…may be running out of engines a lot sooner than it thought.

What a policy mess.

And on top of that, the new Falcon 9 may require additional certification:

NASA says if the Falcon 9 is upgraded in the future, the agency will review the performance and design changes and make a judgment as to whether those changes will require a new certification.

“A thrust increase alone would not immediately result in a new common launch vehicle configuration,” Buck says. “However, often such changes are accomplished by major design differences throughout the engine and include propellant tank changes that affect the burn time and vehicle mass significantly,” he says, adding that NASA considers the effect on loads, controls and aerodynamics when making such a determination. If the agency finds modifications that constitute a new launch vehicle configuration, then a certification strategy that complies with NASA regulations would be put in place and that “such a strategy would define the number of flights required to achieve NASA certification,” Buck notes.

LSP says it is unclear how many additional flights of an upgraded Falcon 9 may be necessary, if any.

“It will depend on what changes, their magnitude, and when the contractor would desire to cut them in,” Buck says, adding that the agency does not currently plan to certify the vehicle for higher-risk Cat. 3 missions, which would include planetary and astronomy missions.

And then there’s this:

Both agencies expect to complete their respective Falcon 9 certification efforts mid-year, though NASA says once the vehicle is certified to launch riskier missions, in the future it does not plan to fly science payloads on SpaceX launchers utilizing refurbished Falcon 9 cores.

“Our current Category 2 certification effort assumes the use of an un-refurbished core stage,” says NASA spokesman Joshua Buck, referring to the ongoing effort to certify the Falcon 9 to launch Earth-observation spacecraft, starting with the Jason-3 ocean altimetry mission set to lift off in June from Vandenberg AFB, California.

See, in a sane world, you’d have more confidence in hardware that had already successfully flown, not less. This would be like insisting on a brand-new airplane very time you flew. Hopefully we’ll get there over time.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Note the first comment by Dave Huntsman on this latest demonstration of NASA’s ongoing aversion to reusability, going back to the X-33 fiasco.