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starship-design: NASA Feared Myopic on Space Future
NASA Feared Myopic on Space Future
Aviation Week & Space Technology
10/27/2003, page 27
Frank Morring, Jr.
Washington
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Experts, lawmakers worry NASA isn't alert enough to what comes after
shuttle, ISS
Business as Usual
NASA and the White House are too focused on the short-term goal of returning
the
space shuttle to flight to give thoughtful consideration to how and, more
importantly, why to replace it, according to a growing group of U.S.
lawmakers and
the experts who advise them on space issues.
In meetings last week with leaders of the congressional panels that oversee
NASA,
Vice President Dick Cheney kept his counsel on the state of play in internal
White
House deliberations on future U.S. space policy. Although participants said
the
Cheney meetings were "a good first step" toward including Congress, the
White
House discussions have been cloaked in secrecy so far.
President Bush will make a decision on his vision for future space
exploration and
announce it when he is ready, according to his NASA Administrator, Sean
O'Keefe,
who has hinted that Bush will choose options supporting exploration beyond
low-Earth orbit. Chairmen and ranking Democrats on the Senate and House NASA
authorizing committees urged Cheney to open up the process and spark a
"national
debate" on space policy, but received no commitments.
THAT HAS LEFT Congress to consider on its own possible space futures. The
basic
outlines of a long-term exploration policy have been refined in studies
inside and
outside the government for years, but the policy is stalled without
political
agreement on priorities and technical details, according to key lawmakers.
"Any consensus has to be arrived at jointly by the White House, the Congress
and
NASA," said Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Science
Committee. "NASA needs to do its part by coming up with credible cost
estimates
and schedules for projects--something that has been sorely lacking in recent
decades and something that has not been done yet for the next major human
spaceflight project, the Orbital Space Plane."
The space plane, intended both as a transport/rescue vehicle for ISS crews
and as
the basis for meeting future crew transport needs, has been greeted with
skepticism at home and abroad (see story p. 28). But the attitude toward the
long-term future of the space shuttle transcended skepticism at a House
Science
Committee hearing this month.
"The shuttle has never been and never will be the launch vehicle that NASA
wants
it to be, yet the agency appears determined to return to business as usual,"
said
Alex Roland, a former in-house NASA historian who is chairman of the History
Department at Duke University.
Roland recommended that NASA should "scrap or severely curtail shuttle
operations." He echoed the view of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board
(CAIB) that "it is in the nation's interest to replace the shuttle as soon
as
possible as the primary means for transporting humans to and from Earth
orbit."
Yet to build a new human space transport, it is necessary to know where it
is
going. So far the Bush administration has avoided a destination-driven space
exploration policy, opting instead for the nuclear space power and
propulsion
technology effort it has named Prometheus. That effort, a spinoff of
long-term
NASA planning from previous administrations, won praise from witnesses
before the
House panel, but there were also calls for a more focused approach.
"We need a national vision that sets a destination for human exploration and
systematically pursues its fulfillment with both robotic and human
spaceflight,"
said Wesley T. Huntress, Jr., director of the Geophysical Laboratory of the
Carnegie Institution of Washington and a former associate NASA
administrator.
Cheney got a similar answer from senators when he asked for their views on
the
issue of robotic versus human spaceflight, according to one participant who
said
"the message was quite clear" that the U.S. must continue to back human
spaceflight. And in the House hearing, the message was equally clear that
Mars is
the destination.
"The geography of the solar system shows us the way," said Michael D.
Griffin, a
former NASA associate administrator for exploration. Griffin listed Mars,
the Moon
and some near-Earth and main-belt asteroids as reasonable goals "in the next
several generations."
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pic10383.pcx)
Credit: IAA CONCEPT
Griffin also listed orbital "waypoints" where humans can learn to survive in
space, including low- and geostationary Earth orbits and the lunar Lagrange
points, where the gravity of the Moon and Earth negate each other. His views
track
those of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), which has proposed
a
stepping-stone approach to Mars in the next 50 years (shown).
As presented by Huntress at the House hearing (and earlier at the
International
Astronautical Congress in Bremen, Germany), the IAA approach would tackle
Mars as
"the most scientifically rewarding and the one place that can galvanize
human
interest like no other." To get there, precursor missions to the Moon,
asteroids
and the dark-side Sun-Earth Lagrange point (SEL2), where scientists already
plan a
flotilla of space telescopes, would shake out the needed technology.
House Democrats led by Rep. Nick Lampson (D-Tex.), who represents NASA's
Johnson
Space Center, have drawn on the IAA work and its predecessor studies in a
bill
that sets a goal of eight years for reaching both solar Lagrange points with
human
crews, 10 years to rendezvous with an Earth-crossing asteroid, 15 years for
a
"human-tended" lunar base and 20 years to demonstrate the technology for a
Mars
landing.
Committee members of both parties see an advantage in the step-by-step
approach to
Mars in that it fits within the eight-year U.S. political cycle bound by the
two
terms allotted a given president. But all of the goals in the Democrats'
bill
start at low-Earth orbit, and Huntress said near-term decisions on how to
get
humans there will have long-term effects on space exploration.
"Our ultimate ability to reach these destinations requires that
architectures
developed today for transportation from the Earth's surface to orbit have a
top-level requirement to consider the future needs for space transportation
to
deep space," he said. "Otherwise, it is likely that a solution will be
derived
that is useless for the next step beyond Earth orbit."