NASA likely to continue Constellation through 2011
from Aviation Week:
source: http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/gener...%20This%20Year
Obama Proposal Likely Unresolved This Year
By Mark Carreau, Frank Morring, Jr.
Johnson Space Center, Washington -May 3,2010
The resurrection of NASA’s Orion crew exploration vehicle as a space station lifeboat is injecting a new disruption into the agency’s already challenging transition from the in-house human-spaceflight plan it started under former President George W. Bush to President Barack Obama’s commercial space transportation and technology-investment agenda.
Continuing opposition in Congress to the “game-changing” policy shift is making it more likely that NASA funding will be handled as a “continuing resolution” this year, instead of an appropriations bill reflecting the changes Obama wants. That would add to the confusion, because it would leave NASA to continue working on the Constellation Program that is killed in the agency’s Fiscal 2011 budget request.
Obama wants the U.S. space agency to develop a lighter version of the Constellation Orion as a four-person lifeboat for the International Space Station. With the capsule eventually re-outfitted for deep-space missions, NASA would forego the lunar landing planned under Bush and instead send astronauts to explore a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, circle Mars with explorers a decade later and eventually land on the Red Planet, Obama says (AW&ST April 19, p. 28).
What the president did not explain in his much-anticipated April 15 remarks at Kennedy Space Center was how the space agency’s proposed $19-billion Fiscal 2011 budget and the spending plans to follow will accommodate Orion’s re-emergence. Nor did he say how NASA will launch a scaled-down version of the capsule, since the Ares I crew launch vehicle remains canceled.
“Orion is a dollar threat to the new baseline program,” warns Richard Kohrs, the retired NASA space station program manager who chairs the exploration committee of the NASA Advisory Council. The advisory council reviewed the agency’s Constellation transition strategy in Houston April 26-29.
“Having a change is a disruption,” says Doug Cooke, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, who briefed the exploration panel on the transition’s progress. “And it could change further.”
The Orion shift solves one problem for NASA—how to settle its termination liability on Orion with a requested $2.5-billion transition fund that probably already is oversubscribed, according to NASA Chief Financial Officer Elizabeth Robinson. Instead, NASA can modify its agreement with prime contractor Lockheed Martin.
But the abrupt change continues ongoing confusion about many details of the shift to the new policy. Exploration executives at Lockheed Martin were not told about the decision to revive the vehicle until it was leaked at the White House two days before Obama’s Florida speech. Initially they were at a loss as to what the change would mean to their program and how it would be justified.
Since then, supporters of the new Obama plan have suggested that docking an Orion rescue vehicle could ease requirements on the fleet of commercial “space taxis” the White House hopes to spur with $6 billion in new federal seed money. With a long-duration Orion docked at the ISS after flying there unmanned on an Atlas V or Delta IV, commercial craft could deliver astronauts and return to Earth relatively quickly.
Orion’s revival has planners estimating the cost of developing a less capable version of the spacecraft that could dock with the space station for 210 days. By launching the spacecraft unmanned, NASA avoids the need for the costly launch abort system that was to help make the Orion/Ares I stack 10 times safer than the space shuttle. Orion’s service module is likely to be revised as well.
The plan would also eliminate the costly process of human-rating a yet-to-be-determined launcher. Nonetheless, the development, production and launch costs of multiple Orion capsules have resurfaced as an unanticipated expense for NASA’s new mission and another detail to be worked out.
Those sorts of details are being hammered out by an internal NASA commercial crew study team initially headed by Geoff Yoder, who was director of Constellation systems integration at NASA headquarters. The commercial crew team is one of 10 such groups set up to identify near-term work needed to effect the transition from Constellation to the new program without running afoul of congressional appropriations language that forbids use of Fiscal 2010 funds to terminate the old effort.
Deputy Administrator Lori Garver says those teams will report soon, and with more deference to Congress than was shown when the initial budget was released in February.
“We plan to initially brief the Hill in the next few weeks on the details, and then between [Administrator Charles Bolden] and I and others finding ways to get them out further to the public and particularly to industry,” she says. “There will be some [requests for information] and industry days coming up.”
Even so, time is running short for congressional action on the Obama space plan, and with the administration fighting sjpeg opposition to the abrupt change in direction, a continuing resolution is increasingly likely. That could restrict the agency to Fiscal 2010 spending levels, while extending restrictions that prevent it from proceeding with Constellation’s cancellation, Cooke says.
Under those circumstances, Bolden is asking for solidarity from the agency’s workforce in carrying out the Obama strategy. In a 30-min. address broadcast from JSC, Bolden urged workers to let go of lingering allegiances to the previous administration’s back-to-the-Moon initiative and lend their support to the commercial crew approach and the broad-brush technology-development effort he and Garver say will enable much deeper exploration eventually.
If they cannot make that “difficult” transition, he says, NASA risks losing the opportunity to focus on the deep space exploration it has been seeking since the Apollo era.
“We have to let go of the past,” says Bolden. “This is a very, very critical time for the agency. What we are about to do, hopefully, is something we have not done before. We have changed programs in the past. We have canceled programs and we have come to new programs, but we have never made the dramatic change that we want to do now.”
Bolden told the advisory council it will take NASA as much as a year to compete and award new contracts to support the new initiative, creating an employment gap for many of the 11,500 personnel who now work on Constellation.
That gap will grow, he warns, if Congress reaches an impasse and decides to pass a continuing resolution.He blames dissension within the aerospace community for much of NASA’s legislative difficulties.
Bolden described two “extreme” camps: One committed to the belief that only NASA can safely and effectively launch astronauts and a second that believes the space agency has conspired to keep the commercial sector out of the human space arena. Both camps have used the news media in a destructive campaign to prevail, he charges.
“We must work with the commercial sector to facilitate their success in being able to provide safe, reliable and redundant access to low Earth orbit, while we in NASA develop the capability to venture to deep space destinations,” Bolden says. “We also need to face the reality that the future will be different than the past.”
While much of the concern on Capitol Hill has been over the public- and private-sector jobs that are threatened by the changes in the Obama budget, lawmakers are worried about what the change will mean for the U.S. role as a leader in human spaceflight, too.
“I represent a county that contains the Goddard Space Flight Center, and I’ve said [before] that Goddard does pretty doggone well,” says Donna Edwards (D-Md.), a member of the House Science and Technology Committee that authorizes NASA spending. “[But] taking into consideration where the U.S. wants to go and the important leadership role that the U.S. has to play in the international community, both for global competitiveness but also because we want to continue to be on the cutting edge of scientific research and technical capacity, we can’t afford to cede that.”
In an address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Garver urged lawmakers and others with an interest in the space program to take the time to examine the new policy.
“We think this program is sustainable not only in terms of dollars but in terms of the public’s support, in making space exploration part of the national psyche again,” she says. “We are changing the game. It’s no longer just about where we want to go, but why we want to go and what we want to achieve when we get there. This activity will lead to new opportunities for the economy, new knowledge and capabilities, and step-by-step progress toward far-reaching milestones. We’re stretching beyond barriers that have defined our limits for years.”
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