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NASA, Congress Reach Accord On Commercial Crew Program
MarkWhittington writes "NASA and Congress have reached a deal on how to proceed with the commercial crew program that provides government subsidies to pay for the development of private spacecraft. NASA will select two competitors from the current four — SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada. A third competitor will be picked for partial funding as a fallback in case both of the main competing companies run into difficulties developing a spacecraft on time and on budget."
How is an IPA going to get people into orbit?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
pay for the development
It works the same in NASA as it does in software dev: you get what you pay for. If you want results, pay for results. If you pay for development, all you get is lots of development.
It's obvious that SpaceX will be selected.
How soon will Dragon be man-rated, and even more important, Falcon 9 and/or Falcon Heavy?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, the Virginia Republican who heads the House appropriation subcommittee with NASA oversight, said today that the program would fully fund two companies â" and could partially fund a third.
Thatâ(TM)s down from as many as four companies, according to Wolf.
âoeThis downselect will reduce taxpayer exposure by concentrating funds on those participants who are most likely to be chosen to eventually provide service to ISS,â he said in a statement.
IMHO, that's doublespeak for "I was able to take out two of four potential competitors to my favorite space pork, the Space Launch System."
The deal also would lay the groundwork for NASA to impose stiffer regulations on the companies competing to develop the rockets and capsules â" a priority for Wolf â" while giving NASA more leeway to nix contracts if it thinks aspiring companies are overselling their capability and financial health.
In other words, a series of irrelevant obstacles can be thrown in the way to hinder these companies even more. The "stiffer regulations" simply isn't needed. NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS. But it's a great tool for adding cost to these activities. We'll see how that gets abused in the future.
Similarly, more leeway to nix contracts means greater uncertainty (and resulting weaker financial health) for the contractors. NASA already is a problem child for bad contracts due to its considerable ability to renegotiate contracts, Darth Vader style. Being allowed even more excuses to renege on contracts will cause even more problems for these contractors.
This isn't going to kill the COTS program, but we should remember that some people are trying to. I think in part this is to remove competition for the SLS and in part just a ploy to eventually suborn COTS funding for the SLS.
This "accord" is for low earth orbit commercial space launches. Orion is intended for beyond LEO. Or something like that.
Orion is not meant for ISS operations. Orion is meant for Beyond Earth Orbit: asteroid and lunar exploration, that sort of thing.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The other "selectee" will be Alliant Techsystems with the Liberty rocket. Yes, I realize they didn't even make the cut from eight or so to four, but they are going to drive everybody else out simply through a massive lobbying effort that will change the outcomes of several districts.
The original Orion concept -- and it get serious attention, even today -- was for an enormous, massive parabolic dome with a spacecraft on top of it. The spacecraft injects small nuclear bombs into the dome, and they explode at the focus. It's pretty much guaranteed that thing will MOVE! And yes, it is quite feasible and technically possible.
I don't think anybody is seriously considering building one of those right now, but the name stuck, and Orion has now been known to generations as "the nuclear bomb powered spacecraft".
Kind of a negative name to pick for your newfangled, modern, but chemical-powered machine.
The sad thing is that Sierra Nevada is in some ways doing more to help drop the cost of going into orbit than almost anybody else around. The Dream Chaser spacecraft is really an amazing vehicle that is just beginning to reach a point of getting a payoff, which the early flight trials going on.
If they get cut, I hope that the investors in Sierra Nevada (and apparently Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic fame is one of them) continue to press forward without NASA funding.
They really don't deserve to be cut, at least so far as the investment being made by NASA into this company will likely produce some impressive long-term results. It is mainly sad that a jerk of a congressman who doesn't like these programs (COTS and CCDev) instead wants to dump 10x the amount of money on a fiscal black hole that will never fly (namely the SLS... aka the "Senate Launch System").
This move to reduce the options for CCDev is not going to save much money, and in fact it will set back commercial spaceflight by several years if not a full decade.
Orion is not meant for ISS operations. Orion is meant for Beyond Earth Orbit: asteroid and lunar exploration, that sort of thing.
That isn't what NASA was saying back when the Ares I was still under active development. The Ares I was being designed specifically so the Orion capsule could get to the ISS (complete with an ISS mating adapter) that really makes it a direct competitor to the SpaceX Dragon, at least for manned spacecraft.
Orion really does a lousy job for areas beyond LEO though. While it has just under 2x the usable internal volume that the Apollo spacecraft used, that won't exactly be something to brag about. Perhaps reasonable for a trip to the Moon, but I don't see how it will possibly be used on a trip to an asteroid much less Mars. The "habitable volume" of the Orion is very much comparable to the internal volume of the Dragon. I just don't see how astronauts are going to be expected to hang out in that kind of volume for weeks and months.
What makes the Orion useful for beyond LEO is mainly that it has its own solar energy generator array, and that the heat shield is being designed to perform re-entry of a free-return trajectory from the Moon and a similar return flight coming from Mars. Then again the Dragon capsule is being designed with those same parameters as well.
Orion might be a piece of the puzzle in terms of getting to Mars or somewhere else in the Solar System, but by itself it won't get the job done.
... the Democratic administration wants to encourage free market competition, and the Republicans in Congress want to limit it. This should not be a shock to anyone who pays attention to reality rather than party rhetoric.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Blue Origin and their SSTO nonsense should have never received a dime of public money to begin with.
So you think the DC-X program was a terrible waste of tax dollars? Why are you upset that a private company without tax dollars is furthering the research into that flight concept and propulsion system?
Furthermore, do you even have a clue what part of the CCDev program that Blue Origin is even doing, what their spacecraft actually is supposed to look like, or how it is going to get into orbit much less return to the Earth? If you did, you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement presuming something that wasn't even true.
*Hint* -- Blue Origin proposed to use the Lockheed-Martin Atlas V for the launch of its spacecraft under CCDev. They aren't even planning on flying their own hardware for the first stage or two.
What is your logic here? You think it costs signifcantly less to turn Dream Chaser around than a Dragon Capsule? It looks an awful lot like a Space Shuttle to me for that.
The two who seem to be doing a lot for bringing the price down would be Blue Origin (who are banking on a seemingly unlikely SSTO), and SpaceX with their Resuable Powered Decent stages (which also seem pretty far away at this point). It takes a 130 million Atlas V to put a Dream Chaser into orbit last time I looked, where as the Dragon only needs a 60 million dollar Falcon 9. Although Dream Chaser *could* probably fit on a Falcon 9 and in either case you are looking at additional costs on top of the basic launcher.
I'd like to point out that Space X did first prove they're capable of real life feats with Musk's own money. Yes the latest developments and the docking with ISS has been co-funded (or mostly funded) by NASA and they'll pay them more for additional launches, but they're getting a real deal out of it as SpaceX is doing it way cheaper than any alternative and they actually deliver already today, not far fetched promises.
You forget the alternative. If the public funds the development of new rocket systems by NASA and keeps using them at a cost of 5x that of the private company, then after N launches the total cost for the public is higher than had they developed it in cooperation with a private enterprise that then operates the technology under contracts at a much lower cost. As an example, Falcon 9 of Space X has lift capacity of 10 tons for a cost of $56M. The Delta-IV rocket had 22 tons and $300M so the cost per kg is 3x higher. The Ariane 5 rocket by ESA has 21 ton lift to LEO and cost of $200M. The Atlas V (earlier one) had lift on 9t at a cost of $125M.
Now if Space X can pull off Falcon Heavy (the first launch is planned already in 2013) then the planned cost of 53t to LEO is $80-125M. That gives it a per kg cost of 5.8x less than Delta-IV, 4x less than Ariane 5 etc. And that's assuming the high end of the price range. It's also a rocket that can deliver cargo to trans-lunar-orbit or even to Mars (14t to Mars, 16t to trans lunar). Why the hell would we need an SLS with 50-130t capacity with an outrageous price tag when we can just launch two Falcon 9 heavy's for the same capacity and probably less than the equivalent launch cost and if need be assemble the final inter-plantery spacecraft in orbit...
I have to disagree with you on SSTO being nonsense - only a small percentage of the cost of an orbital launch is the unavoidable fuel costs, much of the rest is in ground control and and the fact that we're basically throwing away everything except for the orbital capsule with every launch. That made great sense during the cold war when the space program was basically PR campaign piggybacking on ICBM technology to reach orbit - and an ICBM is pretty much by definition a single-shot vehicle and requires ground control because we're squeamish about both suicide missions and autonomous nukes. The space shuttle was a...change from that, but still used much of the same philosophy, just with a larger, more sophisticated orbital capsule
In the modern world where the space is becoming a thriving commercial destination a reusable launch vehicle that doesn't require extensive ground control makes a lot more sense. Granted SSTO has some problems - not really much call to carry the full mass of the launch vehicle all the way to orbit where you'll just be stuck shoving around a lot of useless mass, but the Blue Origin New Shepard seems to be moving in the right direction as a reusable, suborbital launch system with a separable crew module. Assuming the long term goal is to replace the expendable Atlas rocket family with a reusable Shepard descendant it actually makes a lot of sense - even if the eventual Shepard N were to cost 100x what an Atlas rocket does, the fact that it would require minimal ground support and could relaunch almost immediately with minimal maintenance means it could pay for itself within a year or two. The fact that they're doing something fundamentally new though does boost the development costs considerably, especially if you consider the current generation to be a research prototype with few if any direct applications. It could make sense to help fund its development not because you want this vehicle, but because you want the vehicle this vehicle's technology will enable once proven and refined. A true long-term investment if you will - exactly the sort of thing governments tend to be better at funding than private industry.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Oh forgot to add. Space X took the risk on themselves when the did the Falcon 1 and it failed 3x in row. They bet the company on the 4th launch and it worked and have been delivering cargo to LEO and now to ISS since. The Falcon 9 works (it has had 3/3 successes) and Falcon Heavy is basically re-using a lot of the Falcon 9 material so it's likely they'll make it work too. The maiden flight of SLS is planned in 2017 while I'd assume the Falcon Heavy or it's successor might easily be providing the service in 2017 for a lot cheaper (they'll probably have ironed out the reusability part of the first stages by then).
I think a lot of this is indeed coming from the fact that SpaceX is operating like a startup. They also have claimed a lot of the cost reduction comes from the fact that they manufacture every single component themselves in their own factory where the raw materials come in from one door and spaceships/rockets come out the other. They also re-use a lot of the tooling etc because of the design (Falcon 9 is basically 9x Falcon 1 and Falcon Heavy is basically 3x Falcon 9 with inter-exchange of fuel). Due to their relative size as a company their corporate overhead has to be an order of magnitude smaller than say Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. And their main interest is first off to get to be a major player in the space industry and to compete they have to be unique in some way and their way is the cost. I'm guessing their cross margin per launch is quite small while I'd not be surprised if others have a 100% or more cross margin. Musk's vision is to help make humans a space faring civilization with cost to orbit heavily reduced and allowing exploration of the solar system including colonization. As I've understood his hope is to retire on Mars so he's pushing with the company towards making that a reality within his lifetime (assuming he retires at 60/65 he's got 20/25 years left, it's not fully utopic).
And having worked for a private company and government contract and a large EU project I can tell you that the costs shown in a large EU project per person are far higher than you'd normally associate with the tasks done just because you can. And considering that there aren't too many players around I'd not be surprised if they've kept the launch device costs somewhat bloated because they can and it's being disrupter right now by an independent player that has different motives :)
Damn hit submit and then remembered your other parts of the question. With regard to safety and redundancy it's actually in favor of SpaceX. As an example from Falcon Heavy wiki: "The structural safety margins are 40% above flight loads, higher than the 25% margins of other rockets.[10]". They've designed the whole things from ground up for manned flight with extended safety margins so this is not the reason for cheapness...
And with regard to Musk and his motives for the company. Look at the recent 60 minutes interview with him. When Neil Armstrong etc claim that one shouldn't push for commercialization and NASA should do everything themselves (sounds like SLS lobbying to get the old guys out and get support without due consideration what they're doing) Elon's basically in tears. You can see that those guys were/are his heroes and motivation to do the same kind of stuff and it really hurt him. So he's not a fat CEO waiting for a fat paycheck, but this IS his vision and hope and that defines his priorities.
IMHO, "looks like the space shuttle" is a pretty flimsy excuse. The Space Shuttle was a victim of two things: massive budget cuts in the development program, and being a first-generation reusable -- aka, it should have been seen as a testbed for learning rather than a workhorse. This craft seems to have the major lessons learned from the shuttle program down - top mount (lower vibrational load, no debris impacts, etc), single-piece TPS to save on maintenance, much smaller vehicle (the smaller the craft, the higher your surface area to mass ratio, greatly simplifying reentry), lifting body to reduce wing mass, less of the boost phase coming from the orbiter (again, keeping the orbiter smaller and lighter, simplifying reentry), and so forth. Doesn't look half bad to me.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
Also, you underestimate how much overhead there is in a 3-tier contracting scheme. 3x cost would be just about believable.
Ah, SSTOs... It's not that the concept is wrong. It's not even that it's impossible with current fuels and materials. The problem is that it's so *close* to impossible that the difficulty of creating such a craft inevitably leads to big complications.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
An ion drive of any size could probably not power such a beast off the Earth
Very true, but the getting off Earth part isn't really that interesting, we can do it already and it's *really* not something you would have wanted to use a nuke-drive for anyway, unless you have to do so very quickly before the space-elephants drop a kinetic weapon on you (loved Lucifer's Hammer, a battered old copy still holds it's place in my personal library)
For getting around the solar system though - if a state of the art ion drive is 1000x too weak to do what you want, strap 1000 drives to your hull and add enough nuclear reactors to power them all. Not at all an elegant solution, but then I think that would only qualify it even more for the name. Granted the specific impulse is probably well below what could be managed with a true Orion design, but then massive overkill was the name of the game there, so we don't really need to get anywhere close to be useful - I mean come on sustained 1g acceleration will have you beyond the orbit of Pluto in ~12 days, but even 1/100g will get you there in 4 months. And a paltry 1/1000g is enough to get you from Earth to Mars in only 46 days at conjunction, or 100days at opposition - if the sun weren't in the way... and you didn't mind doing all your deceleration in the last few microseconds of the journey.
Hmm, of course all those are assuming flat-space accelerations, the whole climbing out of the sun's gravitational well thing would start factoring in at lower accelerations. Still I think the point is obvious - if you can sustain any sort of acceleration at all the solar system isn't actually that big a place, it's just that it's not possible to sustain thrust with a chemical drive.
An interesting talk on the Orion project from a fellow that managed to salvage a lot of research lost by NASA, if you don't mind seeing stuff still technically classified as Top Secret Orion
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
it doesnt exist yet. it hasnt flown, and its still more expensive per pound than the dragon, which has flown twice and is cheaper per pound. so if you could illuminate how the dreamchaser is doing more than spacex in dropping the cost of going to orbit for all of us, were all ears.
New Sheperd in all regards hits me as pure naivete. For example, using HTP as an oxidizer. I'm well familiar with the logic here. "Oh, sure, it's got less ISP than LOX, but it's SIMPLER! And ISP isn't everything! We'll go simple and cheap, and get a simple, cheap craft!"
And that logic is wrong.
First off, the lesser issue: ISP may not be everything, but it's huge. The scaling factor for having bad ISP is pretty massive, and your other costs will add up quickly as your craft balloons, everything from your transport costs to your launch liability. People who just discount it like that do a big disservice to themselves.
But the bigger issue: HTP is *not* simpler than LOX. It's a giant pain in the arse. It's explosive, which requires that you have sterile, defect-free tanks and systems with very specific materials requirements and purity constantly maintained. Its explosivity can be greatly reduced by the presence of stabilizers, but therein lies the other problem: the more stable you make it, the less reactive it becomes, and if you're using any sort of catalyst pack (which themselves are full of problems), you tend to clog it. Peroxide vapors from even stabilized HTP are explosive. Stored HTP can become less stable over time, and leaks can be catastrophic (as many people, perhaps most famously in recent years the crew of the Kursk, have learned). Heat can set it off. It's difficult and dangerous to concentrate in terms of oxidizer production. It's illegal to ship in tanker trucks due to its hazardous nature. Etc.
People think about household H2O2 solutions and just picture a more powerful version of that. That is not what HTP is like. The Germans and later the US went with HTP a lot early in their rocketry programs. The fact that its usage became greatly curtailed over time should speak volumes.
Basically, HTP is just reinventing a bad wheel. There's one little explored fuel combination that I'd like to see more focus on, personally: LOX/Propane. Propane is of course widely available, cheap, and easy to transport. It's higher ISP than RP1 (LOX/RP1 being a common propellant combination), but the downside when you first look at it in a table is it's much lower density. BUT, at the same temperature as your LOX - aka, they can share a common bulkhead without insulative separation, reducing system mass -- it's actually quite dense. LOX/Propane is also easier to vaporize and ignite.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
The Space Shuttle was a victim of two things: massive budget cuts in the development program, and being a first-generation reusable
In other words, NASA badly overspent on a first generation reusable. If the Space Shuttle had been able to carry a couple of people and a little payload, it'd have fit quite nicely into NASA's existing ( and for the foreseeable future) budget. Instead, they built the successor to the Saturn V. It sucked the oxygen out of the room for any other large space projects that didn't involve the Shuttle and contributed to its survival in some way.
It was too ambitious. It wasn't overbudgeted for what they were trying to accomplish (and after the budget cuts, it was way underbudget for what they were trying to accomplish). They were, however, trying to accomplish too much, and especially for a first-gen.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
I think the Space Shuttle was just a big flop that only escaped being cancelled because the US Government has such deep pockets. In the end, in fact way before the end, it was a jobs program more than anything else. It set the space program back something like 20-30 years.
I don't understand why people can't just admit it was a horrible mistake. Actually, of course I do understand, so many valuable lifetimes of work were sunk into it.We have to pretend.... But we should have just been building cheaper rockets (which the two other programs on the table proposed) - or funding a Ramjet, or Roton, or almost anything else. The only really useful thing the Shuttle did was repair Hubble.
Imagine where we would be now if NASA had done something like COTS 20 years ago after Challenger blew up instead of building another Shuttle.
Map legend for non-rocket scientists:
HTP == High Test Peroxide, a high percentage Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2) solution.
ISP == Isp == Specific Impulse, basically MPG for rockets.
LOX == LOx == Liquid Oxygen, not smoked salmon.
RP1 == RP-1 == Rocket Propellant 1, a highly refined kerosene used as a rocket fuel.
I don't think it's that clear cut. As I mentioned before, the problems were overambition and budget cuts during the development process that made everything worse.
The overambition is actually quite understandable. Think of what we had gone from, at the start of the 1960s to the Apollo moon landings. This incredible pace of accomplishment was driving people's sci-fi dreams of the future wild, even people in high places. The notion was that, clearly, we're about to become a spacefaring race in a major way, we need a vehicle to haul people and tons of cargo with a rapid launch rate turnaround; that's where the inception of the concept came from. Of course, that was not to happen, and not only due to the fault of the shuttle program.
If the overambition itself wouldn't have doomed the goal of affordable reusable spaceflight, the budget cuts in development (brought about in no small part due to the Vietnam War) certainly did. The sacrifices made in development to accommodate them pretty much ensured that it would not be a reliable, affordable system. Turning to the air force for funding meant adding crossrange capability and even greater cargo capability. Disastrous. The lower level of funding meant less system reuse and higher maintenance on the systems that were to be reused. For example, the early shuttle designs called for a titanium frame which could run hot, instead of the current (cheaper) aluminum frame which can't. Letting the frame get hotter means you can use a simpler, and thus easier to maintain, TPS. Not to mention safer; the Columbia disaster couldn't have happened and there wouldn't be nearly as much metal fatigue concerns.
Again, hindsight is always 20-20, but it's easy to see how the problems came about from overambition and then huge budget cuts in development. And I don't think calling it a jobs program, at least initially, is totally fair. Unlike Ares, which is "let's use as much shuttle hardware as we can to keep the plants open and keep developing it even when there's no longer a niche for it", the Shuttle wasn't heavily based on Saturn hardware. Now, what I think clearly became a jobs program and takes no hindsight to see is that when the Shuttle program went down the tubes, and it clearly had failed at its nominal goal of affordable reusable spaceflight, of not only keeping it running but keeping it as the workhorse of the US spaceflight fleet.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
The commercial crew program wasn't even a part of the planning under Constellation. To suggest it was a "stop gap" is completely misrepresenting how it was sold to Congress. Commercial crew has been perceived as the "stop gap" until Constellation could be built, as a sort of "insurance program" if there might have been problems. In fact, in congressional testimony and other public discussion about the future of manned spaceflight, it was almost as if the commercial crew didn't even exist as a program with many members of congress trying to go out of their way to kill the program... just as is being done again by Frank Wolf. They simply can't conceive a situation where a private company on their own dime could develop a spacecraft.
I agree with you that as a practical matter there were numerous problems with the Orion. One of the largest problems with the vehicle is that it was explicitly engineered in such a way that it couldn't fly on either the Atlas V or Delta IV rockets, so it simply had to fly on something like the Ares I or Ares V. That wasn't an engineering decision but rather a political decision made explicitly so EELVs couldn't be considered in the process and that so much money would be dumped down the rathole of Orion development that it became "too big to fail". That is also why Orion development has continued, and why the SLS program was developed.... to build a rocket large enough to carry the Orion capsule since obvious none of the existing launchers could possibly be able to carry a spacecraft capable of putting people into space.
Then again it sort of stings when you point out that Atlas rockets have been used in the past to put people into space. John Glenn didn't mind the ride... 50 years ago. If it could be done then, why not today?
What you are forgetting here is that this particular program, the commercial crew development program (commonly called simply CCDev) is not being operated like a traditional government contract in the fashion that the Manhattan Project of the 1940's was run (and how most major engineering projects have been paid for since).
When the Manhattan project was under development, the bureaucrats realized that they were asking companies to literally come up with stuff that nobody knew if it could be done at all much less be able to reasonably estimate the costs of building those things. The same expectation was true for the Apollo project, as well as many of the aircraft and ships being built for the U.S. military over the years (like nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers). A rough guess was made over the costs involved, but no company was willing to gamble billions of dollars on the off chance their estimates for the cost of these projects was wrong. Instead, the government took the financial risk in something called a "cost-plus" contract. In other words, the contractor was expected to accurately report what the actual costs of the project were, and when the whole thing was finished there was a reasonable expectation of a profit for the company... in other words the "plus" was a guaranteed financial bonus given to the company regardless of how much the contract cost.
This is also where you hear loud screaming with cost overruns, because a project that runs into some technical challenges or has the requirements change over the years of its development will end up driving up those "costs" that simply must be paid for by tax payers and not the companies involved.
For spacecraft being built by companies for NASA, this is the only way those spacecraft have been paid for. Some of this is understandable, as nobody before Werner Von Braun had ever built a spacecraft that took people to the Moon and brought them back to the Earth. To say that anybody in 1960 had a clue as to how much it really was going to cost to build a Saturn V is somebody somebody smoking some hemp or having a few too many beers. For crash programs where there is an issue of national security on the line, a cost-plus contract model even makes sense. There were slogans posted on walls of NASA contractors that openly bragged "waste anything but time".
What is happening with CCDev (the commercial crew development program) and COTS (commercial orbital transportation services) is something very different. There are also several very different things that are happening here too.
One of the things going on is that NASA is providing technical support for companies who want to provide commercial services that NASA could use, such as delivering supplies to the International Space Station (aka COTS) or providing a service to bring astronauts to Low-Earth orbit at various places, including the ISS as well. By technical support, NASA is providing consultants to explain some of the history and technical details for how their earlier spacecraft worked, what problems they had with historical spacecraft like the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, and other vehicles that NASA has worked with over the years. NASA also has huge libraries of technical studies and documentation about these spacecraft including performance data and details about all kinds of engine designs and all kinds of other engineering data that is very useful for anybody building rockets or trying to go into space. Providing these consultants or having people help in digging up that documentation does cost some money, so part of the program is simply paying for all of those people doing that running around, scanning documents if they need to be digitized (keep in mind that some of that data is from the 1950's and 1960's) and perhaps flying consultants to the factories where these commercial companies are building the rockets. Useful stuff and it doesn't go direct to these private companies, but is an ongoing expense.
Another thing NASA is doing is helping pro