FYI,

"Griffin's Commercialization Legacy"
The Space Review
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1266/1

When the Bush Administration nominated Mike Griffin to be NASA
administrator in March 2005, the space community anticipated that he
would take special interest in efforts to promote the commercial
space industry. Unlike his predecessor, Sean O'Keefe, whose career
had been primarily in government and academia, Griffin spent
significant time in industry, including a stint with the American
Rocket Company (AMROC), a proto-NewSpace company from the 1980s, and
as president of In-Q-Tel, a company that effectively serves as the
venture capital arm of the CIA. As noted in this publication at the
time of his nomination, "his experience bodes well for those who
would like to see such [entrepreneurial] ventures play a bigger role
in NASA's programs." (see "Getting to know Michael Griffin", The
Space Review, March 14, 2005)

Now, by most accounts, Griffin's tenure at NASA is nearing an end.
Unless the incoming administration elects to keep Griffin at the
agency—an unlikely but not impossible turn of events—Griffin's likely
last major public statement on NASA's commercialization efforts was
made at a largely-overlooked speech Friday at NASA Headquarters
during a ceremony to honor Armadillo Aerospace for winning one of the
prizes in the Lunar Lander Challenge, one of NASA's Centennial
Challenges prize competitions. In that address Griffin made the case
for not just what the agency should be doing to support commercial
space efforts, but also why.

Parabolic and suborbital commercialization

Griffin's speech, while largely a review of ongoing efforts, did
contain some new developments. One was in the area of commercializing
parabolic flight services for reduced and microgravity work. NASA
operates a C-9 aircraft, dubbed the "Weightless Wonder"(but more
popularly, if infamously, known as the "Vomit Comet") that is used to
train astronauts and perform experiments. A few years ago a
commercial venture, Zero Gravity Corporation or ZERO-G, started
performing similar flights for almost anyone who can pay the $4,950
price. ZERO-G also started to pursue providing similar flights for
NASA.

Early this year NASA awarded ZERO-G a one-year contract, with
multiple one-year options, for parabolic flight services. Griffin
said in his speech that ZERO-G has since performed a number of test
flights to demonstrate their capabilities, in several cases flying
experiments funded by NASA's Small Business Innovation Research
(SBIR) program.

"Tests aren't yet complete, but project managers are confident that
ZERO-G can meet our needs," Griffin said. "Thus, we're planning for
the transition of all microgravity flight activities from the NASA C-
9 to commercial aircraft." The C-9 will be retained for space shuttle
training work, and as a backup to ZERO-G, but Griffin said that "our
primary path will be commercial."

Griffin also discussed NASA's interest in purchasing flight services
from the emerging commercial suborbital industry, for applications
ranging from scientific research to astronaut training. Griffin spoke
the same day that two requests for information (RFI) were due to the
agency on human-tended suborbital science and other research that
could be performed in this emerging class of vehicles. NASA is also
hosting a workshop on human-tended suborbital science on December 15
in San Francisco, timed to coincide with the American Geophysical
Union meeting being held there.

Despite these efforts, as well as positive comments about the concept
made by Griffin in a speech in March (see "Hoping for a reality
tomorrow", The Space Review, March 10, 2008), some in the industry
have been concerned that NASA has been dragging its heels on this,
particularly after one of its biggest proponents, former NASA
associate administrator Alan Stern, left the agency earlier this
year. His successor, Ed Weiler, was perceived to be less enthusiastic
about the concept, noting the limited response to a similar RFI
earlier in the year.

Griffin, though, indicated that he continued to support the idea of
purchasing such services when companies start flying. "When the
capability becomes available, we will purchase seats for various
science payloads, microgravity experiments, and perhaps even
astronaut training," he said. "We're not interested in doing `junk
science' just to fly it, and we're not interested in subsidizing
suborbital space tourism development as we are, in the same fashion,
doing with COTS… But we do plan to leverage this new capability when
it emerges to improve the science that we can conduct as we do today
on sounding rocket missions or to lower our costs. You should see
more about this initiative in next year's budget request."

Defending COTS's cargo emphasis

NASA's biggest commercialization effort during Griffin's tenure,
though, has involved the resupply of the International Space Station
(ISS). Griffin discussed his plans for what would become the
Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program in a speech
a couple months after becoming administrator, one where he said
that "both sides have to have skin in the game," eschewing
traditional government procurement for agreements that involved
progress payments for achieving milestones in the development of
systems.

The overall success of COTS won't be clear for several years to come,
but it has clearly attracted the interest of industry. SpaceX
continued to make progress on its funded Space Act Agreement under
the COTS program with the development of its Dragon spacecraft and
Falcon 9 launcher, while Orbital Sciences Corporation, which won a
similar agreement earlier this year after NASA terminated a prior
agreement with Rocketplane Kistler, is ramping up its work on its
Cygnus spacecraft and Taurus 2 rocket. Both companies, along with a
PlanetSpace-led team that includes several major aerospace companies,
are competing for the follow-on Commercial Resupply Services (CRS)
contract, scheduled to be awarded on December 23.

One area where at least some in industry have differed with NASA is
on the program's emphasis on cargo over crew transportation. The
original COTS program included an option for crew transportation,
known as Capability D, that NASA has not exercised. Proponents
of "COTS-D" have argued that developing a crew transportation
capability opens up new markets for providers in addition to
servicing the ISS, something that cargo-only vehicles don't offer
(see "The COTS conundrum", The Space Review, July 28, 2008)

In Friday's speech, though, Griffin defended the emphasis on
cargo. "I've been asked on many occasions for my opinion on
commercial crew transportation to ISS," he noted, then went on to
explain that cargo is "our more critical need". According to his
logic, there is already a means for getting crew to and from the
station once the shuttle is retired—the Russian Soyuz vehicle, for
which NASA recently extended a contract with the Russian Space Agency
for flights to the station in 2011–2012—but "we don't currently have
a method of getting cargo to space station, and we can't support crew
without cargo."

On the surface that statement seems a little puzzling, since there
are today vehicles that can provide cargo to the ISS: the Russian
Progress vehicle and ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), with
Japan's H-2 Transfer Vehicle (HTV) under development. However,
Griffin appeared to be referring to the anticipated shortfall in
cargo capability to the station once the shuttle is retired even when
those vehicles are taken into account, particularly given the needs
of a six-person crew.

"While I certainly wish I had more money to invest in developing COTS
crew capability—along with many other things I wish I had more money
for—I think it's unwise to raid other accounts to increase our bet on
COTS crew capability," Griffin said.

The value of prizes

Given that Friday's speech was part of a ceremony to honor the winner
of a NASA-funded prize competition, it was little surprise that
Griffin also talked about the prize competitions, both in general and
NASA's Centennial Challenges effort in particular. Prizes have
captured considerable interest in the space community—and elsewhere—
in recent years, thanks in large part to the $10-million Ansari X
Prize and the attention it garnered. That effort not only led to
NASA's own prize program, but also new interest in even bigger
prizes, including prizes in the range of $5–10 billion for human
missions to the Moon or Mars.

Griffin said he favored the use of prizes in general, but not the
proposals for billion-dollar Mars prizes. "For example, I think it
would be fruitless for the American taxpayer to sponsor multi-billion-
dollar prizes for manned missions back to the Moon or to Mars as some
prominent members of the chattering class have suggested," he said,
an apparent reference to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has
proposed such prizes before. "The high upfront cost and technical
complexity of such missions to me renders them unrealistic for a
private concern to undertake at this time. It's an interesting
thought experiment, but it's not an idea which would gain much
traction in the real world, in my opinion."

He added that if establishing a human presence on the Moon was a
national priority, the US government should be actively pursuing
it. "We should not establish a prize for the accomplishment and then
sit back and wait to see whether or not it is claimed," he said. "We
should either care enough to make it happen, or not bother."

So when are prizes most effective for NASA or other government
agencies? According to Griffin, it's when such agencies "are actively
seeking individuals and companies who would not normally participate
in a traditional government procurement process." He added: "Prizes
entice the kind of people who are repelled by the cumbersome nature
of government processes." He cited examples ranging from Charles
Lindbergh to Peter Homer, who won a prize in NASA's astronaut glove
prize competition last year.

All of these efforts Griffin mentioned in his speech—prizes, COTS,
and other purchases of commercial services—touched upon a fundamental
theme: the importance of getting the commercial sector involved in
order to make NASA's space exploration effort sustainable over
multiple administrations and Congresses. "Those of us on the
government side of the space business must recognize a fundamental
truth: if our experiment in expanding human presence beyond the Earth
is to be sustainable in the long run, it must ultimately yield
profitable results, or there must be a profit to be made by supplying
those who explore to fulfill other objectives," Griffin
concluded. "We should reach out to those individuals and companies
who share our interest in space exploration and are willing to take
risks to spur its development."

Mark Reiff