A development program with a customer

A continuously occupied station needs supplies even when its transportation fleet changes. Food, replacement hardware and experiments must arrive; some materials must also come home. The Shuttle’s retirement made the question of future U.S. cargo access especially pressing. A rocket reaching orbit is only one link in that supply chain.

Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS, supported companies in developing and demonstrating cargo transportation capabilities. Commercial Resupply Services, or CRS, purchased operational deliveries. The names sound similar because they address the same need at different stages. Keep those roles separate when interpreting a flight record.

Consider an imaginary laboratory that needs a fragile sample delivered to an orbiting station. Its requirement might specify arrival condition, delivery window and acceptable handling. It need not dictate every engine or panel used by the supplier. However, allowing different designs does not remove the requirement to demonstrate that each design can work safely with the destination.

Try writing two acceptance statements. “The capsule launched” establishes departure. “The sample reached the laboratory within its temperature limit” establishes a useful delivery. A development test can verify part of the second statement without yet constituting a dependable recurring service.

Follow the acceptance boundary

NASA supplied a potential government customer as well as development support, while companies contributed their own resources and designs. The intended benefit extended beyond buying a particular spacecraft: the approach sought capabilities that commercial providers could offer as services. That is an objective and a mechanism, not proof that every business proposal would succeed.

In a teaching example, a supplier can build a demonstrator for 80 units but needs another 30 to prepare routine operations. A commitment to evaluate the demonstrator is not automatically funding for all 110 units. Ask what each agreement covers, who supplies the remaining resources and what evidence releases a payment.