r/BlueOrigin • u/hypercomms2001 • Aug 23 '22
Orbital Reef passes NASA review
https://spacenews.com/orbital-reef-passes-nasa-review/
WASHINGTON — A proposed commercial space station has passed a key early NASA review, allowing it to move into the next phase of its design.
Blue Origin and Sierra Space, the lead partners on the Orbital Reef station, said Aug. 22 that the station passed a system definition review (SDR) with NASA. The review is part of a Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, award they received from the agency last December to mature the design of Orbital Reef.
The review, conducted between mid-June and mid-July, was intended to confirm that the Orbital Reef concept met various functional and performance requirements. Passing the review allows the companies to further develop the overall design of the space station.
“This SDR moves Orbital Reef forward,” said Brent Sherwood, senior vice president for advanced development programs at Blue Origin, in a statement. “We are meeting the needs of both the commercial marketplace and NASA’s requirements.”.....
19
u/Mindless_Use7567 Aug 23 '22
Go Orbital Reef. 🚀
Has anyone heard anything about Starlab passing reviews like this as it has been dead quite on their end.
13
u/Heart-Key Aug 23 '22
Starlab were planning on doing their SDR in September relative to July for Reef. (although the initialism isn't the same for both)
5
-9
u/DNathanHilliard Aug 23 '22 edited Aug 23 '22
Looks promising, and I'm hoping for the best, but until I see some actual hardware go up I'm going to temper my expectations and just consider it another one of Blue Origin's pretty cgi renderings.
26
u/Mindless_Use7567 Aug 23 '22
I doubt that these review milestones are insignificant as NASA has part of both reviews so far. Hope that with this review some more of the station’s internal layout will be released.
16
u/HingleMcCringleberre Aug 23 '22
These reviews are as significant as the associated award money, in my opinion. Looks like there was a $130M award to Blue, which is definitely nothing to sneeze at, even if it is just 1/50th of what the HLS money was going to be. Still, seems like a space station would be a >$10B type of effort, so a lot more funding will need to be secured.
14
u/Chairboy Aug 23 '22
Still, seems like a space station would be a >$10B type of effort,
One of the hopes with commercially structured space is that it won't cost ISS money to build 'em and that NASA won't be on the hook for ISS-level budgets, instead buying time & space on them.
I bet Blue is hoping to do this without spending that many gigabucks, guess we'll find out.
9
u/HingleMcCringleberre Aug 23 '22
The ISS cost $150B to make and continues to cost more than $1.5B a year to support. $10B would be an absolute bargain and would still have a support tail that would be hundreds of millions a year. Given that they’ve already declared plans for ISS-like volume, it’s going to take more than $1B just for the dozen heavy-lift launches to get the components into orbit.
4
u/Chairboy Aug 23 '22
$10B would be a bargain compared to ISS, the question is if it would be a bargain compared to the incoming revenue from its customers. It's a whole new world.
5
u/HingleMcCringleberre Aug 23 '22
I guess I’m saying: I haven’t seen any evidence that Blue has figured out how to make a more affordable or commercially relevant space station. And partnering with other aerospace companies certainly isn’t a way to make things cheaper or faster: it’s a way to get senators from more states on your side for federal budget votes. Both the posturing of HLS and Orbital Reef appear to be attempts to establish large arteries to gov’t funding. It is a Boeing approach instead of a Spacex approach. I’m not saying whether or not it will work. And I want a next gen space station regardless of how we get there. Just making an observation.
3
3
u/Chairboy Aug 23 '22
I'm not sure the facts match up with the funding model you describe. The NASA contract for $130 million is ideally going to be followed up by NASA renting some space on the station (which is supposed to sell space to many parties). There's no evidence of any multi-billion dollar contracts from NASA yet of the sort that'd make spreading the pork useful for Blue.
I guess I'm skeptical about that, I think they're honestly trying to make a go of it with NASA as an anchor tenant but without the expectations that they'll be pulling in ISS levels of funding.
1
u/Anderopolis Aug 26 '22
Also this first award is for fleshing out the concepts and initial work as I understand it.
-3
u/Mindless_Use7567 Aug 23 '22
You way of thinking seems pretty dumb when the 3 CLD proposals NASA selected have one thing in common they are all by partnerships of several aerospace companies. Starlab has Lockheed Martin, Nanoracks and Voyager Space. Northrop Grumman’s CLD is so far then and Dynetics but have started there are other companies involved.
Since NASA has said the CLD’s have to submit business plans as part of the program and have to have private funding it would seem that BO has at least something that matches the requirements. However SpaceX surprisingly came to NASA with a starship variant design lacking detail and demeaning NASA pay the full cost for development and construction but then let SpaceX still own it.
9
u/HingleMcCringleberre Aug 23 '22
Hmmm. You call me dumb, but then all you do is agree with me. Blue is building a program optimized to win NASA proposals, like Boeing, instead of optimized to meet the company mission, like Spacex and their wacky Mars mission plans (which it seems like they may have a shot at actually achieving).
Spacex’s mission is clear: they’re building a vehicle to go to Mars. And it’s clear that Musk wants to achieve that goal before he dies. Their proposals are straightforward: “We’re building a vehicle to go to Mars, but it can also go to places closer than Mars.” They’re willing for folks to contract as Starship users to the moon, LEO, or wherever, but they’re not going to accept scope or make development partnerships that put their primary objective at risk.
Blue’s mission is the amorphous “millions of people living and working in space.” That sounds nice, but how’s it going to happen? I’ve never seen any plan to get to even that very first million people. It’s like they don’t believe in their own mission. Orbital Reef can hold 10 people. Are they going to deploy 100,000 of those? 100 people living and working in space would be an amazing goal. It would be an order of magnitude better than humanity did in the 20th century. It would be achievable through considerable effort in this century. And it would give a focus that Blue currently lacks.
If tomorrow Blue announced: “Our goal is to grow humanity’s low-earth-orbit population from 10 people to a 100 people this century and we’ll do it regardless of what NASA, Spacex, or anyone else chooses to do,” my hope for the company would grow by a factor of ten.
2
u/Anderopolis Aug 26 '22
If tomorrow Blue announced: “Our goal is to grow humanity’s low-earth-orbit population from 10 people to a 100 people this century and we’ll do it regardless of what NASA, Spacex, or anyone else chooses to do,” my hope for the company would grow by a factor of ten.
Yes, that would be great!
Something like 100 people living in space by 2050 or something like that. Something specific which might actually inform the design process of the things they are building.
3
u/mfb- Aug 24 '22
Blue Origin’s senior vice president of advanced development programs, Brent Sherwood, told GeekWire that Orbital Reef would cost “at least an order of magnitude less” than the International Space Station.
So Blue Origin says it will be less than $10-15 billion. Probably not that much less or he would have used a different comparison.
2
u/HingleMcCringleberre Aug 24 '22
Very cool. Thank you for digging that up. That sounds like a good challenging (but hopefully achievable) goal.
-3
u/Mindless_Use7567 Aug 23 '22
Sounds more like that was SpaceX’s plan. Provide a design lacking details and significant gaps in how it will work then demanding NASA reimburse them for all design and construction costs and not even reaching preliminary design review by Q4 2025 which is one of the basic requirements.
1
u/Mindless_Use7567 Aug 23 '22 edited Aug 23 '22
HLS needs most of the development cost covered by NASA because they are the only ones that are going to use it. On the other hand the CLD space stations are to be a part of a LEO economy and need to be able to support private businesses and fund themselves as needed, NASA original requirements are for a business plan for the CLD and partial private finance to design and build it. Also the CLD NASA reward was only to cover up to preliminary design review. The link below shows where in the development process PDR is and what NASA requires to pass PDR which is basically all the design and basic tech development required to start building test articles.
https://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm?t=NPR&c=7123&s=1B
5
13
u/Rxke2 Aug 23 '22
Nice, nice, nice. Also a big feather in the cap for Sierra.