[FPSPACE] Nine year gap in US manned space flight missions, statements at Augustine Panel hearing; Ride proposal to extend intermittent Shuttle missions through 2014

[Peter Pesavento]

>From Aviationnow on-line.

 

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/Gap080309.xml&headl
ine=Nine-year U.S. Spaceflight Gap Seen&channel=space

 

Nine-year U.S. Spaceflight Gap Seen

Aug 3, 2009

 

By Frank Morring, Jr.

 

The outside panel examining NASA's human spaceflight plans has heard
analysis suggesting the U.S. could be out of the human-spaceflight game
until 2019, a nine-year gap after the shuttle retires at the end of next
year.

That is based on NASA's current plan and budget profile, says Gary Pulliam,
Aerospace Corp. vice president for civil and commercial operations, who
presented the findings at an Augustine panel hearing last week in
Huntsville, Ala.

"When you look back in history, and you look at the inception of the
Constellation Program, it was doable," Pulliam said. "It was within what we
see as historical bounds ... But things happen. Budgets begin to get
reduced, and that has a dramatic effect." The Aerospace Corp.'s intensive
three-week analysis for the Augustine panel's launch vehicle subcommittee
evaluated the near-term Constellation vehicles - the Ares I crew launch
vehicle and the Orion crew capsule it will carry - and several alternatives
that might be able to get U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station
in a comparable time.

Ares I carries an initial operational capability (IOC) of March 2015 at
NASA. But Pulliam said Aerospace Corp. evaluators believe budget cuts alone
would add another year and a half to that date. Technical issues would add
another two years on top of that, and a proposal to continue operating the
International Space Station (ISS) for five years beyond its planned 2016
deorbit could stretch the gap by six more months.

"Not all of these things have to happen," Pulliam says. "The committee can
be influential in helping NASA restore some of that budget."

Closing the gap isn't the only assignment President Barack Obama gave
Augustine. The panel must also recommend options for flying out the shuttle
and continuing to operate the International Space Station beyond its
scheduled deorbit in 2016. A panel headed by former astronaut Sally Ride
proposed two options for extending the shuttle - flying one more shuttle
mission in 2012 with the sole remaining external tank available to the
shuttle program, or restarting the external tank line at the Michoud
Assembly Facility in New Orleans and flying one or two shuttle flights a
year through 2014.

The one-flight option would cost an estimated $1.5 billion, according to
Ride's briefing charts, while the more ambitious approach would add another
$2.7 billion, or $4.3 billion over the current baseline. But it would make
it much easier to sustain meaningful research on the orbiting laboratory
with the shuttle's commodious up- and down-mass capabilities.

Ride's subcommittee was clear that it makes no sense to deorbit the ISS in
2016, gaining only five years of utilization after 25 years of development.
That would take as much as $14 billion more than currently budgeted.
Long-range funding for NASA already has plunged dramatically over the past
four years, dropping from $108 billion in fiscal 2006 to $81.5 billion
today.

"NASA does not have the budget or the ability to simultaneously develop new
systems and continue operating existing ones, hence the gap in access to the
International Space Station," said Princeton astrophysicist Christopher
Chyba, a member of the Augustine sub-group that studied missions beyond low
Earth orbit. "In fact, it's unclear that NASA has the funding for any
scenarios that do anything important beyond low Earth orbit prior to 2020."

 

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