WASHINGTON — The inclusion of a 30-day demonstration mission in revised plans by NASA to support development of commercial space stations does not represent a permanent shift to shorter missions.

NASA officials used a Sept. 8 online industry day session to clarify aspects of a draft announcement for partnership proposals released Sept. 5 for the second phase of its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program.

That second phase, called Commercial Destinations – Development and Demonstration Objectives, or C3DO, will use funded Space Act Agreements, rather than fixed-price contracts, awarded to several companies to advance development of their commercial space station concepts. The C3DO phase will culminate with a demonstration mission to a company’s station featuring four people spending at least 30 days there.

That 30-day mission suggested a shift in how NASA plans to use space stations after the International Space Station, which is permanently crewed with individual missions lasting on average six months. A NASA policy directive in late July said earlier requirements for a “full operational capability” involving four-person crews on such stations continuously were no longer binding.

However, at the industry day, Angela Hart, manager of the CLD program, said the language in the draft solicitation should not be interpreted as a permanent shift to short-duration missions.

“I would not say that NASA has fully shifted to monthly crew rotations,” she said. “It is not NASA’s long-term goal to have only a one-month mission.”

The solicitation, she said, does not set long-term requirements for services. That will be left to a future third phase of the CLD program, involving certification of such stations and purchases of services.

Hart said NASA decided on 30 days as the length of that demonstration mission so that crews can fully test various systems on a commercial station while also doing research. “Thirty days is an adequate time for us to be able to test out all systems but also to provide a ‘minimum gap’ mission that would allow us to do certain science.”

The “gap” reference is to a potential gap in U.S. human presence in low Earth orbit, or LEO, between the retirement of the ISS and the beginning of operations of commercial stations. NASA had once desired an overlap between the ISS and commercial stations but has more recently emphasized minimizing a gap between them.

“Our development plans are not tied to the ISS lifetime or deorbit decisions, although NASA is very interested in reducing a gap, if at all possible,” she said. “The two are no longer tied. There isn’t a decision point that says when we have a CLD, we will end ISS.”

However, NASA is still working to minimize, or eliminate, any gap in crewed presence in LEO. “We have partners that have been working on commercial LEO platforms in a variety of ways, but we really want to put that into hyperspeed and get to a place where we’re making the next big steps, and it is driven by the gap,” Brian Hughes, NASA’s chief of staff, said during a talk Sept. 9 at the Global Aerospace Summit here.

“We don’t want the Chinese to be the only platform in LEO,” he said, citing the revised CLD strategy as a way to prevent that. “If we do that process right, and if we do it now, we should be able to prevent the gap.”

The shift in NASA’s approach for CLD development, including at least an initial focus on short-term missions, has caused companies proposing such stations to reevaluate their plans. None, though, have announced any substantive changes to their proposed stations or business plans.

“We’re still going ahead as is,” said Leslie Haas, executive vice president for business development in the space systems division of Voyager Technologies. She spoke during a session of the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Space Technology Symposium Sept. 8, just before the NASA industry day.

Voyager holds a 65% stake in Starlab Space, the joint venture proposing the Starlab commercial station that won funding in the first phase of NASA’s CLD program. She said the company plans to conduct a critical design review of its station in December, a schedule that would support a launch of its station in 2029.

Haas said the company was looking for feedback from NASA about the changes in the program. “But overall, it’s still full speed ahead.”

Representatives of two other companies on the panel also proposing commercial space stations, Blue Origin and Vast, declined to answer a question during the session about how NASA’s revised CLD strategy affected their plans.

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