Sounding much like a broken record (or a buffering webcast, for those not only enough to LPs), NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) has once again identified Congressional miserliness as a major threat to the success of the space agency’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP).
“While the budget request to appropriated funding ratio was slightly improved in 2013, as depicted in the figure below, the shortfall remains a top concern and the 2014 budget remains uncertain,” the panel said in its 2013 annual report. “This shortfall is seriously impacting acquisition strategy, and there is risk that force-fitting the CCP into a fixed-price contract with only the funds available has the potential to adversely impact safety.”
Well, what else is new?
Although ASAP praised NASA’s move from Space Act Agreements to more defined Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) contracting as a “positive step,” the panel questioned whether firm fixed-price (FFP) contracts were the best way to go as opposed to traditional cost plus agreements. FFP contracts should only be used when “technologies are well known and mature, risks are clearly understood, independent cost estimates are available and accurate, and requirements are firm and fixed, ASAP wrote.
“In an effort to devise a program that fits within available funding, the CCP is requesting proposals to develop a new system to transport humans into space by means of a fixed-price contract and source selection criteria that cause some within the space flight community to worry that price has become more important than safety,” the panel said. “Competition between two or more CCP contractors potentially fosters improved attention to safety. However, the ability to sustain a competitive environment may fall victim to further funding shortfalls.”
With insufficient funding, companies have taken longer to formalize vehicle designs, leading to uncertainties in the requirements needed to certify the vehicles for human flights. This situation could lead NASA to make a premature down select from the three competing crew system proposals the space agency has been funding in order to meet a 2017 deadline for commercial flights, ASAP said.