Res Communis

COTS-D Funding?

by P.J. Blount with the blog faculty

The Orlando Sentinel reports:

COTS D – Commercial Human Spaceflight to get at least $80m
posted by Robert Block on Apr 29, 2009 11:33:52 AM

Cots NASA and the White House have agreed for the first time to release money to the human spaceflight option in its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS program.

Under an agreement hammered out with the White House, NASA announced today on Capitol Hill that it will provide the COTS program with $150 million of the $400 million for human exploration given to NASA under President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan.

The money could help shorten the gap in American human space flight between the retirement of the space shuttle next year and the first flight of NASA’s Constellation program, now scheduled for 2015 but believed to be slipping fast because of technical and financial woes.

According to industry insiders, about $80 million of the $150 million is specifically for a “crewed launch demo.” The rest was broken down into $42 million for a docking system to the international space station, $20 million for a cargo transportation demo and $8 million for miscellaneous aspects of the COTS program, including human rating. The remaining $250 million of the stimulus money for human exploration will go to the Constellation program. . . .

But Rob Coppinger at Hyperbola states that NASA told him that this was not money intended for COTS-D:

. . . These are the facts:

* NASA is to spend $150 million, not $80 million
* it is to enable earlier Commercial Resupply Services cargo missions
* these early flights will help NASA determine what human rating requirements are needed
* it will also fund work on standardisation of International Space Station docking

This has nothing to do with COTS-D and reports of a crewed launch demo being funded by this money are not true says NASA . . .