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[Moderator] With that we will continue on this afternoon with Bonnie James who is the
program executive for the technology demonstration missions program Bonnie.
[applause]
[Bonnie James] Well first let me say right away sorry you've got to hear Jean Francois
beautiful accent L.K's beautiful accent and now your stuck with my southern twang. So I
am so sorry let me tell you that right up front. I'm Bonnie James for those folks I haven't
met yet I hope to meet each of you soon. It's my priviledge today to talk to you about
exciting new program in the Office the Chief Technologist, the Technology
Demonstration Missions Program. In that program will be also led out of the Marshall
Space Flight Center and Susan Turner is the point of contact at Marshall. Susan is right there.
She and I will be leading the breakout session tomorrow so if there's questions or
you need further detail anything that you see here today we can talk about that tomorrow as well.
Okay the Technology Demonstration Missions Program is one of three programs
in the capability demos area and as L.K. so eloquently said, "We fly things and that's exciting".
So why have a demos program at all in the space technology development effort?
Why is that important? It's expensive to fly things so why have that. One of
the greatest challenges that we face in incorporating advanced technologies into actual
missions is this gap and bridging this gap between early stage ground development and
actual mission use. And that's why the primary objective of this new program is to do
that to bridge that gap by maturing space technologies through flight qualification and
demonstration into mission infusion so those are two primary focal points for this new
program and that's space flight qualification and mission infusion. Lets look at a couple
of examples of why that's important. Why space demonstration is important at all.
If you look at ion propulsion technology you just look at the historical record of ion
propulsion, you can trace back to 1906, when Robert Goddard first theorizes about ion propulsion.
And he performs some first initial experiments with ion thrusters at Clark University in 1916.
And then in the 50's you see NASA building ion thrusters in the laboratory.
And if you trace back you will see many different tests a lot of literature about laboratory
experimentation of our ion thrusters in the 60's and in the 70's and the 80's and the 90's.
But you have to fast forward to 1998 to the NASA New Millennium program and their
Deep Space One mission which launched in 1998.
In the New Millennium Program, NMP was also focused on demonstrating new
advanced space technologies. So DS1 was their first flight and it was the first flight
demo for ion thrusters and it worked beautifully. It worked very successfully.
Then what do we see happen in history? We see in 2001, NASA approves a Discovery
mission that will utilize ion propulsion. DAWN it is a mission to the astroids. And we
see DAWN launching successfully in 2007. So if you look at the time frame on that
chart is stand back and let the historical record you can see that we've been working on
ion thrusters since the early 1900's and we went a century working those ion thrusters but
as soon as we had a successful flight demo then ion propulsion was available to all of us.
Lets look at another example aerobraking. Aerobraking uses the atmosphere, the natural
resource of the destination, to change orbits in lieu of propulsive fuel. You can trace
back to the 40's when science fiction writers referenced aerobrake and you can find
plenty of technical references for aerobraking in the 50's and in the 60's and in the 70's and in the 80's.
You can find traces back to the German rocket scientists team where they were proposing
aerobrake at Mars. But then you have to fast forward to 1993 to find the Magellan
mission to Venus. The Magellan mission was a science mission to Venus mapping the
gravitational field. And at the end of that mission the spacecraft was left in elliptical orbit
and they decided to go ahead and flight demonstrate aerobraking. See if that would
work in the Venus atmosphere and it worked beautifully. In fact if you go back and look
at those write ups you'll see that that aerobraking technology actually allowed for a whole
second mission at Venus. And the spacecraft was out of fuel at that point so
aerobraking was their only option to continue. And it worked beautifully. So then what
do we see. We see right away NASA decides they are going to baseline aerobraking into
the Mars Global Surveyor mission and that was 94'. So we see aerobraking in the 40's
the 50's the 60's the 70's the 80's. In 1993, we have a flight demonstration in 94' were
using it and we've been using ever since very successfully. So those are just two
examples of why flight demonstration is so powerful and so important to us because it
allows us to infuse that technology. I wanted to share some key elements of this
particular demonstration program because some of these elements are similar to other
flight programs that you have seen in the past but some of them are really unique to this
new program. And again tomorrow we can talk about these in greater detail in the break
out but I did want to share some of this for you today. Crosscutting, for this particular
program the technologies that were going to demonstrate need to be crosscutting and we
define that as the technology with the potential to benefit multiple customers.
Systems-level, we are looking for system-level demonstrators not component level.
We are looking for brand new capabilities like ion propulsion or aerobreaking.
Technology Readiness these technologies need to be mature. They need to be ready for
demonstration and the proposed demonstration needs to take that technology and make it
ready for first mission use. The Project Life Cycle, we are looking at a three-year effort
and I know I've talked to some of you in the hallway at break about this and that's a fairly
quick turnaround and that was intentional because we want to move these technologies
through and get them demonstrated and infused. And we can talk about that more
tomorrow on the breakout sessions as well. Life Cycle Costs, we are looking at a typical
project cost of about a 150 million dollars and that funding includes all elements of that
flight test. The planning, the hardware and software development, the launch costs are
included in that, the ground operations and post test analyses. And cost sharing is also a
very integral part of this new program. To demonstrate a potential infusion path the
teams are going to be required to have a sponsor or multiple sponsors to help cost share
the demo. And a minimum of 1/4 of the total costs must be contributed by someone,
some party outside the Office of Chief Technologist. So lets talk about opportunities for
you to participate. We are anticipating yearly calls for system level demonstrators
that's are goal as funding will allow the goal is to have several proposals selected each
year we'd really like to have two, three, four ongoing projects in the queue each year.
Open competition is a very important to us as Bobby has mentioned we want to cast the
net widely. We want all of your brilliant ideas and so the competition is open to NASA,
other government agencies, academia, industry and international partners. And we
understand that there are some barriers that might pull back some of your participation
such as intellectual property rights and data rights and were working that. We are
working that now with NASA Legal and will continue to work that because we want this
to be as flexible as possible and want as many of you to participate as possible.
So the approach is going to be requests for information RFI followed by requests for proposals RFPs.
And the RFP approach that we are considering is the BAA. So lets talk just a
minute about the RFI because we did release an RFI for technology demonstration
missions on May 27 and that closed at the end of June. And we were really pleased to
get over two hundred responses to that and we are still digesting and collating all of that information.
And we are loading your information into a database that we can utilize for
the BAA in the future. We saw with this RFI very broad participation. We got
responses from NASA, other government agencies, organizations as well, industry,
academia. And if you look at the capabilities represented it is very very broad. Broader
than we even anticipated. And I think I mentioned in the RFI, and I want to reiterate
today that those RFI responses are going to be used to formulate the BAA. Some of
you have asked me about that and we can talk more about how we're going to utilize that
information tomorrow at the break out. So lets talk just a minute about the BAA.
We are anticipating a two step proposal process. Step One is a screening proposal and ten
pages or less and that's to help you and to help us. The Step One proposal should include
proof that this technology really is crosscutting. Your preferred carrier we'd like to have
that information in this ten page or less Step One. We really want to be aggressive and
understanding what launch providers are needed and going after those for you folks.
We are going to raw cost a rough order of magnitude and some information on who your
cost sharing source will be. And we are anticipating two months to formulate this Step
One and prepare that some bit. And OCT will be preparing a review team to review
those proposals and that review team will determine which your proposals will then move
to Step Two. So Step Two is a full flight demonstration proposal, fifty pages or less very
typical for NASA flight demonstration proposals.
Three months for that proposal prep and submit. And we are going to use the same
review panelist as we did in Step One because they're familiar with your proposal your
concept. And the final selection official will be the NASA chief technologist.
The BAA release were currently targeting for October 1, if funds are available we can be ready before then.
So with that then I hope you are just as energize as I am about this new
program in all the possibilities that it brings. I'm excited about the new capabilities that a
tech demo program can bring to us because we have seen what tech demos can do in the past.
Just like Deep Space One allowed us to utilize ion propulsion and Magellan
allowed us to now utilize aerobraking um the possibilities are endless for this program
and I am very excited about that. I think we're really talking about brand new advance
capabilities coming into the aerospace community and that is pretty exciting.
I really feel like they can change the way that we investigate and they can really be changers on
how we explore. Thank you.
[applause]
[silence]
Questions?
[David Gump] David Gump with Astrobotic Technology and Carnegie Mellon.
If there's a continuing resolution as of October 1, does that prevent you from going forward or
or does your program not get halted by a continuing resolution?
[Bonnie James] I see Dr. Bruan standing up. I know he's dying to answer that question.
[laughter]
I would not want to take that away from you Bobby at all so.
[Dr. Bruan] Dying is the keyword.
[laughter]
So if there's a continuing resolution there are a number of scenarios.
And a first of all many of the programs not this one but many of the programs
that in fact the Innovative Partnership Programs that were in place in FY10 would be part
of any continuing resolution in terms of the carry forward funding for FY11. In terms of
the new program content which as I said is about sixty percent of the budget for space
technology and FY11 it depends on specifically what Congress does with the continuing resolution.
There are approaches where Congress can authorize some of these activities,
all of these activities or none of these new activities and that is something that is playing
out frankly this month and next month and we will we'll know at that time.
Where we are today just to be clear we are today is Congress is in the middle of that discussion.
All the mark ups are not complete. I think when the mark ups are completed I think we'll
have a much better understanding of congressional intent and NASA plans to abide by
the congressional intent. Okay.
[silence]
[Bonnie James] Thank you Bobby.
[Dave "inaudible' Martin] Does the 25% external contribution mean that the total program can be 200 million
or more depending on the external contributions or that the OCT part is 115 or less?
[Bonnie James] The typical cost for the check we write is about 150 million but the
contribution from our partner it can be whatever you can afford. As long as it is 25% or
more of the total life cycle cost. Anything you want to add to that? Any other
questions? I think for the RFI, the most I probably fielded five to ten questions a day I
would say on the telephone or email. I would say 90% of those questions were about
this partnership. And how do we deal with this exchange of monies and it is something
we're going have to work through and we can talk more about that at the break out
session because I know that is kind of new. Thank you.