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No, not that Ares but the Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Surveyor, a 6.71m (22ft) wingspan aircraft that would fly through the Martian atmosphere to study its surface chemistry  


credit: NASA / caption: This is a NASA Destination Tomorrow Techwatch video

Ares is to be the subject of a NASA Langley Research Center "assessment [that] is focused on conducting scientific exploration of the planet Mars using Ares"

Despite the recent publicity about more Ares V variants being the subject of NASA studies a little bit of good news for the Shuttle derived heavy lift crowd eeked out this week in the latest edition of Johnson Space Center's 8th Floor News


credit: NASA / caption: can it compete with Ares V lite?

The 8th Floor News says "Briefing included hardware and machining tools at [Michoud Assembly Facility] that are ready for excess.  [External tank manufacturing] Hardware will not be removed until the Agency heavy lift vehicle direction is better understood."

Hyperbola understands that the hardware is now to stay until a notional date of March 2010 but that has no bearing on the actual decision timeframe that the Obama administration will follow

So much for Floridian Senator Bill Nelson's ideas about a late November Obama spaceflight vision announcement

Whatever the next US human rated spacecraft is it is likely it will be able to use the International Berthing and Docking Mechanism (IBDM) that has been under development by NASA and the European Space Agency for more than two years now. The US Congress even directed NASA to develop such a mechanism with all space faring nations


credit: Geert Smet / caption: earlier US work has informed the European studies

Belgian company Verhaert Space is ESA's prime for the European work on this IBDM and at the CEAS 2009 European air and space conference in Manchester, Geert Smet University of Leuven graduate student spoke of his work that contributed to the ESA studies

His presentation revealed that the IBDM's origins is in the cancelled X-38 programme and that now the specification for the mechanism means it can dock or berth together vehicles as "small" as 5,000kg or as large as 80,000kg but the nominal spacecraft mass will be 21,500kg - enough for ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle or the Orion crew exploration vehicle

The planned Chinese space station is to be 60,000kg in mass. Or is it that 80,000kg would nicely suit the modules for a nuclear powered Mars ship?

This video shows Norman Augustine's remarks at the 22 October 2009  US human spaceflight review final report publication press conference

These few weeks since the US review of human space flight report (overseen by Norman Augustine above) was published have seen commercial's future at NASA just get brighter and brighter, what with a new advisory committee and some shiny comments made by the agency's administrator Charles Bolden - backed up by remarks from his officials on deep background apparently

One wonders how these advisory committees could inform the process for developing the new spaceflight vision that Bolden is charged with giving Obama, at a meeting before year's end or by February 2010 according to this report and this report?

Will these committees engage with the flexible path option that has been getting some good press of late? And what can really be done along that path? To date there has been near Earth objects and Lagrange orbit talk and then Moon and Mars gets a mention - but where is the money coming from for any of these destinations?

Its something to consider if flexible path really is the new way forward because its appearences in the media are not from off the cuff remarks. This report shows that internally NASA has been thinking a lot about what it wants to do, and it started long before it got the final Augustine report

Watch this video from the International Astronautical Congress in Daejeon, Korea where the future of the International Space Station was discussed by the ISS partners 

Go here for more IAC2009 videos

Hyperbola is to address the Augustine panel final report in a series of posts in the coming weeks - as we're not going to see any Obama spaceflight policy decision anytime soon - but to kick off this blogs analysis here are a few interesting words from spacedaily.com contributor Jeffrey Bell, over to you Jeff; 

"Having read the whole report, my view is that it is strongly slanted towards the status quo and the real situation with the "Program of Record" is far worse than the Commission was prepared to admit publicly. 

[T]he worst example of this is the manipulation of financial data.  For instance, they always use the "GDP Deflator" as their inflation index for projecting program costs forward and backward in time.  As I showed over two years ago this index grossly understates the real increase of space project costs over time. NASA calculates their own "NASA New Start Index" which is higher than the GDP deflator and even higher than the Consumer Price Index you see in the news.

Watch this video from the Internatonal Astronautical Congress in Daejeon, Korea first plenary session where heads of the world's major space agencies discuss the future

Go here for more IAC2009 videos

On Monday 12 October Flightglobal reported that NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that a heavy lift vehicle was necessary for exploration and that a vehicle was being costed

Talking to sources within the Ares V project and close to the Space Shuttle programme office's Shuttle-derived Heavy Lift Vehicle team it has become clear that while Bolden' choice of words suggested a single vehicle concept was under study, the reality is that HLV is still in the running

Bolden's comments on what he thinks is needed, a heavy lift rocket for exploration and commercial vehicles for LEO access within a constrained budget (Bolden mentioned that he would need to organise "overguides", additional funding requests for the FY2011 budget, for the likes of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a replacement for which - after its launch failure - has not been budgeted for), pointed to a decision by the administrator that the Augustine panel's second option and its designated "Ares V lite" heavy lift vehicle had been selected

On Friday 16 October at the International Astronautical Congress in Daejeon, Korea NASA's Charles Cockrell, associate director at the agency's Langley Research Center's systems engineering directorate, said that the Ares V project office was working on "trade studies of Ares V variants to feed that [human spaceflight policy] decision making process"

However sources close to the HLV team tell Hyperbola that "Yes the shuttle derived side mount, HLV, is one of the heavy lift launch vehicles being considered"

As Bolden is an ex-Shuttle astronaut it is perhaps not surprising that he might be open to the Shuttle programme office's ideas and so this blog asks the question, will anything of Constellation survive this review?

Despite NASA declining to confirm that Space Shuttle Discovery's mission STS-133 will leave the Italian designed and built Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Raffaello at the station and the latest mission information echoing comments made to Hyperbola by the space agency's ISS programme manager, the Space Shuttle programme manifest below shows that STS-133's payload is being referred to as PLM, the acronym for the Permanent Logistics Module project. This involves modifying Raffaello for its permanent attachment to the space station

The manifest also shows that Shuttle's last mission, STS-133, occuring in September but during NASA administrator Charles Bolden's interview with this blogger on Monday 12 October at the International Astronautical Congress in Deajeon, Korea he said that Shuttle would retire in 2011. Bolden is a former Shuttle astronaut and like many close to the programme probably expects slippage in the busy 2010 launch schedule

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NASA had told Hyperbola its administrator Charles Bolden was not going to be available here in Daejeon, Korea but a bit of persistence goes a long way and over a few minutes after the heads of agency plenary session Bolden gave away some interesting details about his thinking on the future of US human spaceflight policy

What was surprising was the degree to which Bolden had clearly already decided that Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles were not going to be a part of that future. Despite this journalist's prodding about the interest shown in EELVs during the Augustine review Bolden was very clear, they were not man rated and multiple launch scenarios with LEO rendezvous and docking was just a no-no; so this was one former two-star US Marine Corp general this blogger decided it was not worth arguing with

But even before the EELVs were outright rejected Bolden was adamant beyond LEO exploration needed a heavy lift vehicle. One wonders what heavy lift vehicle exactly is being costed by the agency, Bolden was guided away by his minders at this point, but the other elements that Bolden was describing match very closely the Augustine summary report's option two; making the heavy lift vehicle the Ares V lite

And of course this also means propellant depots are unlikely to see the light of day evey 45min either

To date this blog has been expecting a decision on US human spaceflight policy before Christmas so that the new policy could be incorporated into the FY2011 budget. Remember when the FY2010 budget request talked of a second budgetary submission to Congress following the review? But if a decision is months off - well there is universal health care and a new Afgan war strategy to sort out first - then appropriations specifically for this new policy may not appear until FY2012. And what does that mean for the Augustine committee's $2.5 billion commercial crew proposal, or any commercial transportation initiative? 

So "Yes we can" now has less immediacy to it and for NASA it's now more of "Yes, in due course"