 Hey what's up everybody, welcome to tomorrow. Coming up we're going to be discussing the most recent announcement regarding NASA's second generation commercial resupply services contract, otherwise known as CRS-2. The winners of this contract have been announced and we're going to be examining their different systems and capabilities. This is your space pod for January 19th, 2016. So NASA has awarded cargo contracts to three different companies to ensure that food and supplies, as well as critical research, science, and technology demonstrations, are delivered to the International Space Station from the time period between 2019 and 2024. NASA has selected Orbital ATK, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and SpaceX to continue building on their initial cargo partnerships. And this time around, NASA wants some different requirements and capabilities that they expect from all three companies. Instead of having the amount of cargo missions be based off of a predetermined weight requirement, NASA is going to be contracting six flight missions from each company. This will allow for more flexibility and will guarantee a resupply capability to the International Space Station. Last time around during CRS-1, there was a certain weight requirement that the companies had to deliver over the span of the contract. And that would spread out over as many missions as it took each company to deliver that amount of weight. Interestingly, it seems that all three companies must have a variety of delivery, return, and disposal capabilities for both pressurized and on pressurized cargo, as well as an optional accelerated return, and the addition of an insurance policy requirement to cover damage to government property if any accidents occurred during launch services, re-entry services, or transportation to, from, in proximity of, or docking with the space station. With the lessons learned so far in the Commercial Crew Program, it seems that there's going to be some more regulations in certain areas, and in other areas it'll be less stringent, and hopefully this will allow for more flexibility like they want. The goal of all of this is to make sure that the United States can maintain the highest level of operations at the International Space Station as possible until the Space Station's retirement. These resupply flights in the 2019-2024 time period are going to be coinciding with the Commercial Crew flights, the actual flights that will be sending up American astronauts to the Space Station. And something that's really interesting about all of this is because of those Commercial Crew vehicles, they're going to be able to increase the crew at the International Space Station from six members to seven members, and hopefully that will be able to increase a lot of their research time, and we'll be able to see a lot of return and just a lot of really great benefits out of the final years of the Space Station. I hope that we continue operations at the Space Station far beyond 2024, but that's another story for another time. So let's talk about each company individually. SpaceX already has the capability to bring pressurized and unpressurized cargo to and from the Space Station with their Dragon capsule, but the disposal and accelerated return capability part may be where they need work. They could already load unpressurized trash into the trunk of the Dragon, which burns up in the atmosphere already during re-entry. Accelerated return may be harder, but I'm assuming that adding some Super Draco engines to the cargo version of the Dragon would give SpaceX that capability once they get their Dragonfly working. In any case, I'm sure they will always be trying to improve their vehicles. Orbital ATK will most likely need a lot of different upgrades to their Cygnus vehicle in order to fulfill all of these different requirements that NASA has set forth, but in the meantime they can continue with their current configuration, which is enhanced off of the first version of the Cygnus that they've already been flying. I'm interested to see how they will enhance their vehicle even further. They will need to be able to send an unpressurized cargo, and I'm curious how they will do that. They also have to have a return capability, which they currently do not have, much less a rapid return capability, so they will require a lot of work. Although Orbital ATK did have proposals in the past for an unpressurized variant and a return capsule variant of the Cygnus, I wonder if they plan to reuse all of those, and do they need to have all three capabilities at once on the same flight, or would NASA be satisfied if they could have three different versions of the same vehicle? These are questions that hopefully will be answered over the next couple of years. Hopefully a lot sooner than that. Sierra Nevada now would probably need the most work, but once it's flying, their vehicle would be able to fulfill almost all of the requirements fairly well. And I'm very excited that their Dream Chaser space plane will fly in space under this program, even if it is the cargo version. Just like in the COTS and CRS-1 programs, Sierra Nevada will need to do several test flights of the cargo variant and all of its subsystems. Hopefully we will see them flying in space though before the end of this decade, but since they need to do the most work, it's possible that they will provide some of the final cargo flights to the space station, unless they already have significant progress completed on the cargo variant of the Dream Chaser space plane. That would be awesome if they have a lot of work done on that that we don't know about, but in any case, they still have to do the most amount of work because theirs of the three is the only vehicle that hasn't flown in space yet. The whole deal with this accelerated return capability is that NASA wants to be able to return science experiment samples or tech demos very rapidly and recover them without being contaminated, like being contaminated from salt water from splash downs, for example. And the whole reason for this is so that they can make the most out of those especially sensitive projects. And something that might come to pass is that if only one of these three companies can provide that accelerated return capability, NASA might not require it from the others. But based on the wordage that the announcers who announced the winners of the CRS-2 program had, it seemed like they wanted all of these different capabilities from all three companies to be able to send up pressurized and unpressurized cargo, be able to dispose of trash pressurized and unpressurized, and have this rapid return capability. So we're just going to have to see how things play out. But it seems to me like they want those capabilities from all three companies. And I'm very excited to see how each company would go about doing that. It's still unknown at this time what the detailed milestones for each company are going to be under this program and what the value or payout of each one of those milestones is going to be. However, NASA has promised to do this program under a fixed price contracting method similar to the same way that they've already been doing the commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. However, some estimates have said that the total maximum value if they have the maximum amount of missions for this would be somewhere around $14 billion. But I don't want to speculate on where all that money would be going until we get some sort of detailed milestone list of what all the different requirements and progress that all three of these companies would need to make over the coming years before operational flights. In any case, congratulations to all three companies for being awarded this contract. And I am personally very excited for all three of them. I mean, the Orbital ATK and SpaceX were already doing cargo flights, but just having the dream chaser with Sierra Nevada as well is just awesome. That's just, I'm so happy for that. That's going to be great. We are probably going to have a lot of bad days ahead, but I think that we're going to have a lot more good days than bad days ahead. Ah, the future is so exciting. Also, congratulations to SpaceX for the successful launch of the Jason 3 spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday. Unfortunately, they were not able to land the first stage of the core stage on the automated drone ship out in the Pacific, but that's okay. They were successfully able to place the spacecraft into its intended orbit. And our very own Jared Head was actually there at the launch and was able to collect some footage. Although it was very foggy, I'm looking very much forward to seeing what he was able to collect. And he's going to have a really good detailed rundown on the next space pod of that mission and the entire launch itself. So tune in for that next space pod to hear all about the Jason 3 spacecraft and that successful launch. Very jealous I wasn't able to be there. Thank you very much for watching this video. My name is Michael Clark, and please leave a comment and let us know what you think about this whole Sierra's 2 contract. Do you think that all three companies are going to have to upgrade their vehicles? When do you think the Dream Chaser space plane is going to first fly in space? These are things that I want to know, so please leave a comment either in the comment section down below or on any of our social media. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven't already. And if you are willing to enable, please consider contributing to our Patreon campaign which funds the creation of these videos. We are very close to reaching our next goal of being able to produce four space pods for month. And with your continued support, we'll be able to continue making videos like this. Thank you so much to all of our Patreons who've been contributing already. And I'd like to give a special shout out to the founders of tomorrow who are contributing a huge chunk of the fund that makes these videos happen. So thank you very much. And also thank you to all of our Patreons. Without you guys, we wouldn't be doing this. So thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm just, my mind is blown at your guys' generosity. It's, this is amazing. Thank you again for watching this video and hopefully you know a little bit more today than you did yesterday, thanks to tomorrow. Keep moving onwards and upwards everybody and I will see you in the future.