Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems (Orbital ATK) thread

[tater]

Just now, XB-70A said:

Got to love that Verizon robotic voice in the back 

My buddy via txt:

uh oh rocket got sent to voicemail

[tater]

 

[tater]

This is pretty cool:

 

[StrandedonEarth]

16 minutes ago, tater said:

This is pretty cool:

 

Bravo, I say, bravo! This will be a big boon to comsat operators, especially as the MEV's evolve and expand their capabilites

[Nightside]

NG bought Orbital ATK just for those stylish round solar panels, am I right?

[tater]

 

[tater]

 

Quote

Orbital Science Corporation of Dulles, Virginia, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Space, has been awarded $187 million to design the habitation and logistics outpost (HALO) for the Gateway, which is part of NASA’s Artemis program and will help the agency build a sustainable presence at the Moon. This award funds HALO’s design through its preliminary design review, expected by the end of 2020.

187 million to design it. Not to build it. This is why we can't have nice things.

[natsirt721]

32 minutes ago, tater said:

187 million to design it. Not to build it. This is why we can't have nice things.

You think that's too high?

Keep in mind, this is for the entire PDR, that includes PDR for all of the subsystems and sub-sub systems. There might be a hundred engineers working this at any given time, including however many levels of subcontracting overhead (plus NG's corporate overhead). I think this is quite the fair price. And lets be real, that's not even that much money.

[tater]

14 minutes ago, natsirt721 said:

You think that's too high?

Keep in mind, this is for the entire PDR, that includes PDR for all of the subsystems and sub-sub systems. There might be a hundred engineers working this at any given time, including however many levels of subcontracting overhead (plus NG's corporate overhead). I think this is quite the fair price. And lets be real, that's not even that much money.

I can only imagine the final price will be billions.

They have had Cygnus stuck to the side of ISS for months, the whole point of the no-bid contract was leveraging that. Why not just pick the company that made actual ISS modules, instead?

100 engineers? that's 1.87 million per engineer. For a single year.

13 Cygnus flights to ISS.

[Ultimate Steve]

Anyone know how much the dev for the ISS modules was? Lunar modules probably have a higher standard than current ISS modules and have to go longer without maintainence, and despite cygnuss heritage it's only in space for a handful of weeks at a time. The jump from 2 months to 10+ years will not be a cheap one to qualify.

[tater]

The hab module is supposed to be minimalist, and based on the Enhanced Cygnus already flying to ISS. Since they are going to launch it stuck to the PPE, they don't even need the Cygnus SM.

 

[natsirt721]

26 minutes ago, tater said:

I can only imagine the final price will be billions.

That's par for the course for spacecraft development.

22 minutes ago, tater said:

100 engineers? that's 1.87 million per engineer. For a single year.

Ok, 100 is probably a bit low.  I'd say low hundreds probably, but that's not all going towards salary.

Also, from the article:

Quote

This cost plus incentive fee contract allows Northrop Grumman to finalize the design of all systems and subsystems. It also provides for the company to award initial subcontracts for long-lead hardware elements.

So they're shelling out for hardware procurement already. Nothing too fancy probably, but I'd bet that eats a fair bit of that 187 mil. Additionally, with that kind of contract if the actual costs run low, NASA pays less overall, but NG takes a greater proportion as overhead. It's likely that the total value was high-balled by NG in order to get a larger amount of incentive dollars - a safe bet for a PDR.

[tater]

It's cost plus. For modifying a vehicle already in production.

No reason it should not be fixed price.

[Ultimate Steve]

1 minute ago, tater said:

It's cost plus. For modifying a vehicle already in production.

No reason it should not be fixed price.

To be fair, the modifications from a short term LEO cargo resupply vehicle to a long term Lunar space station habitation module aren't particularly likely to be straightforward.

[tater]

3 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

To be fair, the modifications from a short term LEO cargo resupply vehicle to a long term Lunar space station habitation module aren't particularly likely to be straightforward.

Except that the vehicle history and ease of conversion were in fact the reasons cited for making it a no-bid contract.

If it's very challenging, why not open it to bids?

 

[tater]

Quote

Northrop Grumman has an exclusive contracting agreement with Thales for pressurized cargo modules. The Cygnus cargo compartment is based on the Multi-Purpose Logistics Modules built by Thales to launch inside the payload bay of the space shuttle packed with several tons of supplies and experiments for the International Space Station.

Thales Alenia Space also manufactured several permanent modules on the International Space Station.

“This existing contractual relationship (between Northrop Grumman and Thales Alenia Space) and its associated production pedigree are critical to timely development progress and problem resolution, which are substantive mitigations to schedule risk,” NASA wrote.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/07/23/nasa-taps-northrop-grumman-in-sole-source-agreement-to-build-gateway-habitat/

 

So Thales (makes ISS modules) already makes Cygnus. But they need a few hundred million to make a white paper telling us they know how to make modules.

So they can change the price, and make everything more expensive than it needs to be via cost-plus.

[natsirt721]

Quote

The space agency outlined officials’ rationale for selecting Northrop Grumman in lieu of a full and open competition in a contracting document.

“In order to meet the Gateway program’s schedule and support the vice president’s 2024 human lunar landing mandate, NASA determined it was necessary to continue to work with NGIS (Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems) for these highly specialized services,” NASA wrote in a justification document. “NGIS was the only NextSTEP-2 contractor with a module design and the production and tooling resources capable of meeting the 2024 deadline.”

I don't approve of sole-source contracting, but this explains why they did what they did. Thales doesn't own the IP for Cygnus, NG does, so they can't bid to produce a Cygnus derivative, they would have to start from their shuttle-based cargo module or from scratch.

16 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

To be fair, the modifications from a short term LEO cargo resupply vehicle to a long term Lunar space station habitation module aren't particularly likely to be straightforward.

Definitely not. Cygnus has minimal life support capabilities and is designed for a short-term mission, most of which is spent docked to the ISS which has its own supporting systems. The gateway is going to be around for a long time, and is a lot further away from Earth than the ISS - the subsystems will have to be very robust in order to last for the duration of the DSG mission. Its not that its easy to convert Cygnus to a standalone habitation module, its that its easier to do that than to start from scratch, which is what the other bidders would be doing. Especially given that Thales already has production lines setup for Cygnus components. 

[tater]

37 minutes ago, natsirt721 said:

I don't approve of sole-source contracting, but this explains why they did what they did. Thales doesn't own the IP for Cygnus, NG does, so they can't bid to produce a Cygnus derivative, they would have to start from their shuttle-based cargo module or from scratch.

The point is that they sole sourced it because they think that NG is the way to go to get it by 2023. Sole sourcing it doesn't bother me in this particular case—cost plus DOES bother me, though. The Dragon XL (see below) is fixed price.

 

37 minutes ago, natsirt721 said:

Definitely not. Cygnus has minimal life support capabilities and is designed for a short-term mission, most of which is spent docked to the ISS which has its own supporting systems. The gateway is going to be around for a long time, and is a lot further away from Earth than the ISS - the subsystems will have to be very robust in order to last for the duration of the DSG mission. Its not that its easy to convert Cygnus to a standalone habitation module, its that its easier to do that than to start from scratch, which is what the other bidders would be doing. Especially given that Thales already has production lines setup for Cygnus components. 

While true, NASA clearly thinks it is achievable in just a couple years. For NASA, that's a statement they consider it "easy," when literally everything else takes a decade or more these days.

FWIW, the logistics contract for Gateway supply (that SpaceX won with the Dragon XL) requires the vehicle be at Gateway for at least a year. That's fairly robust.

[natsirt721]

I don't think that NASA would do it this way given the choice, but their priorities and timetable are being set by the white house, not by internal processes. Leads to some unfortunate results, like that price tag. Now that I think about it, cost-plus for a PDR does seem a little strange, but I'm not well versed in contract norms. I guess the incentive in that case is to work quickly?

[tater]

 

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Coverage live, but holding:

 

 

[tater]

Hold lifted, launch in 10 min. 13:46 UTC