GRAHAMWARWICK / WASHINGTON DC
Contractors prepare detailed cost and performance requirements for October
Requirements for NASA's planned Orbital Space Plane (OSP) will be refined under competing $45 million contracts awarded to Boeing, Lockheed Martin and a Northrop Grumman/Orbital Sciences team. The awards are modifications of contracts originally let under Cycle 1 of NASA's Space Launch Initiative, which was restructured late last year to focus on near-term development of the OSP and longer-term research under the Next Generation Launch Technology programme.
The contractors will conduct feasibility and trade studies and prepare more detailed cost and performance guidelines for NASA's system requirements review in October. The review will evaluate the OSP concept based on NASA's top-line Level 1 requirements, and set Level 2 requirements that will further narrow the scope of system design. Level 2 requirements will provide more detailed cost, performance and reliability guidelines for the OSP, but will not specify a preferred concept. A systems design review, scheduled for April next year, will validate the Level 2 requirements and determine detailed Level 3 needs for a specific OSP concept.
NASA expects to make a decision on full-scale development of the OSP, and select the winning contractor, in the fourth quarter of 2004. Plans call for the OSP to be launched by a heavy lift version of the Boeing Delta IV or Lockheed Martin Atlas V evolved expendable launch vehicles to provide an International Space Station crew rescue capability by 2010 and a two-way crew transfer capability by 2012.
Source: Flight International
