon spacecraft and its Falcon 9 rocket. Northrop’s performance on Cygnus and its various rockets was given a “moderate” rating.

And NASA had to bend over backwards to even get Northrop to bid because they don’t want to do fixed price contracts. The same appears to be true for other aerospace outfits like Lockheed Martin and Boeing – the latter having lost at least $1.4 billion on its fixed price contract to supply NASA with the star-crossed Starliner spacecraft (currently stuck at the ISS for almost fifty days into its one-week human test mission, its two astronauts twiddling their thumbs while Boeing check out various faults).

The final joke is that SpaceX wanted to do only a fixed-price contract; going the cost-plus route would mean adding an extra layer of bureaucracy for a one-off spacecraft – and they still won! Northrop was allowed to do a “hybrid” cost-plus approach – and still lost.

As the article points out, this doesn’t bode well for America’s two decade-long effort to create a commercial space environment, nor for NASA’s specific plans going forward where it’s essential to have multiple private-sector companies involved.

The agency would like to move toward an era of commercial space, in which the agency shares development costs with the private industry and benefits from the ideas and nimble development practices of entrepreneurs. Everyone wins.

However, the space agency has encountered serious turbulence in this endeavor. Based on the experiences of Commercial Crew and now the US Deorbit Vehicle, on a level playing field, it is clear that traditional space providers such as Boeing and Northrop struggle to compete with SpaceX on price and performance.