As many of you know, yesterday President Obama made some stark announcements about the future of NASA, and manned spaceflight in the United States. In response to that, I'm delighted to bring you a two part piece by Ken Oslund, a JPL engineer, and former classmate of mine at Caltech. Today, Ken will be covering NASA's direction over the last six years—the programs that were in place, and their planned direction. Then, tomorrow, Ken will be summing up exactly what Obama's plan is for NASA, and what it means for the future of space exploration.
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Obama's Human Spaceflight Plan
Today (Feb 1, 2010) president Obama presented his FY 2010, and through that budget laid out major changes for NASA and particularly for US human space flight.
Before Obama's budget: Human spaceflight programs over the last 6 years
First, a brief summary of human spaceflight plans that have existed for the last 6 years.
Bush's program: Constellation
After the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry on Feb 1, 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) made a number of recommendations to improve safety, but essentially concluded that they did not consider the space shuttle to be sufficiently safe, and that every component of the system should be recertified if the shuttles were going to fly beyond 2010.
In January of 2004, the Bush administration responded to this by announcing Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration." That vision called for using the shuttle to complete the ISS, then retiring the shuttle in September 2010. It also created the Constellation program, which was meant to replace the space shuttle and take astronauts both to the ISS and beyond low earth orbit (LEO) to the moon, and ultimately Mars. To do this quickly and cheaply, it called for primarily using existing technology to create, among other things, two new launch vehicles: the Ares I to launch crew, and the Ares V heavy lifter to launch all other equipment. However, subsequent Bush budgets gradually decreased the funding for NASA, putting Constellation's success at risk.
NASA has already spent about $9 billion on the Constellation program, much of which has so far gone into development of the Ares I rocket and the associated crew capsule, since these would be the first things to fly, and (ideally) would be used to support the ISS.
The Augustine Committee
After President Obama took office, he formed the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee, usually known as the Augustine Committee, since it was chaired by Norman Augustine, and the full name is a bit of mouthful. The committee's responsibility was to determine what NASA could do with human spaceflight, how much it would cost, and how long it would take. Their principle finding was that the current program of record—Constellation—was underfunded and could not be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time with current funding projections. They found that due to a lack of funding, rather than exceedingly difficult technological problems, Ares I, which had been planned to start flying astronauts in 2015, would probably not be ready until at least 2017, Ares V faced even bigger delays and essentially no money existed at all for the lunar lander, delaying its completion indefinitely.
The committee postulated that an additional $3 billion/year (to put these numbers in perspective, NASA's 2010 budget is $18.7 billion, and the total federal 2011 budget is ~$3.69 trillion) would allow NASA to get the Constellation program back on track. They also made a number of recommendations about which path to take with human spaceflight, and while the Augustine Committee did not officially endorse one path over another—it was chartered only to determine possibilities, not to make recommendations about which possibility should be chosen—the members of the committee ended up favoring one of the possibilities over the others, and I will summarize that possibility here:
Space Shuttle
Fly out the remaining shuttle missions to complete the ISS, but allow those launches to extend into FY 2011 in case of unforeseen problems or delays (currently the last shuttle mission is supposed to launch in Sept 2010, and FY 2011 starts in October 2010). After those missions are finished, retire the shuttle as planned.
ISS
Funding for operating the ISS currently extends only through 2015, at which point the "plan of record" is to dump the ISS into the pacific ocean. However, there is widespread support among the international partners to extend the space station's operation through 2020, and no money exists in NASA's budget to build a way to de-orbit it anyways. The Augustine committee recommended that ISS operations be extended to 2020, but more about this will be decided at a meeting between station partners in Tokyo this March.
Constellation
This is where it gets interesting. In a nutshell, the committee felt that the Ares I would see relatively few flights, since all it can do alone is take astronauts to LEO, and would therefore be very expensive on a per-flight basis. Basically it would be the world's most expensive taxi. They recommended that NASA scrap the Ares I rocket, and fund or purchase commercial launch vehicles, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, to transport crew members to LEO. This would free up resources at NASA to develop the Ares V, or another heavy lift vehicle.
But what would NASA do with this heavy lift vehicle? The committee recommended what it refers to as the "flexible path". In order to land on the moon, you have to develop an enormous amount of technology: you need a crew capsule, a crew launch system, a heavy launch system, a lunar descent and landing system, various surface operation systems, such as the lunar rover, and an ascent/return system. However, to visit other interesting near by targets, such as Lagrange points or near earth asteroids (NEOs - Near Earth Objects), you only need about half that stuff: the crew capsule and the launch systems; the gravity of asteroids is low enough that you don't so much land on one as dock with it, so "landing" systems are much simpler. Thus you could visit some NEOs and test parts of the system while developing your lunar, or Martian, landing and surface systems. You'd get to the moon or Mars in about the same amount of time for only slightly more money compared to going straight there, and you'd get to do some missions that are both scientifically and technologically useful in the process. The Augustine committee still thought, though, that the moon and/or Mars should be ultimate destination.
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Ken Oslund works on radar data as a software engineer at JPL. In his free time he enjoys rock climbing, wilderness backpacking, skiing, good beer, and large explosions*, which can only lead to one conclusion: He must have started out life as a mountain goat in the Bavarian alps before being transmogrified into a human after a bizarre incident involving a young boy, his pet tiger, a cardboard box, and CERN. The exact details are unknown though, and the Swiss and Germans have refused to acknowledge anything.
*Intentional and controlled explosions, viewed from a safe distance, like fireworks, etc
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Now that you've got the background info, come back tomorrow for the full summary of Obama's new plan, and discussion about just what it means for the future of NASA and manned spaceflight.
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