One of the criticisms of NASA's Moon return Constellation programme was that it wasn't going to get astronauts back to the Earth's natural satellite until long after 2020
But are dates really that important? If you're prepared to spend the money why not take longer, spend more but get there in the end anyway? Deseret News says Utah politicians want pretty much exactly that with a call for Constellation to continue at a slower pace. But the programme of record appears to have achieved that slower pace already according to NASASpaceflight.com which says Constellation is withering on the vine, its workers demoralised after five years of hard graft resulting in cancellation
Heraldtribune.com reminds us that Obama only narrowly won Florida in 2009 and NASAWatch is saying that the 15 April space summit will be more like the televised health care debate
Whatever is said in that space summit room it seems all could be truly lost for Shuttle already as spacepolitics.com's Jeff Foust is reporting that David Radzanowski, NASA's deputy associate administrator for programme integration in the agency's space operations mission directorate, confirmed that a decision now to continue Shuttle would still mean a spaceflight gap of at least two years following what could be the very final flight, the proposed contingency mission STS-135; which makes you wonder why the US Review of human spaceflight plans included options for continuing Shuttle that made no mention of gaps - what weren't they told?
But are dates really that important? If you're prepared to spend the money why not take longer, spend more but get there in the end anyway? Deseret News says Utah politicians want pretty much exactly that with a call for Constellation to continue at a slower pace. But the programme of record appears to have achieved that slower pace already according to NASASpaceflight.com which says Constellation is withering on the vine, its workers demoralised after five years of hard graft resulting in cancellation
Heraldtribune.com reminds us that Obama only narrowly won Florida in 2009 and NASAWatch is saying that the 15 April space summit will be more like the televised health care debate
Whatever is said in that space summit room it seems all could be truly lost for Shuttle already as spacepolitics.com's Jeff Foust is reporting that David Radzanowski, NASA's deputy associate administrator for programme integration in the agency's space operations mission directorate, confirmed that a decision now to continue Shuttle would still mean a spaceflight gap of at least two years following what could be the very final flight, the proposed contingency mission STS-135; which makes you wonder why the US Review of human spaceflight plans included options for continuing Shuttle that made no mention of gaps - what weren't they told?
on March 12, 2010 4:38 PM | Reply
The Augustine Committee was referring to spacing out the existing manifest in the context of a side-mount or in-line derivative. The gap refers to the addition of flights beyond the current manifest that would need tanks, equipment from supply lines some of which have been already shut down.
on March 12, 2010 4:44 PM | Reply
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the day that NASA will put its space program in the "right hands" the world will finally have a truly exciting space exploration and a quick return to the Moon
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on March 12, 2010 4:49 PM | Reply
Not option 4b, that had Shuttle continuing and then being replaced by commercial.
on March 12, 2010 5:25 PM | Reply
Rob, you misunderstand. There are like 4 different gaps you could be talking about up there.
What 4B does is it DELAYS current shuttle missions so there is never 6-12 months without a shuttle flight. This is the "minimum safe-flight rate" they refer to.
There are 4 more shuttle missions left, so if you delay them you can stall until the new hardware is ready.
on March 12, 2010 6:29 PM | Reply
Thank you for your response. The question turns on what it means to have the Shuttle program, "continuing".
The relevant subsection of the Augustine Report, Section 6.4.5 [p. 90] with my bracketing of the three posibilities reads, "What should be the future of the Space Shuttle? [1] A prudent fly-out of remaining flights (currently part of NASA policy,
but FY 2011 funding for it is not part of the President’s
budget) or [2] an extension of the Shuttle through 2015 at
minimum flight rate? [3] A third option, discussed in Section
4.1, of extending the Shuttle life by one flight is considered
to be a variant of the 2011 fly-out option, which should be
resolved by NASA."
The question thus becomes does an extension of the Shuttle through 2015 at a "minimum flight rate" mean merely flying out the remaining flights in the existing manifest over a longer duration, in this case to 2015; or does the "minimum flight rate" through 2015 mean adding shuttle flights to the manifest. From the text, I can see grounds for uncertainty, however, the inclusion of the third option [3], which is adding another flight, strongly suggests that [1] and [2] refer to flying the same number of flights from the existing manifest, merely in a different temporal sequence.
Under Option 4b, both cargo and crew for the station will be commercial, however exploration beyond LEO will be provisioned by a new Shuttle-derived HLV. In any case, thank you for your timely and in-depth reporting!
on March 12, 2010 7:07 PM | Reply
Rob,
We were thoroughly briefed on the Shuttle program status. ET's were the limiting factor. At that time the ET line shutdown hadn't gone so far, there were 7 or 8 tanks left (forget the exact number), and stretching out the remaining Shuttle flights would have covered the gap to restarting ET production. There were some uncompleted older model ET pieces that could be used to do some reduced-performance flights if I recall correctly but my memory on that is unclear.
Time marches on, that was nearly six months ago that I was looking at the data, and I'm no too surprised that there'd be some kind of gap now. As in other areas of the program, the longer you put off making the changes that need to be made, the more painful they become.
on March 12, 2010 7:40 PM | Reply
Post-mortem on the Augustine Committee:
They certified that Constellation was on an unsustainable trajectory, budgetwise.
They confirmed that Ares 1 and Ares V were technically questionable and overly expensive.
They produced a report which was an insult to Obama's intelligence (that is, neither he nor anyone-else could make sense of it).
These results permitted Obama to do what he had already decided to do before he appointed Bolden as Administrator; to scrap it all!
In doing so he threw out the baby (Orion) with the bathwater.
on March 18, 2010 6:14 PM | Reply
From what I know so far I think the two to three year gap claim can be challenged. It could also be pointed out that a 2012 restart for Shuttle would still give four years of operations until commercial crew services began in 2016, assuming their development runs smoothly, and five years if certain politicians get their way and Ares-Orion survives to become part of whatever space programme emerges from the next few months and that starts ops in 2017.