NASA’s Commercial Crew Program By the Numbers
With the recent news that commercial crew flights to the International Space Station will likely slip to the end of 2018, I thought it would be a good time to review what NASA has spend on the program since it began in 2010. And, since NASA has separated cargo and crew, we will also look at the space agency’s commercial cargo programs.
The table below shows that NASA has given out nearly $8.4 billion in contracts to Commercial Crew Program partners over the past six years. These figures do not include NASA’s overhead.
| Commercial Crew Contracts (Millions of Dollars) | ||||||
| Company | CCDev1 |
CCDev2 |
CPC |
CCiCap | CCtCap |
Totals |
| Boeing | $18.0 | $112.9 | $9.993 | $480.0 | $4,200.0 | $4,820.993 |
| SpaceX | – | $75.0 | $9.589 | $460.0 | $2,600.0 | $3,144.589 |
| Sierra Nevada Corp. | $20.0 | $105.6 | $10.0 | $227.5 | – | $363.1 |
| Blue Origin | $3.7 | $22.0 | – | – | – | $25.6 |
| United Launch Alliance | $6.7 | U | – | – | – | $6.7 |
| Paragon Space Development Corp. | $1.4 | – | – | – | – | $1.4 |
| Alliant Techsystems | – | U | – | – | – | $0.0 |
| Excalibur Almaz | – | U | – | – | – | $0.0 |
| Totals: | $49.8 | $315.5 | $29.582 | $1,167.5 | $6,800.0 | $8,362.382 |
CCDev-1 — Commercial Crew Development 1
CCDev-2 — Commercial Crew Development 2
CPC — Certification Products Contracts
CCiCap — Commercial Crew Integrated Capability
CCtCap — Commercial Crew Transportation Capability
U – Unfunded Space Act Agreement
Nearly $8 billion of the total has been given to two companies, Boeing and SpaceX. Boeing’s contracts have totaled $4.8 billion for the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. SpaceX has received contracts worth $3.1 billion for Crew Dragon. Sierra Nevada Corporation received $363.1 million for development of its Dream Chaser shuttle.
NASA awarded $6.8 billion to Boeing and SpaceX for the CCtCap phase of the program. Under these contracts, the companies will complete development and testing of their vehicles and also fly commercial missions to the space station.
In the meantime, the space agency has been purchasing seats aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The table below shows the agency has signed contracts worth nearly $3 billion for seats through 2018.
Credit: NASA OIG
During that period, the cost of Soyuz seats have been going up sharply. The per seat price in 2011 was $37.7 million. For 2018, the price has increased to $82 million per round trip.
While NASA has sent nearly $3 billion to Russia since 2011 to pay for access to ISS, Congress has cut the Obama Administration’s requested funding for commercial crew by $1.1 billion over the years.
NASA and the Obama Administration have blamed Congressional cuts for delays in the program, which was originally schedule to begin flying in 2015. The under funding has led to additional costs as NASA has been forced to buy more Soyuz seats from the Russians.
In a report released last month, the NASA Inspector General reported that delays in the program over the past two years under the CCtCap contracts are due to SpaceX and Boeing running into technical challenges with their vehicles. Further, NASA has experienced delays in its safety review process.
Commercial Cargo
Cygnus approaches ISS (Credit: NASA)
Commercial crew will only fill half of NASA’s transportation needs for the space station. After losing two space shuttles and 14 astronauts to accidents, NASA decided to separate crew and cargo into separate vehicles. To handle the cargo side, NASA embarked on two programs, Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) and Commercial Resupply Services (CRS).
The COTS program cost NASA about $800 million. Under the program, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation (now Orbital ATK) developed new boosters and cargo ships to service the space station.
SpaceX’s developed the Falcon 9 booster and Dragon supply ship — upon which Crew Dragon is based — under the COTS program. NASA contributed $396 million toward development of the vehicles. SpaceX provided $454 million of its own funding.
NASA contributed $288 million to the development of Orbital’s Antares booster and Cygnus supply ship. Orbital contributed about $500 million of its own funding to the program.
Under the CRS-1 contract, NASA originally ordered 12 Dragon supply missions at a cost of $1.6 billion. The space agency has subsequently ordered an additional eight missions. It is estimated that NASA will spend $2.7 billion for the 20 missions ordered under CRS-1.
NASA originally ordered eight Cygnus cargo missions to ISS at a cost of $1.9 billion. The space agency has since added two additional missions to the CRS-1 contract, bringing the total number of flights to 10.
The price of the additional Cygnus flights are uncertain; if the average price per launch is the same as the original order, then the total under the CRS-1 contract would be close to $2.4 billion.
In January 2016, NASA awarded CRS-2 contracts to SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Sierra Nevada Corporation to provide cargo flights from 2019 to 2024. Each company is guaranteed six supply flights; NASA will order additional supply flights as needed. The program has a maximum potential value of $14 billion.
26 responses to “NASA’s Commercial Crew Program By the Numbers”
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Since NASA and Russia have a ride share, if CC does not make it by the time Soyuz contract expires in ’18 I guess NASA will continue to have one crew on ISS. Russia will have to wait to get a ride on CC in return. So no need to worry. 1 should be enough to run the US side. Not much science though. I regret that SpaceX did not convert Dragon 1 to crew. Too cheap I guess. A few million$ vs billions. Not to say that’s the reason SpaceX did not do it though.
dragon 1 doesn’t have an escape system the amount of revisions needed to add abort motors would have been about the same as the jump from dragon 1 to dragon 2
I think they considered adding a Soyuz style escape tower and life support to Dragon 1 but decided a solid tractor escape system would be a fairly expensive development project that would not contribute much towards their long term goals and would negatively impact the payload.
“Too cheap I guess. A few million$ vs billions. Not to say that’s the reason SpaceX did not do it though.”
by definition almost, Dragon 2, IS dragon cargo with abort motors and life support, wtf are you talking about?.
Similar, but not the same. It’s got a different pressure vessel, docking mechanism, and numerous other control and environmental systems – and trunk and power systems.
I can’t wait to see these vehicles flying. Competition is a good thing.
or is cooperation better?. Silly question really, cooperation is always better, but motivation and remuneration are also important.
Depends on what you mean by “cooperation”. If it’s in the form of all of the SLS contractors “cooperating” on the program, it’s a bad thing, IMHO. Every project manager should know that too many lines of communication will slow down a project. Vertical integration has its advantages (e.g. SpaceX and Blue Origin).
I meant genuine cooperation – as in naive idealist.
BTW, this competitin – who is actually competing?.
Boeing certainly aren’t competing, they just say “pay us more than we’re worth or don’t, and NASA generally do”. SpaceX are priced below what they could be, given the prices of the “competition”, so they aren’t really “competing” either. SNC and OATK aren’t trying to compete with SpaceX, but perhaps they are competing with Boeing and each other. Though, I’m sure their margins are reasonably healthy, so don’t know that competition is really providing any price advantage.
I suspect some more analysis on the actual benefits of “competition” is needed.
SpaceX and Boeing certainly are in competition. Yes, development costs were different between the two (which reflects some of that “pay us more than we’re worth or don’t” attitude of a typical NASA contractor). But once the two vehicles start flying, cost of each flight most certainly will enter into the equation. If one vehicle is grossly more expensive (from NASA’s point of view) it will almost certainly order more flights on the cheaper of the two.
“But once the two vehicles start flying, cost of each flight most certainly will enter into the equation.”
Exactly, Boeing aren’t even trying to compete.
Then my guess is they’ll get some “minimal” number of flights in order to maintain the capability and SpaceX will get the rest.
Doug, great write-up.
There will only be competition and benefit when a number of suppliers bid competitively for each flight. Now they just get handed a nice fat profit margin by a bureaucrat
Did you miss the part where the companies had to compete, providing funding of their own, and complete engineerings and technical demonstration milestones to get that funding with the nice fat profit margin?
Didn’t President Obama propose 6 billion over five years to fully fund commercial crew?
Heresy ! We blame congress for underfunding everything around here. It’s impossible for the administration to be wrong, or the contractors to not deliver.
Nice to see all the information in one article with the graphs. However, it will be a great day for NASA when CC starts flying crew to the ISS & LEO. No more single point failures that keep our astronauts from launching on American soil for years.
nitpicking: all contracts have milestone based payments, so the companies only get money when certain milestones have been reached AND as far as I know there are still CCiCap milestones that have not been fulfilled, not to mention that CCtCap is far from completed…
Therefore it is not really true, that NASA has “given out nearly $8.4 billion”.
Should the companies fail today (however unlikely that might be), a lot of that money will never have to be paid.
(but the rest would have been wasted of course)
Also – as far as CCtCap is concerned – the total program award of US$6.8 billion covers development costs through the program funding—$3.42 billion over the years 2015–2019 with $848 million in the commercial crew budget request for FY 2015—and $3.4 billion for operational crew resupply to the ISS—12 flights with four astronauts on each flight, where NASA assumed the same per-seat price of $70.7 million it would pay for each Soyuz seat in 2016.
It’s a fair point.
Contest the wisdom of this program, but we must be clear that these were not your typical NASA cost-plus contracts.
Doug Messier wrote that NASA “has given out nearly $8.4 billion in contracts.”
I see where you’re going if he were trying to compare to to expenditures of another program, but he compared commercial crew contracts to Russian crew transport contracts. That’s fairly apples to apples.
The kicker is, when the contracted money is spent with American companies, it’s creating American jobs, and it’s developing launch vehicles that also have commercial applications bringing more business to the American launch market, instead of buying launch services that merely line the coffers of a foreign country.
It is kind of funny when a author of article writes a sentence and then provides evidence in his own article invalidating what he just wrote.
“Nearly $8 billion of the total has been given to two companies, Boeing and SpaceX.”
Yet in this article it shows only $4.039 Billion has been appropriated by Congress for Commercial Crew. So how can Boeing and SpaceX be given $8 Billion for a program that only has had a total of $4 Billion appropriated? (Note for sake of brevity I am not subtracting out money already given to companies besides SpaceX and Boeing).
“NASA Inspector General reported that delays in the program over the past two years under the CCiCap contracts are due to SpaceX and Boeing running into technical challenges with their vehicles. “
Note the Commercial Crew funding allocations and also note the years of the biggest Delta between appropriations and what as requested. This lack of funding delayed the CCDev process and CCiCap process. The funding has been much more consistent once the contracts had been awarded to SpaceX and Boeing which is part of CCtCap. I think there is a misstatement in this Inspector General report because CCiCap was from 2012-2014. The last 2-years the program has been under CCtCap.
The CCiCap mention is a typo. Should say CCtCap.
The $4 billion goes through 2016. If you look at the out years (2017-2020), you see another $2 billion budgeted. I don’t think those amounts include all the commercial missions NASA is ordering.
The figures in my table were derived from the following pages:
http://www.nasa.gov/content…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
The NASA page has the basic contract amounts when they were first signed. NASA added additional milestones along the way, which are reflected on the Wikipedia page.
Thank you for the reply Mr Messier.
I think your wording of this sentence “Nearly $8 billion of the total has been given to two companies, Boeing and SpaceX.”, doesn’t really do a good job of explaining that only half of that $8B has actually been paid to SpaceX and Boeing.
Fair enough. FYI: Operational flights that NASA is ordering will be included in a different part of the budget, I believe. So, that’s why you see a gap there. You’ll notice in the table above, spending on commercial crew diminishes sharply during the last two years.