Commercial Space Transportation Capabilities

Space Act Agreements (abbreviated SAA) are a type of legal agreement specified in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 (and subsequent congressional authorizations) that uniquely empowers NASA to work with any entity that enables fulfillment of the Administration's mandate. As recently as the 2010 authorization of (Pub.L. 111–314):

The Agency enters into SAAs with various partners to advance NASA mission and program objectives, including international cooperative space activities.

Agreements of this type have been reached under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) and Commercial Crew Development (CCDev). They are not subject to normal Federal Acquisition Regulations.

Besides these two initiatives NASA has concluded five other agreements in the Commercial Space Transportation Capabilities (CSTC).

Five agreements were signed between January 2007 and June 2007:

All three of the Space Act Agreement initiatives, COTS, CSTC and CCDev are for development, engineering and testing of design concepts, but CSTC is different from the other two initiatives in no providing any funding. CSTC agreements are only instruments committing NASA to increase cooperation and to support the private sector companies with information and other facilities, but this commitment is without financial implications and both sides (NASA and the private companies) should ensure by themselves the required funds for their respective parts of the activities.

Four of the cooperation agreements signed are for a period of maximum 3 years which have lapsed in 2010. In the fifth one, that of SpaceDev, the period is censored.

So far NASA has published a list of accomplished progress milestones only for SpaceDev, and the same Dream Chaser spacecraft is also one of the winners (albeit with different milestones) of CCDev rounds 1 and 2.