NASA : Possible Shifts in Direction
Setting the stage for a major overhaul of the nation’s human spaceflight program, a blue-ribbon panel said Thursday that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should consider scrapping the rocket it had been developing to replace the space shuttles and bypassing the Moon for now.
In a 157-page report titled “Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation,” most of the options proposed by the 10-member panel turn to private companies to provide astronauts with the ride to low-Earth orbit and replace Moon landings with the “flexible path” approach — flybys of the Moon and Mars and visits to asteroids and deep-space locales that do not require development of complicated landers.“It seems to us that would be a more sensible program,” the panel’s chairman, Norman R. Augustine, said in a news conference.
In response to a question, Mr. Augustine agreed that the rocket under development, the Ares I, was not the right one for NASA and that it was not going to the right place. “I would say that’s a fair portrayal,” he said.
The panel’s report does not provide many surprises beyond what was discussed in a series of hearings over the summer and an executive summary released last month, but explains the panel’s reasoning in greater detail. It also concluded that NASA would not be able to push beyond low-Earth orbit without a budget increase of about $3 billion a year. The agency is “at a tipping point,” the report said, “primarily due to a mismatch of goals and resources.”
“Either additional funds need to be made available,” it went on, “or a far more modest program involving little or no exploration needs to be adopted.”
Beyond dissatisfaction with NASA’s current course, the Obama administration has given little indication which options it might choose, whether it would support a budget increase for NASA or even when it will decide.
“Against a backdrop of serious challenges with the existing program, the Augustine committee has offered several key findings and a range of options for how the nation might improve its future human space flight activities,” said a White House spokesman, Nicholas S. Shapiro. “We will be reviewing the committee’s analysis, and then ultimately the president will be making the final decisions.”
In an interview on Wednesday with The Huntsville Times in Alabama, the NASA administrator, Charles F. Bolden Jr., said he planned to meet with President Obama by the end of the year to present the agency’s views on what it should be doing.
Under NASA’s current plans, developed after the loss of the shuttle Columbia in 2003, the remaining three space shuttles are to be retired next year after completion of the International Space Station. A new series of rockets is supposed to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020.
For NASA to continue operating the space station through 2020, five years longer than currently planned, and still reach the Moon, the current program would require $159 billion from 2010 to 2020, the panel calculated, far more than the $100 billion that the current budget guidance from the Obama administration lays out.
The panel said $100 billion was too little for any plausible push out of Earth orbit, but it said other possibilities were feasible if financing were raised to $128 billion over the next decade.
A prototype of the Ares I is on the launching pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, scheduled to lift off on Tuesday morning. That test flight, with a less-powerful first stage and a dummy second stage, was devised to gather data to aid in refining the design.
The full rocket and the astronaut-carrying capsule on top are not scheduled to begin operation until March 2015. Because of NASA’s budget constraints, the panel predicted that the date of the first flight would very likely slip two years.
The panel did not call Ares I an engineering failure but rather more a casualty of changing circumstances and of budgets one-third smaller than originally planned for. “With time and sufficient funds, NASA could develop, build and fly the Ares I successfully,” the panel wrote. “The question is, Should it?”
Because of the delays, the Ares I may be too late for one of its primary tasks: ferrying astronauts to and from the space station. Its defenders point to its simple design, arguing that it will be far safer than earlier rockets.
While agreeing that the Ares I’s simplicity was an asset, the panel was unconvinced that the rocket would be markedly safer than competing concepts that similarly consist of a reliable booster and a crew capsule with a launching escape system. Further, the planned launching rate for the Ares I is no more than two a year, “raising questions about the sustainability of safe operations,” the panel said.
The panel did not call for throwing away all of the development work for Ares I. Among other options explored, the panel was more favorable toward NASA’s developing the Ares V Lite. Currently, the Ares I is to complemented by a heavy-lift rocket, the Ares V. The Ares V Lite would be a smaller version, using the solid rocket booster developed from the Ares I.
The panel also discussed developing a heavy-lift rocket based on rockets currently used by the Air Force to lift satellites or one based more closely on the space shuttle design.
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