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Executive Briefings. Industry Analysis. NASA can move forward with a contract award involving its plans for sending people back to the moon. This means NASA can now award the contract that involves the first crewed mission back to the moon under its Artemis plan. Current government contractors already have been assigned a UEI. New contractors will obtain an identification code through the SAM.
A bill aimed at small business participation in the federal marketplace passed the Senate. Gary Peters D-Mich. Top senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee lead a bill that give the federal acquisition workforce a crash course in artificial intelligence. The bill encourages OMB to seek feedback from the public and private sectors on ways to improve the training.
The TSP hit that milestone last month. Over , of those participants are invested in the six new L funds the TSP established last summer. For a complex product like a launch capability, the FAR system is premised on traditional styles of procurement, in which an agency like NASA would set out specific requirements for the system it wants to acquire.
Because the agency is ordering a bespoke product that the contractor likely has no independent use for, the agency would pay all of the development costs plus an added fee, and own the resulting system design.
The Department of Defense and a handful of other agencies also have limited other transactions authority , although the scope of authority differs by agency. In any case, no agency is supposed to use these authorities when a simple procurement would do.
In addition to this legal distinction, COTS differs from traditional procurements in other ways. First, each of the companies selected was expected to pay part of its own development costs. This ensured that the companies were building something useful they could go on to commercialize — they would not have agreed to share costs to build something they knew was inefficient. Second, the use of fixed-price, milestone-based payments limited the amount of oversight necessary to ensure success.
It allowed NASA to turn over development entirely to the companies, knowing that it was only on the hook for payments when the programs successfully met pre-defined milestone criteria. These three elements — shared development costs, milestone-based fixed-price payments, and goal-driven evaluation — were all geared toward reducing the amount of oversight NASA had to exercise.
It allowed the companies to move at their own natural speed, not waiting for NASA to approve specific elements. The result: fast-moving startups working with NASA without losing their edge. The agency solicited proposals from the commercial space industry, and selected six semifinalists in May In August, it announced the two Phase I winners. It was developing the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon capsule. NASA terminated its contract in October Without the milestone-based exit valve, NASA would have continued to pay out funds for a project whose schedule kept slipping.
Both SpaceX and Orbital Sciences completed their projects and received the full awards they were offered. However, funding for the program was cut in This program was cheaper and simpler than Voyager and was able to be completed using the funding already appropriated.
Viking 1 and Viking 2 probes were launched to Mars in , and reached Mars in The Voyager name was recycled for the Mariner 11 and Mariner 12 probes to outer planets. Information received was instrumental in designing subsequent missions to Mars.
It launched in July and signified the last Apollo flight for the U. The test project included several scientific missions, including an engineered solar eclipse by Apollo for Soyuz to take pictures of the corona. It provided useful information on how to sync the two space programs and served as part of the formation of the Shuttle-Mir Program , which would help to relax tension caused by the space race.
This was also the last U. On April 12, , Columbia was sent into space. Designed to be part of a four-vehicle fleet of spacecraft, Columbia was to be frequently launchable and entirely reusable. Pubic interest in space traveled waned again, and the Challenger disaster of further illustrated the dangers of space travel.
On January 28, a civilian joined a crew of professional astronauts for the first time. All seven members of the crew were killed. NASA was criticized for its lack of openness with the press in the wake of the disaster. Speculation ran rampant, with The New York Times and United Press International running stories suggesting that an external fuel tank had caused the explosion. The Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, also known as the Rogers Commission , was charged with investigating the disaster.
The commission worked for several months and published a report of its findings. During the rest of the s, the space program worked quietly on the Space Station Freedom , but some scientists at NASA wondered if unmanned missions such as the Voyager probes would return more useful scientific data. It served as an important research tool and helped to repair damaged public relations following the Challenger disaster. An American craft again docked with a Russian craft, and together they created the largest space station ever built—the International Space Station ISS.
The Space Shuttle Columbia had flown 27 successful research missions when it was launched on February 1, The Columbia Accident Investigation Board , convened to investigate the disaster, recommended technical and organizational issues and set the space program back two years as a result of its findings. Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration, which called for the retirement of the space shuttle fleet by , the completion of ISS, and the development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle.
It also called for a return to the Moon by in order to set up outposts for potential future missions to Mars. Congress provided start-up funds for the first year of the new space program in late Although the flight was successful, a piece of foam similar to the one that caused the Columbia accident was dislodged, grounding the shuttles until the problem was solved.
But the entire crew returned safely on August 9, In late August , the Michoud Assembly Facility, where the external tanks were constructed, was damaged in Hurricane Katrina. This delayed subsequent flights by several months, while damage from the hurricane was assessed.
Discovery touched down successfully on July 17, , after increasing the ISS crew to three. Although this did not delay the next mission, weather problems and other technical glitches continued to stymie scientists.
Atlantis was the next successful space mission in September On December 4, , NASA announced that it was planning to build a permanent base on the Moon, with construction to commence in and projected completion in The plan, which would shift the role of NASA away from operating its own spacecraft to relying solely on commercial companies, was met with mixed reaction, including sharp criticism from several former astronauts , including Neil Armstrong.
The agency has sent spacecraft to Mercury and has Jupiter missions in the planning stages. The New Horizons mission to Pluto was launched in and will arrive in In August , the Phoenix Mars Mission was launched. Sturdier and fitted with better imaging equipment, the Phoenix lander explored the northern Martian planes and provided extensive data during its five-month mission.
Its operations ended on May 25, , when communications failed after it suffered severe solar panel ice damage. During the past two decades, NASA has failed in three separate attempts to develop a new launch capability. The absence of a concerted, heavily supported, and well-executed overall NASA mission in the future would leave a vacuum that could be easily filled by the already heavily budgeted military and national security outer space operations.
As the U. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA is responsible for carrying out space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research. Presently, the agency manages orbital and off-planet missions such as Opportunity and Curiosity, the Mars Exploration Rovers; Cassini , a satellite in orbit around Saturn; the Hubble Space Telescope orbiting Earth that helps scientists explore the deepest reaches of space; the International Space Station, which is extending the permanent human presence in space; and Earth science satellites that send back data on oceans, climate, and other features.
NASA operates 10 field centers and a variety of installations that conduct the day-to-day work in laboratories, on airfields, in wind tunnels, and in control rooms. NASA also maintains four mission directorates under which most agency operations fall. These are:. Exploration Systems —This directorate will use the International Space Station as a stepping-stone for sending humans deeper into space, beginning with landing on an asteroid and then on Mars.
SMD seeks to understand the origins, evolution and destiny of the universe and to understand the nature of the strange phenomena that shape it. SMD also seeks to understand the nature of life in the universe and what kinds of life may exist beyond Earth; the solar system, both scientifically and in preparation for human exploration; and the Sun and Earth, changes in the Earth-Sun system, and the consequences of the Earth-Sun relationship for life on Earth.
The Space Operations Mission Directorate also oversees requirements for development, policy, and programmatic oversight. The directorate is similarly responsible for agency leadership and management of NASA space operations related to Launch Services, Space Transportation, and Space Communications in support of both human and robotic exploration programs. Press Releases - Recent.
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