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

[David Portree]

Peter:

 

"Things happen"? That's some insightful analysis. 

 

What happened was, this was ill-conceived and poorly executed. I'm sorry, I'm not Obama, I don't mind assigning blame. This would have been do-able - as Pulliam says - if Bush had been serious about it and if a realistic budget had been developed and supplied. But the Vision was nothing but election-year pandering. The notion that you could pay for it by freeing up Shuttle and ISS funds has always been suspect. The Federal budget doesn't work like a home budget. 

 

What to do now? The Shuttle didn't suddenly become more dangerous just because an exciting (for some, anyway) moon program that needed its retirement came along. It has always been dangerous, but we accepted it until it became politic to become scared of it. Accept it some more. Fly it once a year or so to ISS to switch out US crews and do resupply and maintenance. Stretch US stay times on ISS to suit the Shuttle schedule. More long-term stay data can't hurt. Be prepared to do that for up to a decade while we develop, build, and adequately test a decent Shuttle replacement (capsule plus heavy-lifter). 

 

Beef up the robotic program to help fill the gap. Get some technology investment under way and test it in the robotic program. Make the robotic and piloted programs more complementary to each other. (As it stand now, robotic wants to get away from the piloted program mess and piloted wants robotic to go away because it shows what real exploration is. Both are hurt by this.) Mars sample return would be a great mission for linking the program halves, and it needn't cost gazillions. IKf JPL can't do it, give it to someone else - it worked for Viking, which was managed by Langley after JPL antagonized NASA HQ. JPL needs to be brought into line anyway, after the MSL mess.

 

Get NASA out of the business of funding "newspace" - it's a waste of taxpayer dollars. The ideology-based adherence to "newspace" - no different, really, than the old communist rhetoric, and just as full of logical holes - complicates matters. Didn't Shuttle teach us not to base our planning on dreams and promises, hype and propaganda, primate politics and wishful thinking? 

 

Do more Earth-focused space-based studies, since it makes space seem more relevant to people. Don't set a grand goal - back to the moon by 2020, or whatever - since it gives opponents something to attack. 

 

Work toward having a broad range of capabilities, not some goal that isn't likely to keep its relevance, given the lead times involved. 

 

Above all, don't get impatient, and be prepared for a long series of fights.


David S. F. Portree

dsfportree at hotmail.com
dportree at usgs.gov
 
http://robotexplorers.blogspot.com/
http://beyondapollo.blogspot.com/
 
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/About/People/DavidPortree/
 



 


From: pjp961 at svol.net
To: fpspace at friends-partners.org
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 16:29:27 -0400
Subject: [FPSPACE] Nine year gap in US manned space flight missions, statements at Augustine Panel hearing; Ride proposal to extend intermittent Shuttle missions through 2014







>From Aviationnow on-line.
 
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/Gap080309.xml&headline=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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