Is the answer to heavy-lift rocket cost issue bringing back Ares I?
http://blog.al.com/space-news/2011/0...y-lift_ro.html
HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - As NASA's new heavy-lift rocket struggles to get off the drawing board, a national space analyst says the answer to moving into deep space may be bringing back Ares I, the rocket NASA just canceled.
Dr. Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, raised the Ares option last week as one way out of political and financial thicket that has enmeshed the Space Launch System (SLS), which is the formal name for the heavy-lift rocket project.
Congress ordered NASA to build SLS last November and appropriated $1.8 billion for the current fiscal year to get started. That was part of a compromise with the White House, which had wanted to turn manned spaceflight completely over to commercial companies while NASA concentrated on robotics, earth science and research for deep-space missions.
Senators and representatives from NASA states, who forced the compromise, have grown increasingly frustrated this year with the delay starting SLS. NASA has started the other parts of the compromise program, and administrators chose an SLS building plan in May. But instead of releasing the $1.8 billion, they subjected SLS to an independent financial review by the firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
In the meantime, senate critics including Alabama Sens. Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions question how NASA is spending some of the SLS appropriation.
The independent financial review was submitted to NASA Friday, a spokesman confirmed, but NASA declined to release it.
"The type of information contained in the independent cost assessment is acquisition sensitive and generally not releasable to the public," NASA Headquarters spokesman Michael Braukaus said Friday. "If it is determined to be releasable, the assessment will be posted to NASA's Space Launch Systems Web site."
Shelby and other congressional critics say NASA has redirected $340 million of this year's $1.8 billion SLS appropriation to uses only "tangentially" related to SLS, most of it infrastructure upgrades at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Meanwhile, NASA contractors warned some 600 Huntsville aerospace workers this month that they face layoffs at the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30. That's when NASA will officially ends the space shuttle and Constellation programs with no SLS ready to take their place.
Huntsville's Marshall Space Flight Center is the lead NASA center for the new heavy-lift rocket, and local aerospace company managers there fear a permanent brain drain unless work starts soon on SLS.
Pace said last week it is clear the White House and Congress still have a "difference of opinion" on spending priorities.
Illustrating that point and the stakes is an internal NASA document leaked to the Orlando Sentinel this month saying SLS and a new crew capsule will cost $38 billion over 10 years but only fly twice.
SLS supporters say the report was leaked to cause "sticker shock," but critics say it proved SLS is one more NASA project waiting to spin out of financial control.
"We must ensure that every dollar spent in this area is used effectively and efficiently," Obama administration spokeswoman Meg Reilly said last week defending the outside financial review.
"I expect the (financial review) will confirm what Congress and the NASA technical experts have known for nine months," U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said Friday, "that the administration could have approved the vehicle design concept months ago, prevented the loss of thousands of jobs, and ensured U.S. leadership in space and science."
Pace said the impasse has him wondering about Ares.
"Ironically, the budget pressures being put on the program right now would in my mind argue for returning to the previous plan," Pace said, "which was launch and build Ares I first and build Ares V later."
Ares I was the first and smaller of two rockets in the now-canceled Constellation program, which also included a Multipurpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) that is being constructed. Ares I, which could have taken astronauts back to the moon, was being developed in Huntsville by many of the aerospace workers now facing layoffs.
For Pace, Ares has several positives. First, a lot of money and time have already been spent on it, and that work would feed into the larger rocket later.
"You build on the work that was already done," Pace said of Ares I. "You can fly the MPCV. You have five-segment solid (rocket motors) that are already done. You have a use then on the upper stage for the J-2X engine, which is also in development."
Ares I would also "provide a backup option in case the commercial crew guys run into problems," Pace said. "And it's a foundation to be able to return to the moon with the international partners at some point."
That's important, Pace said, because "our potential international partners cannot do human mission to Mars or human missions to (near-Earth objects). They can do human and robotic missions to the Moon."
Is resurrecting Ares I really viable? The technical points Pace makes are accurate, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said last week. And the 2010 law ordering up the SLS did put a priority on using as much of Constellation as possible going forward.
But there would be hurdles in reopening a debate both the Congress and White House thought was behind them.
The leak to the Orlando newspaper drew a lot of attention, but Pace and others say the $38 billion estimate includes fixed costs for centers and personnel that NASA would have regardless. When those are considered, they say, $3.8 billion a year over 10 years isn't that far out of line with other major U.S. technical investments.
"Sometimes, people in Congress and the public think that when you appropriate money, it's 100 percent going to programs as opposed to maintaining structure," Pace said. "There's always overhead in everything. Nothing exists without overhead." Pace also pointed out that the heavy-lift rocket wouldn't launch many times because SLS is a developmental program, not an operational one. The idea is to build a rocket for later missions, not cost average each flight during development.
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