Space Shuttle: April 2010 Archives

Following a meeting between the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programmes and the space operations mission directorate's senior management NASA has concluded that

• STS-133/Discovery now becomes the Launch-On-Need (LON) vehicle for the STS-132/ULF-4 mission targeted for 14 May launch
• STS-133/ULF-5 is to fly 16 September
• STS-134/ULF6/AlphaMagneticSpectrometer is targeted for mid-November
• AMS should be at Kennedy Space Center in late August - so STS-134 date is still fluid
• While November is the new "no earlier than" launch date for STS-134/Endeavour, due to ISS traffic with Soyuz, ATV and HTV a flight timeframe of "end of CY2010 and early into CY2011" is said to be "challenging"

One has to wonder what on Earth (pun intended) president Barack Obama, his administration and the NASA management team think will be accomplished with a 1h 55min chin wag between "senior officials, space leaders, academic experts, industry leaders and others" about the future of US space exploration

Public relations disaster is one accomplishment that this blogger can envisage. If everyone comes out of the conference (see timing below - all times in Eastern Daylight Time) declaring the Obama plan a fantastic vision the event will be criticised as a White House whitewash and if a single individual speaks out against it, the reports will be of a divided conference

Hyperbola suspects the outcome will be far far worse

We are told Obama will have some "private time" with politicians attending the event. Anything other than the president's ageement to a wish list of space transportation projects is going to see those politicians attack the new space plan. And it won't stop there, academics will likely go on the record to say they don't agree with all or parts of the plan while industry will simply brief journalists, off the record, about why the plan doesn't make sense 

It is not obvious at what point the media get to question the president and, or his conference participants but I would imagine that certain politicians and corporations are already on the phone to Florida based and national media. Is it a conference or is it Obama's last space stand?

The afternoon to save exploration in full

13:30h NASA tv begins President Barack Obama KSC visit coverage
14:25h President Obama speech in Operations & Checkout building
15:45h Conference overview
           with NASA admininstrator Charles Bolden, Norman Augustine, John Holdren
16:25h Conference breakout sessions
           - increasing access to and utilization of the International Space Station
           - jumpstarting the new technologies to take us beyond
           - expanding our reach into the Solar System
           - harnessing space to expand economic opportunity
17:40h Conference wrap-up with Bolden and breakout session moderators

The 15:45h conference overview and 16:25h breakout sessions will all take place in the Operations & Checkout building

credit: NASA / caption: NASA's proposed Ares V cargo launch vehicle mode in a windtunnel 

A heavy lift rocket is needed to sustain the International Space Station (ISS) because when Shuttle retires key parts of the station are too large for any of the existing rockets available or those planned

In an exclusive interview Boeing vice president and ISS programme manager Joy Bryant stressed the need for a heavy lift capability and downmass - to bring back experiments - to ensure the station is full realised as a laboratory

Boeing has been NASA's prime contractor for the US segment of the ISS since 1993. On 5 March this year the company officially "delivered" the outpost to NASA but Boeing will continue to service the station on a "sustaining" contract. In Bryant's view to sustain the ISS a heavy lift launcher is needed

Watch former NASA astronaut and now Boeing space exploration general manager and vice president Brewster Shaw talk Ares I crew launch vehicle upper stages and Ares V cargo launch vehicle design contracts in this video from the National Space Symposium in 2009. He also talks about the "8-10,000" direct job losses expected if Shuttle retires without substantial progress on Ares V. He is referring to the Chinese at the beginning of the video because if I remember correctly (I was at this briefing) he had just come from a meeting with China's space programme officials. This video is part two, for part one go through to the extended portion of the blog post

Boeing tells Hyperbola that its own video from the 2010 Boeing National Space Symposium exploration briefing will be posted here so check back soon

Hyperbola is hearing that astronaut corp rumours are circulating about STS-134, previously the penultimate Space Shuttle fleet flight, saying that it is now to take place in December at the earliest and maybe even January or February 2011

One of the reasons for the delay is the fact that STS-133 will now fly the Permanent Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM), Leonardo, which won't be ready until October - three months after its current official date of September

While the orbiter Atlantis will be retired as early as this May after its mission STS-132, its sister ship Endeavour will still be used for STS-134 and Discovery will deliver Leonardo on STS-133; but before STS-134 rather than after it, as stipulated in the existing Shuttle manifesto

What will further extend Shuttle operations into calendar year 2011 is the extra money NASA was given for the possible continuation of operations beyond 1 October 2010. That extra money, the well sourced rumours say, could fund an extra flight, which would be STS-135 using Discovery

The STS-135 flight would be to deliver much needed spares and other cargo with an MPLM to the International Space Station but there would be no Launch On Need (LON) rescue Shuttle organised. Instead the mission would have a crew small enough for a Soyuz rescue spacecraft replacing the LON scenario - how much will that cost NASA?

In that great tradition of immoveable objects encountering the unstoppable force it seems the force has won out and the object, the flexible path aka plan A, is succumbing to Congressional will

Certainly if you believe what NASAWatch thinks is happening behind closed doors, which it seems even Utah's elected officials and Floridian politicians can't access, then its going to be all change for the president Barack Obama budget request for 2011

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (see video above) is all for Shuttle extensions while between the many tears NASA administrator Charles Bolden stuck to the script and told the BBC that its game-over for Shuttle; words he didn't repeat during his visit to Hunstville, Alabama last week

For more defence of the flexible path approach go here for C-SPAN video of the spaceflight panel at the George C Marshall Institute which spacepolitics.com reported on last week

But for some levity how about Venezualan space programme goals and troubled New York governor David Paterson's hopes for an orbiter for his state - dream on Paterson