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Sierra Nevada Corp. Files Legal Challenge Against NASA Commercial Contracts
New submitter Raymondware sends an update to last week's news that NASA had awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to provide rockets for future manned spaceflight. Now, one of their competitors, Sierra Nevada Corp, has announced it will launch a legal challenge to the contracts. The company claims the government is spending $900 million more than it needs to for equivalent fulfillment, and they're demanding a review. They add,
Importantly, the official NASA solicitation for the CCtCap contract prioritized price as the primary evaluation criteria for the proposals, setting it equal to the combined value of the other two primary evaluation criteria: mission suitability and past performance. SNC’s Dream Chaser proposal was the second lowest priced proposal in the CCtCap competition. SNC’s proposal also achieved mission suitability scores comparable to the other two proposals. In fact, out of a possible 1,000 total points, the highest ranked and lowest ranked offerors were separated by a minor amount of total points and other factors were equally comparable.
Leaving out Boeing would be budget suicide for NASA.
Sounds so exciting until you realize that low Earth orbit is closer to me than New York City is to Montreal, and I can go there by bus and explore something infinitely more fascinating than a sucking void.
Is this going to hurt the beer supply?
I love their beer!
Really they want to challenge because the government favored Boeing by 1.5B over SpaceX which they favored by 900M over SV?
It's all fair in a corrupt faux government.
Cure the "bitcoin replaces fiat currency and that's what makes the yoke of governments work" music.
E
It couldn't possibly be the fact that the two companies that got approved use a simple capsule like the Russians and Sierra Nevada uses a spaceplane. After the issues with the Space Shuttle I can see why NASA rejected that plan.
So how is the Dream Chaser on past performance for orbital flights? No such flights? I see why it was not chosen because of past performance or lack there of.
NASA didn't really have any other choice. They couldn't give the entire contract to Boeing without risking falling into the same defense contractor cost plus revolving door situation that has held back our space program for decades. They couldn't give the entire contract to SpaceX without causing an uproar in the "space belt" congressmen/women that could possibly scuttle the entire CCtCap/CCDev/CCDev2 program (which they've been trying to do anyway). So they took a middle of the road approach, with both SpaceX and Boeing providing launch services they keep enough political support to keep the program afloat but down the road having the two compared side by side either encourages Boeing to keep its prices reasonable to stay in the game or gives NASA the evidence to say "hey, we've got two proven launch systems and one is costing us a whole lot more than the other, why are we still using them" in a public congressional budget hearing. SNC just had the position of being the lesser of the two second chair choices, not saying its right but that's politics unfortunately.
Wait... So they're serving a different beer on rockets?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
To me, the fact that I don't know who they are tells me all I need to know about how successful they've been at launches...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
who the fuck are Sierra Nevada??
I know who Boeing are: they have a long history and a fantastic pedigree in aerospace engineering. Including STS components.
I know who SpaceX are as well, they're the guys who have already demonstrated the viability of a private concern running shuttle to the ISS.
Answers on a postcard, please.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
They also have a very extensive Wikipedia entry for the Dream Chaser which goes into minute detail about every contract they have received and every milestone they have achieved. It is so detailed and gleaming that it was obviously crafted by someone in the pay of SNC.
However, it you read the whole thing you can find some very interesting information in he very last section listing their technology partners.
It turns out that Lockheed-Martin is responsible for "airframe construction and human rating of the spaceplane". SNC has designed a lifting body capsule, and hybrid rubber/NO rocket engine. Based on the partners list, it seems that they are acting as a systems integrator, and everything outside the design and rocket is not in house technology.
So if NASA is making the step to commercial human rated spaceflight, are they better off choosing companies who have already demonstrated orbital launch capabilities, or someone that does not even have the ability to build their own space capsule? When something goes wrong (and something will) imaging the finger pointing in the SNC scenario. This explains why NASA made the safe choice.
This suit, although filed by SNC, seems like an attempt by Lockheed-Martin to get a chunk of the billion dollar pie. What do they have to loose? Their name isn't on any of the legal paperwork, so they can pretend to be out of the loop. Meanwhile the congress-critters from Lockheed will be fighting it out with their counterparts from Boeing behind closed doors. This won't be decided in the courts, or in any public forum.
It's not about public policy or access to space, it's about corporate profit. If you want to know why NASA seems so screwed up, just follow the money.
Why is Snark Required?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
SNC has a solid track record in satellites, but is probably better-known in aerospace for its aircraft work - they take production aircaft of ALL types (from small prop-jobs to big jets) and do modifications to their structures and systems to adapt them to very special (generally) government missions. As such they have excellent teams with solid experience in all aspects of all types of aerospace structures and systems as well as aerodynamics. You have not heard about them because you do nou buy satellites and you are unaware of most government specialty aircraft. SNC is every bit as solid as Boeing, LockMart, Northrop, etc. but if you've ever seen their work you just did not recognize it... you would have thought is was an unusual Boeing, or Cessna, or Beechcraft, etc. plane
> One could orbit the (airless) moon at an altitude of 2000 feet
That's what I thought, but former NASA engineer Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) says you can't. Something about orbital physics involving gravity that I don't understand. I wonder who is right. I'm guessing the guy who did orbital physics for a living, although I don't understand it.
"...the highest ranked and lowest ranked offerors were separated by a minor amount of total points and other factors were equally comparable."
AKA: "We were bottom, but dammit, not by that much!"
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
1) Your bottom two points don't really pan out. A simplified mission means less things to check and double check. 2) The contract was taking crew to the space station. Capsules are proven method of doing that. If NASA is going to spend money on a space plane mission it should have the plane do something else.
I looked and found more about it. You could of course fly around the moon at an altitude of 500 meters. Orbit has a specific definition it seems - centripital force being equal and opposite to gravity, so they balance out. Anyone inside the craft therefore feels zero gravity. If gravity pushes your into your seat as the craft flies around, that's not orbit, that's flying around.
Centripital force is small when you're moving almost in a straight line. Traveling just above the earths's surface, for example, the turn radius is several thousand miles. Therefore, for gravity to be balanced by centripital force, you need to be far enough away that gravity is reduced sufficiently that the small centripital force can balance it.
Parachutes are emergency survival devices they are not supposed to be the way you normally fly - they are quite risky.
That's why sky divers use them only for emergencies. Pardon my sarcasm. And you're not "flying" with parachutes, but landing with them - a place where they have quite a bit of success and have turned out to be quite reliable.
Neither shuttle was lost in a situation where a capsule would have been superior; Had an Apollo capsule been ripped apart on ascent by an exploding booster as Challenger was the crew would have died just the same way (capsule crews generally have no personal escape gear like personal chutes because the capsule scheme cannot handle the extra mass, whereas post-Challenger shuttle crews DID get such equipment). Had an Apollo capsule suffered a basketball-sized hole in its heatshield its crew would have perished just as surely as Columbia's crew.
To the contrary, in the Challenger accident, two things would have been different. First, the capsule would have been on top of the vehicle. Second, it would have a launch abort system attached. That combination would have made the accident survivable.
The same goes for the Columbia accident. The capsule would not have been situated on the side of the launch vehicle where it could receive an impact and hence would not have had said basketball sized hole in the vehicle.
Finally, it's worth noting that NASA didn't have a need for a vehicle larger than a big capsule. They never had more than seven people in the crew. And payloads were no more massive and only a little bit bigger in width than the current Delta IV Heavy and the 80's Titan IV could handle.
> The centripetal force that is needed for any circular (or curved) movement is provided by the gravitational pull of the moon/earth, e.g. the gravitational force.
Think about what that would imply, it would mean that it's impossible to turn in space, away from the earth's gravity. In fact, it woild mean that here on earth you could only turn downward, toward the earth. Nascar drivers couldn't turn left, because all curved movement must curve downward.
G-force and gravity behave in indistinguishable ways, so it appears that they are the same thing (per Einstein). That does not mean that all G force is EARTH'S gravity. Orbital centripital force is gravity(-like), so it can therefore balance the gravity coming from another source (earth), resulting in net zero g aboard the spacecraft.
Enter the lawyers. It will end up costing more in the end, after they extract their many pounds of flesh. In the true tradition of the private market, money that might have gone into research or equipment goes to Marcus and Mack.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yes, they have done a great deal of work in the aerospace industry - what they have not done, and call me crazy for thinking this is relevant, is:
1) Build an entire surface-to-orbit launch vehicle
2) Launch said vehicle
3) Use such a vehicle to deliver a payload to orbit
Aerospace ngineering is an extremely broad field, and just becasue you can design a satelite or space-station toilet seat doesn't mean you're an expert large-scale rocket engineer.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
SNC wasn't going to launch DreamChaser, ULA was.
I did read what you wrote. What I'm talking about is more general, it applies even to a perfectly homogeneous gravitational body.
I'm talking about the minimum gravitational altitude in terms of \frac{Gm_1m_2}{r^2}=\frac{m_2v_{T}^2}{r}.
it depends on your definition of "simplicity"
Nothing about a vehicle like the DreamChaser (FAR simpler than the shuttle) is all that complex. Nothing has to "deploy" for it to safely get from orbit to a runway and, unlike shuttle, it does not have APU's that need to be started before reentry in order to power the flight controls. The control surfaces of DreamChaser are all present and configured properly for reentry and landing while the vehicle is on the pad atop the launch vehicle. Aircraft control surfaces are century-old absolutely reliable technology.
Let's examine a capsule and parachutes, shall we?
NASA's Orion has a "foward bay cover" that covers the chutes and MUST be in place for launch. After reentry this MUST be explosively jettisoned or the chutes cannot deploy and the crew dies. The forward bay cover has its own drogue chutes which must be explosively deployed to pull the cover clear from Orion or the two objects could "re-contact" potentially damaging Orion and possibly its stowed parachutes (killing the crew when they hit the Earth with no chutes). The Orion must then fire mortars to deploy small chutes to stabilize the otherwise unstable capsule - if these fail to deploy or deploy-and-tangle the capsule can end up in a tumble that causes the main chutes to tangle on deployment (potentially even wrapping around the capsule) - killing the crew (this scenario happened on a test drop in Yuma that destroyed the test capsule on impact). After the stabilizing chutes cut loose (which they MUST in order to avoid fouling the other chutes) a second set of pilot chutes is deployed by mortar shot, and these in-turn pull the main chutes out of their bags. If this fails the crew dies. The main chutes deploy in reefing stages (if this scheme fails and they deploy too broadly too early they will be shredded by the sudden spike in load caused by aerodynamic drag and the capsule's inertia - a failure mode well-known to the military). NASA has tested a bunch of redundancies in all this, testing single minor failures (like skipping a "reefing stage"), but they have not done tests for any of the "big" failures because there is no solution and the result is "loss of crew and vehicle". This does NOT mean I think Orion is super dangerous or a secret disaster-in-the-making - it's just that any organization (like NASA in this instance) will decide to do what it WANTS to do and then back-fill the justifications (with things like a phony "complexity" argument) to justify. NASA is the same agency that launched the Shuttle MANNED on its very first flight WITHOUT any "launch abort system" and then operated the system that way FOR THIRTY YEARS - but now insists the commercial crew providers cannot be "man-rated" without a proven LAS and unmanned demonstration flights.
Yeah, capsules are a proven way to go to and from a station (like Soyoz to/from Salyut/Mir/ISS, Apollo to/from Skylab, etc) BUT so is a "spaceplane" (Shuttle not only went to/from ISS many times with no problems but also BUILT the station).
"Simple", like "proven" is in the eye of the beholder and biased by the preferences of the individual.
1) irrelevant - I'm not bidding to build a spacecraft
2) not really - aircraft don't have to deal with hard vacuum, radiation, micrometeorites, or flying through a several thousand degree plasma cloud at Mach 20 on reentry. Get rid of those and you're just dealing with a tin can and an air circulaion system.
3)Fair enough, assuming you are correct I missed that detail. Regardless though I doubt they've designed much that is supposed to be operational while being subjected those sorts of semi-chaotic G-forces. Can you list even one single spacecraft they've designed and built already? Boeing and SpaceX both have several incremental designs under their belt.
Plus there's the whole "spaceplane" silliness, which was given a pretty bad name by the shuttle, but is also kind of inherently flawed: wings are worthless except for the final landing sequence, and can be actively dangeous during reentry. So basically you've increased reentry instabilities and decreased the available payload by diverging dramatically from the optimal surface-to-volume ratio afforded by a sphere in order to be able to land on a runway instead of parachuting to the ground. A dubious trade off at best I'd say.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I said centripital when I meant centrifugal and started a long subthread / argument basically about nothing. Yeah, gravity is the centripital force in an orbit. The balancing, opposite force is what I was calling centripital.
I said centripital when I meant centrifugal I guess and started a long subthread / argument basically about nothing. I understand gravity is the centripital force in an orbit. The balancing, opposite force is what I was calling centripital.
The contract is not about launching the spacecraft, it is about building them and having the work in space.
Besides, SNC is going to be launched on the same vehicle that Boeing is using. The Atlas V. The only difference is that the Dream Chaser could also be launched on an Orbital Antares rocket or the Falcon 9 as well (at least it is being designed to fly on multiple launchers).
That isn't even a consideration for why SNC lost the bid.
Other than the contract wasn't for building a launcher in the first place, hence why the remarks about experience in building a launcher is irrelevant. The contract was for building a spacecraft that would sit on top of a launch vehicle. In the case of SNC, they were using the services of United Launch Alliance, a company who has experience in launching stuff into orbit. ULA has been putting stuff into orbit (at least their parent companies) since the 1950's. Is that enough experience?
It helps to read the fine print.
Also, you ignored the assertion I made that Apollo would have also killed the crew if its launch vehicle had exploded and ripped it apart in the process (as happened to Challenger). We all ASSUME the Apollo LAS would have worked, but this was never proven (tested on Little Joe II, but NEVER on Saturn).
Sounds like you should have ignored what you were thinking too.
DreamChaser has an integral launch abort system, so this shortcoming of the shuttle is not a generic "spaceplane" shortcoming
Indeed. Notice I never said anything to disagree. I didn't speak at all of DreamChaser's features which would mitigate or evade the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
Except of course that Apollo 13 very nearly put the nail in that coffin. Had the Apollo 13 explosion been a tad more energetic, it could well have cracked or holed the heat shield (and indeed nobody knew it had not at the time) whereas a shuttle-type arangement would have been safer in THAT incident (its TPS in a less-vulnerable position and the by-that-point-in-the-mission inert main engines being in the position to be hurt).
Not at all. Keep in mind that Apollo 13 accident happened just prior to a propellant burn to insert the capsule in lunar orbit. The Shuttle under the same situation would have propellant on board and some sort of active rocket engine for conducting the burn (though not necessarily the Main Engines). In that situation, damage to the heat shield is still possible depending on where everything happens to be. For example, if the Shuttle is still piggy backing on the side, then the heat shield is still exposed to potential damage.
In the case of the capsule scheme, there's generally another severe and dangerous limitation: separation from the service module must happen so close to reentry that there is no time to do ANYTHING between when the shield is exposed and inspectable and the time when plasma begins to surround the vehicle...
And not much of a reason to care either since the heat shield has been inspected on the ground. But I suppose we could stick a couple of cameras on the service module to image the heat shield, should this ever become a problem.
Your final note about size is exactly why DreamChaser (the POINT of this discussion) is so much smaller than shuttle (NOT the subject of the discussion). DreamChaser is sized for the same number of crew as CST-100 and Dragon, and has three more seats than the (now crippled) version of Orion LockMart is spending BILLIONS and more than a decade building for NASA...
So what? Lockheed Martin would spend more than that, if we let them. The cost of their projects tend to be sized to the available funding. None of the other capsule builders have this sort of problem.