WASHINGTON — NASA has canceled a multibillion-dollar project
to demonstrate satellite servicing technologies that had suffered extensive
delays and cost overruns.
In a brief statement March 1, NASA announced it was ending
the On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (OSAM) 1 mission. OSAM-1 was
being developed to refuel the Landsat 7 spacecraft and then perform the
in-orbit assembly of a Ka-band satellite antenna.
NASA said it was canceling OSAM-1 “due to continued
technical, cost, and schedule challenges, and a broader community evolution
away from refueling unprepared spacecraft, which has led to a lack of a
committed partner.”
The agency said that, after formal congressional
notifications of its decision, it would start the process for an orderly
shutdown, which would include transferring hardware and “pursuing potential
partnerships or alternative hardware uses.”
NASA said it would also review how to mitigate the impact of
the cancellation on the workforce at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which was
leading OSAM-1. NASA spokesperson Jimi Russell said there are approximately 450
NASA employees and contractors working on OSAM-1, and that NASA “is committed
to supporting project workforce per plan through fiscal year 2024.”
OSAM-1 started about a decade ago as Restore-L, with the
goal of launching as soon as 2020 to refuel Landsat 7. The mission was renamed
OSAM-1 in 2020 with the addition of payloads to perform in-space assembly and
manufacturing activities.
The mission, though, suffered significant cost overruns and
delays. As of April 2022, the mission’s total cost, once projected to be
between $626 million and $753 million, had grown to $2.05 billion and its
launch delayed to December 2026. NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), in
an October 2023 report, concluded the project would likely suffer additional
overruns, with an estimated cost at completion as high as $2.17 billion and a
launch of between March and June 2027.
A key factor in OSAM-1’s problems, the report concluded, was
the performance of Maxar, which is supplying both the spacecraft bus as well as
the robotics payload, called Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER),
under contracts with a combined value of nearly $316 million. Maxar delivered
the OSAM-1 bus in September 2023, two and a half years behind schedule, and was
running more than two years late with the deliveries of SPIDER components, OIG
found.
Maxar acknowledged in the report that they had
“significantly underestimated the scope and complexity of the work” modifying
one of its 1300-series satellite buses, designed for commercial geostationary
orbit communications satellites, for use on OSAM-1 in low Earth orbit. The
company also had technical problems with SPIDER as well as issues managing
subcontractors. NASA said in September 2023 it has removed one element of
SPIDER called MakerSat, which would have manufactured a composite beam, to
focus on its servicing and assembly technologies.
That report traced the problems with the OSAM-1 bus and
SPIDER to the use of fixed firm price contracts that, OIG concluded, gave NASA
no means to incentivize the company’s performance. NASA at times stepped in,
providing an estimated $2 million in labor to help with the OSAM-1 bus in 2022
and 2023.
“In our discussions with Maxar officials, they acknowledged
that they were no longer profiting from their work on OSAM-1,” OIG noted in its
report. “Moreover, project officials stated that OSAM-1 does not appear to be a
high priority for Maxar in terms of the quality of its staffing.”
Maxar spokesperson Eric Glass said the company had delivered
to NASA a pallet for the SPIDER payload, as well as one of its three robotic
arms, with the other two robotic arms planned for delivery later this year.
“While we are disappointed by the decision to discontinue the program, we are
committed to supporting NASA in pursuing potential new partnerships or
alternative hardware uses as they complete the shutdown,” he said.
One problem OSAM-1 did not have was funding. Congress
regularly exceeded NASA’s requests for funding for the mission. The OIG report
noted that NASA requested $808.5 million for OSAM-1 between 2016 and 2023 but
Congress appropriated more than $1.48 billion. NASA requested $227 million forOSAM-1 for fiscal year 2024 and both the House and Senate versions of spending
bills fully funded the mission.
OSAM-1’s cancelation comes as many companies are commercially
pursuing satellite servicing technologies, in many cases using more cooperative
approaches such as designing satellites with refueling ports that reduce the
complexity of refueling. At the annual meeting of CONFERS, a satellite
servicing industry group, in October 2023, an audience member noted there had
been little discussion about OSAM-1 in conference presentations.
Bo Naasz, who leads satellite servicing capability
development at NASA, acknowledged the difficulty in developing a spacecraft
designed to refuel a spacecraft “not prepared” for servicing. “It’s really
hard,” he said. He argued the value of OSAM-1 was to demonstrate robotic
technologies that could be transferred for other applications while gaining
experience in satellite servicing.
“We can help convince the consumer that we know how to do
this and that it’s ready,” he concluded. “I think it is, but I also think it’s
hard.”
