NASA's Orion spacecraft
Orbital Urges NASA To Hold Orion Lifeboat Competition
Space News
An Orbital Sciences Corp. executive told a Capitol Hill audience June 24 that the contract for the space station crew lifeboat NASA has been directed to build should be put out for bid rather than assigned to Lockheed Martin without a competition.
William Claybaugh, senior director of human spaceflight for Dulles, Va.-based Orbital Sciences Corp., said Orbital thinks an open competition would yield a better deal for NASA than paying Lockheed Martin to reconfigure Orion to launch unmanned to the space station and serve as a crew rescue vehicle, or CRV.
“We observe that the administration plans to spend about $6 billion on commercial crew programs and with that acquire two competing commercial crew vendors, and thus the administration appears to believe that commercial crew system will cost about $3 billion,” Claybaugh said during a commercial spaceflight panel discussion hosted by U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.).
“If a commercial crew [system] is expected to cost $3 billion, then paying $4.5 billion for a CRV doesn’t seem to make sense,” he said, adding that the cost to open competition for the Orion contract would be negligible and could produce a lower cost to the government.
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