NASA's Plan for Commercial LEO Development

A robust and competitive low-Earth orbit (LEO) economy is vital to continued progress in space. The United States is committed to encouraging and facilitating the growth of the U.S. commercial space sector that supports U.S. needs, is globally competitive, and advances U.S. leadership in the next generation of new markets and innovation-driven entrepreneurship. NASA has developed a long-term vision to achieve this goal where, one day, NASA will become one of many customers in low-Earth orbit. The plan was publicly unveiled on June 7, 2019 at Nasdaq in New York. This plan builds on, uses the capabilities of, and applies the lessons learned from over a decade of work and experience with commercial companies. This plan, entitled NASA's Plan for Commercial LEO Development [1], addresses how NASA will partner with industry to bolster supply of commercial LEO destinations, stimulate demand for new and emerging markets in LEO, and lays out near-term steps to achieve a robust economy in LEO. In the near term, NASA developed and is implementing a five-point plan building on the work of the last two decades. 1)NASA established a commercial use and pricing policy for the International Space Station (ISS) that will enable companies to reduce uncertainty and build business plans as they seek to perform commercial activities, including marketing; 2)NASA has announced the intent to enable flight of private astronauts to the ISS with the first mission as early as 2020, including a solicitation as a mechanism to enable the assessment and approval of these missions; 3)NASA has initiated a process for developing commercial low-Earth orbit destinations, including the overall strategy, timeline, and solicitations for developing commercial destinations using the ISS Node 2 Forward Port, and free-flyer destinations; 4)NASA has laid out a plan to pursue opportunities to stimulate scalable and sustainable demand for LEO destinations including solicitations with calls for in-space manufacturing and regenerative medicine flight demonstrations, as well efforts to expand the pipeline of potential users and seeking innovative approaches to broadly stimulate demand; 5)NASA has updated a white paper quantifying the agency's long-term needs in LEO. This paper provides an overview of NASA's plan and longterm vision for development of the LEO economy, and provides a summary of progress being made in each of the five areas of the plan.