NASA Commits to Long-term Artemis Missions with Orion Production Contract
HOUSTON (NASA PR) — NASA is setting in motion the Orion spacecraft production line to support as many as 12 Artemis missions, including the mission that will carry the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024.
The agency has awarded the Orion Production and Operations Contract (OPOC) to Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado. Spacecraft production for the Orion program, managed at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, will focus on reusability and building a sustainable presence on the lunar surface.
“This is a great day for the men and women at Johnson Space Center. They are crucial to our national space program, and have an undeniable legacy and record of success in advancing America’s leadership in the human exploration of space,” said Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. “I am pleased that Administrator Bridenstine has heeded my calls and is taking significant steps to ensure that Johnson continues to grow with the exciting future of manned exploration that lies ahead. More needs to be done, and I look forward to production ramping up in the weeks and months to come and to more opportunities with NASA.”
OPOC is an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract that includes a commitment to order a minimum of six and a maximum of 12 Orion spacecraft, with an ordering period through Sept. 30, 2030. Production and operations of the spacecraft for six to 12 missions will establish a core set of capabilities, stabilize the production process, and demonstrate reusability of spacecraft components.
“This contract secures Orion production through the next decade, demonstrating NASA’s commitment to establishing a sustainable presence at the Moon to bring back new knowledge and prepare for sending astronauts to Mars,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “Orion is a highly-capable, state-of-the-art spacecraft, designed specifically for deep space missions with astronauts, and an integral part of NASA’s infrastructure for Artemis missions and future exploration of the solar system.”
With this award, NASA is ordering three Orion spacecraft for Artemis missions III through V for $2.7 billion. The agency plans to order three additional Orion capsules in fiscal year 2022 for Artemis missions VI through VIII, at a total of $1.9 billion. Ordering the spacecraft in groups of three allows NASA to benefit from efficiencies that become available in the supply chain over time – efficiencies that optimize production and lower costs.
Spacecraft reusability – itself a significant cost saver for the agency – will help NASA build the capabilities for sustainable exploration at the Moon and beyond. The long-term plan is to reuse the recovered crew modules at least once. The first phase of reusability will start with Artemis II. Interior components of the spacecraft, such as flight computers and other high value electronics, as well as crew seats and switch panels, will be re-flown on Artemis V. The Artemis III crew module will be re-flown on Artemis VI.
The first six spacecraft will be acquired by cost-plus-incentive-fee ordering. Because the cost of a complex, high-tech system generally decreases over time as the design stabilizes and production processes mature, NASA will negotiate firm-fixed-price orders for future missions to take advantage of the anticipated spacecraft production cost decreases. Furthermore, the cost incentives on the cost-plus-incentive-fee orders are designed to motivate favorable cost performance during early OPOC production and drive substantially lower prices for any subsequent firm-fixed-price orders issued under this contract.
“As the only vehicle capable of deep space exploration, the Orion spacecraft is critical to America’s continued leadership,” said Rep. Brian Babin of Texas. “Today’s announcement signals that we are moving closer towards operation and production. While I look forward to learning more of the details, it’s encouraging to see that this program is moving along as it should be. I am proud of the Orion program team and contractor partners at Johnson Space Center as they move towards getting the vehicle ‘flight ready.’ Without the brilliant minds and extraordinary leadership of the hard-working men and women at Johnson, our country would not be the preeminent spacefaring nation in the world.”
Work under this contract also will support production of NASA’s lunar-orbiting Gateway and evolving mission requirements. Production of certain spacecraft components already designed and qualified for Orion will be provided for Gateway use, eliminating the need for the Gateway Program to develop and qualify similar components.
“The men and women at Johnson Space Center represent the best and brightest scientific minds, and I’m confident with additional Orion spacecraft they will push the limits of exploration to the Moon and beyond,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. “I commend the Trump Administration for recognizing the importance and tradition of Houston as the center of human spaceflight and exploring the next frontier.”
Houston has long been the hub of America’s human space exploration program, from the early days of Gemini, Mercury, and Apollo to Artemis. With NASA’s accelerated return to the Moon, Johnson Space Center now is managing more major human spaceflight programs than ever before. In addition to the Orion program, the Texas facility also manages NASA’s Gateway and International Space Station programs, and is home to the Mission Control Center and America’s astronaut corps – the next moonwalkers. Johnson also manages the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, the first two deliveries for which are targeted to launch to the Moon in July 2021.
“No other spacecraft in the world can keep humans alive hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth for weeks at a time with the safety features, crew accommodations, technical innovations, and reliability that Orion provides,” said Mark Kirasich, Orion Program manager at Johnson. “With the design and development phase of Orion largely behind us, this new contract will enable us to increase efficiencies, reuse the spacecraft, and bring down the cost of reliably transporting people between earth and the Gateway.”
NASA is working to land the first woman and next man on the Moon in five years as part of the agency’s Artemis program. Orion, the Space Launch System rocket and Gateway are part of NASA’s backbone for deep space exploration. Work is well underway on both the Artemis I and II Orion spacecraft. Engineers at Kennedy Space Center in Florida have completed and attached the crew and service modules for Artemis I and are preparing the spacecraft for environmental testing. Meanwhile, teams at Kennedy are integrating thousands of parts into the crew module for Artemis II in preparation for the first crewed Artemis mission.
The Artemis program is the next step in human space exploration. It’s part of NASA’s broader Moon to Mars exploration approach, in which we will quickly and sustainably explore the Moon and use what we learn there to enable humanity’s next giant leap, sending astronauts to Mars.
For more information about Orion, visit:
63 responses to “NASA Commits to Long-term Artemis Missions with Orion Production Contract”
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Cost Plus Pork
SLS/Orion may be the poster child for government waste but unfortunately the private sector had not shown itself to be superior. Two space taxis that should have been flying two years ago still sit on the ground while Boeing has gone silent regarding when they will be ready to fly and SpaceX blew up it’s capsule in a ground test. Blue Origin is as silent as ever but even when New Glenn flies it won’t be much of an improvement over Starliner and Dragon 2. Meanwhile, Elon Musk flies water towers and tells us that really big things are just a few years away. Really big things always seem to be a few years away for everybody and “private space” can’t seem to make the business case necessary to bring in the investment money needed for putting large numbers of people into space economically.
Perhaps NASA should just contract for what it needs until the private sector can find a reason to produce spacecraft and hardware without relying on government contracts.
Private space hamstrung by NASA beauracracy and in the early years, underfunding.
At least SpaceX is doing something besides Commercial Crew on their own dime. Can’t say the same for Boeing or BO.
Cheers
Neil
The whole idea was that private space would be self funded and independent from the government. To cry that the government does not fund private space misses the point entirely.
A major problem was NASA moving the goalposts; setting up a list of milestones & requirements then changing them mid-process.
The problem is the marketplace won’t allow a company to develop a manned spacecraft by themselves. As for NASA changing the game, well, given what happened to what was supposed to be operational vehicle #1 they did not provide enough oversight. The goalposts needed to be moved some more.
Hi, I am from NASA and I am here to help you. ??
But first you need to fill out this stack of paper, for spaceflight is all about doing the paperwork.
….. I know you’re being sarcastic, but you realize that your sense of sarcasm is butting against the hard reality as that’s just as it went down. Space X would be out of business and the Falcon program would not exist without NASA there to help. That’s just cold hard fact and history.
Or SpaceX would have took a different path with Dragonlab and a crew version of Dragon to a Bigelow Aerospace B330. Instead of a Falcon 9R there might be now a Falcon 5R or Falcon 7R actually taking humans to space instead of waiting for NASA approval.
Stop selling entrepreneurs short. They are always more than one way forward.
So SpaceX should bow and scrape and tug the forelock for the rest of eternity because it got NASA out of a scrape it, and its Congressional string-pullers, had gotten itself into? Please!
You argue with yourself so much. And you make the mistake of confusing possible futures with the here and now. No version of BF(x) is flying yet. No cargo version, let alone something that carries people. Yet you rant as if it’s been flying for years and rail against a world that refuses to fly on it.
In the best of all worlds where BF(x) works, there’s going to be a time period when the cargo version is the only BF(x) flying and the manned version is still under development. If you want the rest of the world to abandon it’s ICBM class boosters at that time, your best bet will be to fly the operational capsules inside the cargo bay of what ever is operating at the time. It does not matter how successful BF(x) as a program is, we’re going to need capsules for some time yet.
You do realize that it has been FAA that has been the one with the massive amount of regulations. Right?
SpaceX is developing a manned spacecraft by itself, as is Blue Origin.
I agree that NASA missed the titanium check valve problem while providing oversight. But, thank God the testing program NASA and SpaceX jointly came up with/agreed to found the issue before people were put on board, so ultimately, the system worked (just not as smoothly as possibly)
Following Capt. Bob down the “SHS is a mirage” rabbit-hole are we? Starship will be a manned spacecraft and is being developed by SpaceX on its own. It will be the first such, but not the last.
As for the DM-1 Crew Dragon 2, what magic NASA oversight was supposed to prevent what happened to it from happening? The problem was found because of testing SpaceX elected to do on its own.
The admitted mistake of not using plug and instead using a check valve that allows a small amount of back flow. And did.
Notice that NASA is not the one with the massive oversight. It would be FAA that has been the nightmare to them.
Ideally. However, as you note, private corporations weren’t successfully developing manned spacecraft on their own, so the idea developed to become about public-private partnerships: the government would provide seed money, mentorship, requirements and, finally certification and operational contracts in order to get a commercial manned spaceflight industry going.
Congress underfunding NASA’s plans with their commercial Crew partners in the program’s early years clearly slowed progress. Less money, less honey.
Now the argument could be made that the government shouldn’t have to pay any money to a commercial program, but that’s a matter of semantics – it’s called “Commercial Crew”, but it isn’t fully commercial and all involved know that. It’s hoped to become fully commercial after the development phase ends, but we’ll see. It’s clear SpaceX has developed other plans as this program has somewhat crawled along and their propulsive landing approach became unfeasible due to a late shift in NASA’s guidance (perhaps for the better! That Dragon incident on the test stand was quite a sight)
It’s also worth noting that the lack of privately built spacecraft Mr. T indicts as a market failure was actually the result of a long-standing program of active NASA suppression of private space efforts motivated by a general sense of territoriality where space was concerned and specifically by a desire to maintain Shuttle’s launch monopoly anent U.S. payloads. Mr. T is, in effect, criticizing private business for a lack of movement while ignoring the fact that NASA, in effect, hit every would-be launch provider that popped up over the head with a 2×4.
Self-funding and substantial independence from government is coming. But it’s not unreasonable to complain when the government doesn’t keep its financial commitments for things it solicited in the first place.
SpaceX needs to fly their in-flight abort test, and Boeing their pad abort test (which SpaceX flew in 2015). Boeing won’t fly an in-flight abort test. The Dragon abort failure was a leaky valve, now replaced by a burst disc.
Boeing, SpaceX and Orion were affected by a new parachute issue discovered during SpaceX’s tests, which caused a re-do of how they are modeled.
Boeing definitely needs to resume making tangible progress. Maybe the burst disc solved the problem for SpaceX but they will need to test the system to NASA’s satisfaction before they’ll fly with astronauts aboard.
DEMO-2 is waiting for both IFA and new leadership appointments on the NASA side which may, in fact, be delaying decisions on IFA, abort rehearsals and the Joint Flight Readiness Review. IOW, the whole kit and kaboodle may be waiting for new hires.
The flammability of titanium check valves has also turned out to be a surprise for everybody on all sides. SpaceX’s refinement of state of the art for parachute deployment is also being shared through NASA with Boeing to aid the CST-100’s teething problems. The FCC licenses for both CC vehicles begin in November.
The good thing is that the delay is allowing SpaceX time to rebuild Pad39a for Starship/Super Heavy flights, while they are free to use Pad40 for Starlink flights. The Dragon2 abort and DM2 flights would just mess both up, so further delays while NASA does it reviews and it’s reviews of its reviews is probably good.
actually Starship/Superheavy are getting a secondary pad being built adjacent to the main 39a pad as part of the same launch complex
the D2 anomaly investigation has been closed it seems, it is likely they are waiting until the Starship update before IFA, as well as for the end of hurricane season, before they do much of any launching out of the Cape, the IFA booster and I believe the DM 2 booster have already done acceptance testing at McGregor.
It’s a good thing that you test. Demo – 2 has a lot of testing to do on the ground before that in-flight abort. If you launched it now, how could you be sure the data is reliable? Run it 25 – 30 times on the ground first and then confidence will be more warranted.
Oh, I am sure that is going on right now.
No. SX recently passed the Parachute test.
I’m going to disagree with you because as far as I know, NASA never missed a milestone payment or paid late. When the companies met their milestones they got paid. The delay had more to do with engineering hurdles that both companies encountered. Secondly, neither company saw any value in putting more private funds into the projects to speed them up even though private equity has always been available. It goes back to what I said about not being able to make the business case for manned spaceflight outside of government charters.
In short, they acted like good government contractors are suppose to act. Meanwhile Elon Musk was laying the foundation for his own private space program. The Starship/Super Heavy shows what happens when a firm is not working for NASA.
As for HSF, think about how many paying airline passengers there would be if you forced them fly in fighter plane style cockpits. Why do you think the Starship has more room than a A380? But as with all great revolutions time will tell.
Starship just got bigger. Stitching images of the constructed parts and a bit of pixel counting reveals its gone from 55m to 59-60m, and the LC-39A EA documents the propellant tanks have grown from 1100 tonnes to 1500 tonnes.
Yep, a work in progress, not one frozen in time like the SLS. Which again makes it more like ship building than aircraft, since ships are often modified while being built. It’s why there are often differences even in ships of the same classes as experience and needs are taken into account while they are still in the shipyard.
In fact, Congress (aka Dick Shelby, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Frank Wolf) underfunded CC by roughly $500M/year for four years running, while simultaneously reading NASA the riot act for the programs not making much progress. SpaceX initially projected first manned flight of Crew Dragon by 2015, if properly funded. Add two years of delays and you’d still get 2017.
While it’s true there’s no non-government customer for manned spaceflight at current pricing, said customer did, in fact, string the two contractors along for four years before finally coughing up what the contractors said their programs would cost. To be fair, NASA wanted to buy; they just weren’t allowed the funds.
Neither CC company can be blamed for concluding that the government was in no hurry, or that CC services are a bit of a bust as long as they’re competing with Orion, i.e., the government, for funding and missions.
Are you saying that had there been more money available, the companies would have hit their engineering goals more quickly?
Actually, NASA has for the most part stayed out of private space. It has been FAA that has done the damage.
And yeah, it was CONgress, specially the GOP, that gutted the CCXdev funding.
And Blue Origin is almost 100% on their own dime.
“Perhaps NASA should just contract for what it needs” ? Contract with who? Public sector spacecraft are hard to find, especially if you want a capsule at <$1B
Unless you missed it the government wants to fly to the ISS so they need to buy off the shelf or contract.
You can’t just go out and buy a spacecraft off the shelf. It would be great if there was sufficient commercial activity to spur a robust spacecraft-building industry but at this point we’re stuck with fixed-price or cost-plus contracts. Nobody except spacecraft manufacturers likes cost-plus but that doesn’t mean that NASA can’t work with the industry to build what they need for a fixed cost. If they want to keep using these public-private partnerships I would recommend stipulated damages clauses for late delivery with a binding arbitration provision so NASA-mandated changes do not cause late deliveries. There’s a lot that can be done to make the contracting process better. We don’t need to return to cost-plus.
Hi Terry. It’s not NASA that is preventing the move to cost-plus but the Congress oversight and certain particular senators who don’t trust fixed price. They want oversight and that means FAR cost-plus contracts instead of simply specifying the requirements and letting the contractors determine how to meet these.
Cheers,
Neil
My point was really you are saying NASA should contract for what it needs which is exactly what they did with SpaceX and Boeing because obviously you can’t buy one off the shelf, doh.
Part of the problem was the changeover from Space Act Agreement-based contracts to FAR-based contracts. Then there was Boeing’s aerodynamics issues with Starliner anent Atlas V, the evergreen, but vague, hanky-twisting about parachutes by ASAP and that abort system failure last year. SpaceX, for its part, has also had ASAP kibitzing about parachutes to contend with and NASA calling an audible at the line of scrimmage anent propulsive landing.
The private sector isn’t going to put large numbers of people into space until some means exists to get them there and back.
The private sector – SpaceX – is developing spacecraft (SHS) without any government contracts up-front. It would be nice if more such projects were underway, but somebody’s got to be first and SpaceX has stepped up.
New Glenn has no human-crewed spacecraft associated with it so its debut is irrelevant anent getting people to and from space and should not be mentioned along with Starliner and Crew Dragon 2.
The Mk0 “water tower” has already flown twice. The Mk1 is close to getting off the ground now. SpaceX isn’t promising big things a few years away – more like a few weeks and months.
NASA has been contracting for what it needs. It pays the Russians about $90 million a seat for rides on the rickety rattletrap Soyuz.
My concern is that at some point an incident will indicate that it would have been safer to throw bean bag chairs and O2 tanks in a nearly unmodified D1 than continue buying Soyuz. . A little more involved of course, but a solution that could have been in use five years and billions of Rubles ago.
But doing things the easy way is not the NASA way. They always seem to strive for the most difficult solution.
ROFL.
Thank you for the laugh.
Orion; started in 2006, and spending has been 16 BILLION from 2006-2018, with an average of around 1.1B / year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
However, Commercial Space started in 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Space has been awared a grand total of :
3,144.6 MILLION (or 3B), with the majority of it slated for actual launches. But we will assume that 1B goes to launches. As such, SpaceX has had an average of less than 225M / year on this.
Oh, BOEING was awarded 4,820.9 (or close to 5B), with a good chunk of it slated for actual launches (interestingly, fewer than SX). Again, assume that 1B goes to launches, then Boeing has had an average of 444M / year.
IOW, Boeing has had almost double the money for their taxi.
L-Mart has had nearly 5x what SX had yearly, and they have had 13 years.
And yet, the one that is very likely going to launch humans first, will be SX.
Hell, there is a great chance that SX will launch over 30 ppl at one time into orbit before L-mart gets 4 ppl up there.
the pork must flow
a attempt to show momenteum
Probably, yet we’re still waiting for that long-delayed first launch of a private sector space taxi. Any day now, any day.
You clearly missed the demo flight of Dragon2 to the ISS. Wakey, wakey.
Cheers
Neil
Neil, it carried people? How did I miss that? It also exploded on the test stand. Did you happen to miss that? It’s understandable because SpaceX has done everything possible to keep it under the radar. No people, no count, still waiting. Any month now.
What did SpaceX do to keep it under the radar?
They just generally kept quiet about the whole thing until they came out and said “we know what the problem was and how we’re going to fix it.” I wasn’t meaning to imply that they tried to suppress information but especially early on they were a good deal less than forthcoming.
The same was true in the wake of the AMOS-6 loss.
max of 12, like there’s ever going to be that many SLS?
We need big payloads for the new and current set of boosters. Go ahead and contract them. If all else fails we can fly them on Falcon Heavies.
Or unload them by crane unto the lunar surface from a Starship 😀
12 Orions means 12 service modules from ESA. Then the program is too big, too complex, and too international to kill off. Just like the ISS…
Up to 12 Artemis missions. Here, they are specifically ordering 3 more Orion capsules, while stating intention to order a further 3 Orions in 2022:
“With this award, NASA is ordering three Orion spacecraft for Artemis missions III through V for $2.7 billion. The agency plans to order three additional Orion capsules in fiscal year 2022 for Artemis missions VI through VIII, at a total of $1.9 billion”
Meanwhile, as the plan is to work towards re-using each capsule at least once, the above may be it for new capsules even if they go as far as an Artemis XII mission (and perhaps even beyond).
“The long-term plan is to reuse the recovered crew modules at least once…The Artemis III crew module will be re-flown on Artemis VI.”
However, as you said, that would still require new Service Modules for each mission. If Europe agrees to keep providing the Service Modules, well, we can always just chop ’em off at the knees like usual (heh heh). But if it’s done under a treaty agreement such as for the ISS, it becomes more than just a matter of cancelling a bloated US program. Keep your hands on your wallets, tax payers
no because its max but indefinite quantity, meaning it could be 3
How better to fund black projects?
It must be a doozie…
This is a large amount of money to spend. I cannot find the appropriate section in NASA’s 2020 budget document. There is money for Orion development (page DEXP-4) but the equivalent production section appears to be missing.
Does this mean that NASA has been given an unofficial go ahead by Congress for the Orion and Artemis Programs?
IMO, it just means they’re trying to present Congress a fait accompli: here’s America’s program, it’s real, we’ve got real hardware and we’re going to the Moon – well, unless you specifically kill it. And in that case, it’s on you – you killed America’s return to the Moon.
Gotta say, it worked for Commercial Crew. – remember the CCtCap announcement back in 2014 for contracts of $4.2 billion for Boeing and $2.6 billion for SpaceX and everyone was like, “Where the heck did all that money come from”? But presented with a “Take-it-or-leave-it, we’re fully funding two different commercial crew providers and that’s the program”, Congress coughed up the dough.
Bridenstine was in Congress at the time; looks like he remembered the lesson well. Of course, it remains to be seen if the same tactic will work again
That funds everything, except anything needed to go to the Moon.
Musk made a not-a-flamethrower that runs on propane. NASA has developed not-a-flamethrower that runs on US taxpayer cash
Sooie!!!! Oink, Oink, Oink….