Better Spacecraft

NASA's Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition program is the latest in a long line of innovative contracting strategies at the agency. The RSA program, based at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., was born in 1996, when Goddard top management issued a challenge to reduce the lead time of awarding spacecraft contracts from an average of one year to just 30 days. The procurement shop formed a task force to determine how best to meet that goal and within six months had come up with a plan and established a new office-the Rapid Spacecraft Development Office (RSDO)-to implement it.

The results have been impressive. Not only did the office meet the 30-day goal for awarding contracts, it also sped up delivery time from four to seven years to 18 to 36 months. As a result, NASA has been saving upwards of $20 million per mission. NASA officials are now using the RSA program as a model for purchasing launch services and possibly other services in the future, says Thomas Luedtke, NASA associate administrator for procurement.

The impressive numbers stem from the use of firm fixed-price, performance-based, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contracts that allow NASA to buy commercial spacecraft that, with minor modifications, can support space missions. In the original solicitation, NASA simply said it needed small to medium-sized spacecraft and related services, and then let private firms tell what they had available to meet the agency's requirements. RSDO staffers then compiled the selections into a catalog from which NASA project managers and other customers can select. In the past, all spacecraft were custom-ordered on a cost-reimbursement basis.

Under the new contracts, customers have access to multiple suppliers. New vendors and products can be added to the catalog through an "On-Ramp" process without undergoing new competitions. On-Ramp proposals are accepted semi-annually over the life of the five-year contracts. Other contract innovations include: Allowing annual updating of technical details and options; Providing the option to have vendors launch the spacecraft, in effect delivering it in orbit; Making it possible to buy individual spacecraft components on an emergency basis.

The contract structure "allows us to keep pace with new technology," while staying flexible enough to meet varying customer needs, Luedtke notes. Because the procurement process now demands fewer NASA resources, the contracts also allow NASA to spend more money than it otherwise could on designing the scientific instruments that will be attached to the spacecraft for data gathering in space. The RSA approach represents a culmination of federal acquisition reforms, and the associated innovative thinking, put in place in recent years, Luedtke adds.

Treating spacecraft as a commercial commodity represents a major "paradigm shift" in the way NASA buys spacecraft, says Bill Watson, current chief of RSDO. In the past, program offices issued specifications for customized spacecraft and paid contractors whatever it took to build them. Now the philosophy is to let industry tell NASA what is available, and then the space agency can determine whether the spacecraft fit its needs, he says. Along the way, commercial providers assume the financial risk in designing and building spacecraft. "If the spacecraft does not work in space, we get all that money [we paid for it] back" or a replacement spacecraft, says Jim Adams, RSDO chief from the office's inception until May, who now works as project formulation manager for NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement Mission. Understandably, contractors haven't welcomed this transfer of risk. "It's been a contentious issue," admits Sharon Collignon, an RSDO contracting officer. But contractors can buy insurance and account for its cost in their proposals, she says.

Not everyone at NASA believed the new approach would work. "There were several project managers who thought I would not succeed," recalls Adams. But they overcame their resistance once they saw how much their own risk was lowered by buying already tested and proven spacecraft, he says. Even the RSDO staff was a little surprised at the quick success. "I thought we would be fortunate if we could hit 90 days," Adams says. "But we beat the 30-day [target] on the first satellite that we offered."

That first satellite was called the QuikSCAT, a satellite with instruments attached to measure the speed and direction of winds over the surface of the oceans. NASA had been flying similar instruments on board a Japanese satellite that had been lost in space. With it went the valuable data stream that NASA had been collecting. At the time, El Niño, a disruption of the atmosphere system over the Pacific Ocean, was playing havoc with weather patterns on the West Coast of the United States, as well as in other parts of the world, causing NASA to want a replacement as soon as possible.

The program managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., selected the spacecraft they wanted from RSDO's catalog, and within three weeks, the delivery order had been placed. Eleven months later, the satellite was ready for launch. (It didn't launch for another six months, though, because of a backup of other scheduled launches.) "It was amazingly short," recalls Jim Graf, QuikSCAT project manager. Graf notes that there was no request for proposals, no assessing proposals, no negotiations-none of the time-consuming activities typically associated with procuring a spacecraft-allowing the mission to move forward quickly.

Graf says he was a reluctant participant early on. During the first meetings with RSDO staffers, "I sat there with a certain amount of queasiness," he says. Graf feared that the contracts would be too rigid to allow for purchase of a spacecraft that was truly tailored to his mission's needs. But he did find adequate flexibility, and the process ran so efficiently and the results were so successful that Graf was soon a supporter. The RSA program "is a model for innovation and it should be used by others," he says. The savings, speed and lowered risk factor fit well into NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin's philosophy of "faster, better, cheaper," NASA officials say. At Goddard alone, where RSDO placed delivery orders for four of the five small and mid-sized spacecraft launched since 1997, an estimated 28 civil servant work-years have been saved.

The RSA process also allows for a "more agile approach" to carrying out individual missions, Adams says. Under the old system, NASA typically attached 10 to 12 measuring instruments to each spacecraft; it took so many years to design and build one that scientists were eager to have their instruments attached for fear they'd have to wait another several years for another launch chance. Now, only one or two instruments are attached to the RSDO catalog spacecraft; program managers know they'll be able to procure another spacecraft quickly when they need it.

Although the end result may be that NASA buys and launches more spacecraft overall, the agency still saves time and lowers risk, Luedtke says. For one, the commercial spacecraft are significantly less expensive. In addition, if a spacecraft fails, fewer instruments-and therefore less critical scientific data-will be lost.

So far, only small and medium-sized spacecraft are included in the RSDO catalog because those are the items readily available on the commercial market. It will probably be a long time before spacecraft capable of landing on planets will be in the catalog, simply because there's no current commercial need for such equipment, Adams says. The point of the RSA process, Watson adds, is to wait until commercial vendors design, test and build a spacecraft and then buy that proven item.

Luedtke isn't sure NASA will ever be able to buy all its spacecraft via the RSA catalog. But he predicts that as the commercial market expands and NASA program managers see more successful missions launched using catalog spacecraft, the agency will buy less and less custom-built equipment, ultimately saving taxpayers considerable amounts of money.