Companies Organize To Compete for NASA's Exploration Work
Aviation Week & Space Technology, 01/02/2006, page 79
Frank Morring, Jr., Washington
Companies organize to compete for business from NASA's long-term exploration program
NASA's biggest suppliers are building up business units to compete for a piece of the back-to-the-Moon mission, which even the U.S. government estimates will cost at least $104 billion over the next 15 years.
With that kind of money at least potentially on the table, companies are establishing exploration units to bid on the space hardware--new and derived from space shuttle components--that NASA will use to send humans beyond low Earth orbit.
"We see it as a major business opportunity," says Art Stephenson, chief of the newly formed Space Exploration Systems unit in Northrop Grumman's Integrated Systems sector.
ITSELF A NEWCOMER to human spaceflight in its latest corporate incarnation, Northrop Grumman has formed a partnership with Boeing to compete for NASA exploration work. As Boeing focuses on using the shuttle to complete the International Space Station, for which it is prime contractor, Northrop Grumman is taking the lead role in the team's effort to win the contract to develop the planned Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV).
In that competition, which is expected to conclude with an award by next summer, the Northrop Grumman/Boeing team faces one led by Lockheed Martin. Both have won Phase 1 contracts to elaborate their CEV proposals, and both are awaiting final requirements from NASA for the "Apollo on steroids" ballistic capsule that the space agency has decreed will be the next-generation ride to space for U.S. astronauts (AW&ST Sept. 26, 2005, p. 26).
Northrop Grumman and Boeing plan to reverse roles in later exploration competitions for launch vehicles, the lunar lander and the "Earth departure stage" that will carry the CEV and lander to the Moon. But for now it is focusing on winning the CEV competition, combining the skills the Northrop elements of the company gained developing the B-2 bomber in the 1980s with the spacecraft and lunar-lander heritage it gained in merging with TRW and Grumman.
The company's new unit is currently working out of office space in El Segundo, Calif., near the Los Angeles International Airport. It has opened a Houston office near NASA's Johnson Space Center to be close to the agency's CEV project office, and maintains small contingents in Washington and near Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and Kennedy Space Center, Fla., as well.
Overall, Northrop Grumman has more than 300 employees working on exploration, primarily to prepare the CEV proposal. Some of them--such as Stephenson, a former director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center--have been hired to give the company better insight into the agency's needs. Based on his government experience, Stephenson sees his role as a focal point within the company for all of NASA's work on Project Constellation, as the exploration systems hardware-development effort is known.
Other former NASA officials include Michael F. Lembeck, who has moved to the company's Houston office from a post as director of requirements in the Exploration Systems Missions Directorate at agency headquarters. The CEV requirements won't be set for good until the release early this year. Lembeck's appointment is so recent that he remains barred by federal revolving-door regulations from direct business interaction with his former NASA colleagues. He is, however, free to advise the Northrop Grumman/Boeing team on its proposal.
As before, Doug Young, CEV program manager and vice president, will oversee the CEV work. "It's a pretty big proposal effort, given the scope and breadth of what's being undertaken here," Young says. "Through the selection process, we'll probably come down to a lower steady-state [staffing] number while we continue on our contracts, and then start looking toward the award time frame. We'll also start preparing for that, depending on what the schedule turns out to be."
Stephenson's closest counterpart at Lockheed Martin is John C. Karas, vice president for space exploration at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. near Denver. Karas has been on the job since the company formed his unit in the spring of 2004, after President Bush issued his space exploration directive. Although initially Lockheed Martin pushed a lifting-body approach to the CEV design, the company has since drawn on its background with robotic capsules that carried the Mars Viking landers and the Stardust sample-return spacecraft due back this month. NASA has specified a ballistic capsule shape for the CEV.
Karas is also responsible for Lockheed Martin's portion of the space shuttle/ISS programs. Those include the shuttle external tanks built by company employees at the government-owned Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans. Michoud is also the site of several technology demonstrations in metallic and composite structures Lockheed Martin is carrying out as part of its Phase 1 CEV contract. Karas sees that work as a "bridge" between finishing the ISS and moving on to the next steps in space exploration.
Lockheed Martin plans to do all of the exploration-structure work it wins at Michoud, where it already employs some 2,000 workers. That tracks with NASA's early plans to use the unique facility to build the upper stage for the CLV and the planned lunar heavy lifter to follow (AW&ST Sept. 26, 2005, p. 22).
The Lockheed Martin team also has a Houston office, where Cleon Lacefield--vice president and CEV program manager--spends most of his time. Lacefield managed the X-33 suborbital reusable launch vehicle testbed program for the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works until NASA stopped its funding. Overall, Karas says, there are "five or six different lines of businesses across the corporation" that the exploration unit is tapping for expertise, including the Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif.
While the CLV upper stage probably will be built at Michoud, its first stage has already been selected--a four-segment redesigned solid rocket motor (RSRM) used in pairs to boost the shuttle stack off the pad.
"It's really the same motor, the same aft skirt," says Mike Kahn, vice president of space launch systems at RSRM-builder ATK Thiokol. "The only real difference is, instead of having a pointy nose cone on top you have an interstage connecting it to the second stage."
NASA recently selected ATK as the sole source for the CLV first stage. That means the company will go on building the big solids after the shuttle retires at the end of Fiscal 2010, but probably at a reduced rate since they will be launched only one at a time instead of in pairs. The company also is a likely choice to build the five-segment RSRMs for the lunar heavy lifter, and is looking to tap the entire ATK technology portfolio for other lines of work growing out of the exploration program.
"We're looking to support the two primes with thermal protection systems, launch-abort systems, sensors, composite structures [and] radiation hardening," he says. "There's a lot of capability across the company to support the CEV primes."
The Northrop Grumman/Boeing team held a small-business conference in Houston Dec. 2 that drew more than 200 suppliers, indicating the interest in gaining a piece of the exploration business extends far beyond the aerospace giants. Northrop Grumman's Young says the meeting drew experienced space shuttle suppliers and new faces as well.
"I don't think it's limited to the shuttle program at all," he says.
