NASA is officially still on schedule with their 4-year-old plan to spend $35 billion to build new rockets and finally take astronauts to the moon again, but now a top NASA manager is proposing a cheaper alternative that costs around $6.6 billion.
This less expensive option may not be as powerful as NASA’s current design with its fancy new rockets, the people-carrying Ares I and cargo-lifting Ares V, but it will still get to the moon and back.
The new model requires flying lunar vehicles on top of something they already have “” the old space shuttle system with its monstrous orange fuel tank and twin solid-rocket boosters, minus the shuttle itself. The rocket would be carrying two new vehicles “” a generic cargo container and a capsule for astronaut travel that looks similar to the Apollo. The new vehicles would have the capability to go to both the moon and the international space station.
The most surprising part of the entire idea is that it was NASA’s shuttle program manager John Shannon that came up with it. He was strongly encouraged by a top NASA administrator to present his idea to an independent panel in charge of reviewing NASA’s expensive spaceflight plans.
Shannon claims to have liked the original design, but he said, “I think the cost numbers are going to give us problems.” Over the past three years, Shannon and a handful of others have casually played with the shuttleless shuttle, an idea that has been passed around NASA for decades. So with the NASA’s blessing, Shannon and his colleagues went forward with the plan, without any connection to another group of space program workers who designed a different alternative to Ares anonymously for fear of retribution from NASA officials.
“What I was doing was not a break from NASA,” Shannon said in a telephone interview. “I don’t care what launcher we use, I just want to go to the moon.”
This is all occurring while NASA’s new moon program, called Constellation, is scrutinized along with the whole human spaceflight program from an outside board as part of President Barack Obama’s science policy.
The panel’s initial reaction to Shannon’s presentation was very positive.
“Terrific, very well done,” said panel chairman Norman Augustine, a longtime aerospace executive who noted he liked a similar proposal around 20 years ago.
The reaction of the panel coupled with the approval of the upper-level management hints to space experts that NASA management may be changing its mind, or at least entertaining doubts about the much more expensive plan.
Howard McCurdy, an American University public policy professor who has written books about the space agency’s decision-making, believes NASA management is concerned that there would not be enough money to fund the costly version.
“They are hedging their bets,” agreed Keith Cowing, a former NASA engineer who runs the Nasawatch.com web site, which acts as a watchdog on the space agency. “It clearly reflects some doubts among senior agency folks in the overall veracity of their current approach.”
NASA spokesman Michael Curie said Shannon was urged to make the presentation “in the spirit of sharing the options we’ve studied in the past.”
He also added, “NASA believes the best plan is to fully fund the current architecture… This does not indicate a lack of confidence in or support for the current program.”
Shannon said his numbers are not perfect and could change. The system would utilize hardware that has already been built in order to save time and money. Eventually new engines would be built but from the old model.
Shannon’s concept would use the same new Orion crew capsule being designed for Constellation. The only new vehicle would be the cargo container. Both would sit on the external fuel tank like the shuttle does now. When the crew capsule flies, it would be inside the cargo carrier at the top, with an emergency escape system.
And that “is the easiest part of the whole structure,” Shannon said.
Another advantage of using the old shuttle system is that NASA wouldn’t have to restructure its Kennedy Space Center launch site and use shuttle flight control systems, which would save billions of dollars, time and headaches, according to Shannon. The new system would also be able to launch a year earlier, meaning less space workers would be laid off.
Shannon says that his plan, called the Shuttle-Derived Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle, would only carry two astronauts at a time rather than three or four. He added that this might mean less of a moon base.
Shannon said that regardless of what the final plan ends up being, it all comes down to this: “I would like us to be in the lunar business.”
—
On the Net:
Comments