WASHINGTON — NASA has canceled a multibillion-dollar project to demonstrate satellite servicing technology that was experiencing significant delays and cost overruns.
In a brief statement on March 1, NASA announced the end of the On-Orbit Maintenance, Assembly, and Manufacturing (OSAM) 1 mission. OSAM-1 was being developed to refuel the Landsat 7 spacecraft and assemble Ka-band satellite antennas in orbit.
NASA said the reason for canceling OSAM-1 is due to “ongoing technical, cost, and schedule challenges, as well as the broader community's evolution away from refueling a spacecraft that is not yet ready.” “This has led to a lack of suitable partners.”
The agency said it would formally notify Congress of its decision and then begin the process for an orderly closure, including relocating the hardware and “pursuing potential partnerships and alternative uses for the hardware.”
NASA said it will also consider ways to reduce the impact of the cancellation on employees at Goddard Space Flight Center, who were leading OSAM-1. NASA spokesperson Jimi Russell said approximately 450 NASA employees and contractors are working on OSAM-1 and that NASA is “committed to supporting the project workforce as planned through fiscal year 2024.” “There is,” he said.
OSAM-1 began as Restore-L about a decade ago and is targeted to be launched in 2020 to refuel Landsat 7. The mission was renamed OSAM-1 in 2020 and added a payload to perform in-space assembly and manufacturing activities. .
However, the mission suffered from significant cost overruns and delays. As of April 2022, the total cost of the mission, once expected to be between $626 million and $753 million, has increased to $2.05 billion, and the launch has been postponed to December 2026. . NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) concluded in an October 2023 report: The project is likely to suffer further overruns, with an estimated cost of $2.17 billion upon completion, with launch scheduled for between March and June 2027.
The report concluded that Maxar's performance was a major factor in OSAM-1's problems. Maxar is supplying both the spacecraft bus and the robot payload, called the Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER), under a contract totaling approximately 10 million yen. 316 million dollars. The OIG found that Maxar delivered the OSAM-1 bus in September 2023, two and a half years behind schedule, and was also more than two years late in delivering the SPIDER components.
Maxar said in its report that the scope and complexity of the work to modify one of its 1300 series satellite buses, designed for commercial geostationary orbit communications satellites, for use on OSAM-1 in low Earth orbit He admitted that he had significantly underestimated the The company was having technical issues with his SPIDER as well as problems managing subcontractors. NASA announced in September 2023 that it had removed one of the SPIDER elements, called MakerSat, which was supposed to manufacture composite beams to focus on servicing and assembly technology.
The report traced the OSAM-1 bus and SPIDER problems to the use of fixed-price contracts, and concluded that the OIG did not give NASA the means to incentivize the company's performance. NASA has stepped in from time to time, providing an estimated $2 million in labor to support the 2022 and 2023 OSAM-1 buses.
“In discussions with Maxar officials, they acknowledged that they were no longer benefiting from their research on OSAM-1,” the OIG said in its report. “Additionally, project officials stated that his OSAM-1 does not appear to be a high priority for Maxar in terms of staffing quality.”
Maxar spokesman Eric Glass said the company has delivered a pallet and one of three robotic arms for the SPIDER payload to NASA, with the remaining two robotic arms expected to be delivered later this year. said. “While we are disappointed in the decision to cancel the program, we are committed to helping NASA pursue new partnerships and the possibility of using alternative hardware as we complete our shutdown,” he said.
One problem OSAM-1 did not have was funding. Congress consistently exceeded NASA's requests in funding missions. The OIG report noted that NASA requested $808.5 million for OSAM-1 from 2016 to 2023, but Congress has allocated more than $1.48 billion. NASA requested $227 million for OSAM-1 in fiscal year 2024, and both the House and Senate spending bills fully funded the mission.
The cancellation of OSAM-1 comes as many companies pursue satellite servicing technology commercially, often using more collaborative approaches such as designing satellites with refueling ports that reduce the complexity of refueling. This was done while the company was hiring. At the annual meeting of CONFERS, a satellite services industry association, held in October 2023, an audience member noted that he had little discussion of OSAM-1 in the conference presentation.
Bo Nurse, head of satellite maintenance capability development at NASA, acknowledged the difficulty of developing a spacecraft designed to refuel a spacecraft that is “not ready” for maintenance. “It's really tough,” he said. He argued that the value of OSAM-1 lies in gaining experience in satellite servicing while demonstrating robotic technology that can be transferred to other applications.
“We know how to do this and can convince consumers that we are ready,” he concluded. “I think so, but I also think it's difficult.”