The Commercial Spaceflight Federation welcomes the Aerospace Corporation of El Segundo, California for its decision to release a clarification document yesterday regarding its white paper on the business case for NASA’s Commercial Crew program. The clarification document, titled “Aerospace Commercial Crew Modeling Tool Update,” is available on the Aerospace Corporation homepage at www.aero.org.
The document states, “The intent of this report was not to pass judgement on the economic feasibility of a commercial crew transportation provider, but rather to illustrate the ability of the tool to conduct parametric sensitivity studies.” The document continues, “The results shown to NASA and Congress recently were not intended to represent any specific real world scenario. We modeled a scenario utilizing data from as long as 10 months ago in order to demonstrate the tool’s viability, not the viability of any specific commercial crew transportation system.”
The document also confirmed that “Aerospace did not survey NASA or industry for input data. … The results were not intended to reflect what the commercial community has been developing,” and that “Aerospace can model many other possible cases and assumption sets to produce significantly different results.”
