Obama Reviews Space Shuttle Finale

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The Obama administration is taking a sweeping look at NASA that focuses on plans to retire the nation's aging shuttle fleet in 2010.

Five space policy experts - four of whom held key NASA posts during the Clinton administration - are gathering data on options to close an anticipated five-year gap in U.S. human spaceflight. They aim to brief the incoming president before his Jan. 20 inauguration.

"They advised us that the shuttle retirement was going to be their No. 1 priority," Brevard County Commissioner Mary Bolin said. "And that was just tremendous to hear because that is a concern for our citizens. That hits us straight in the heart."

"I was very impressed with them," Commissioner Robin Fisher said. "It seems that President-elect Obama has everything in order, and he's moving at a fast pace."

Bolin, Fisher and Lynda Weatherman, president and chief executive of the Economic Development Commission of Florida's Space Coast, met with the Obama's NASA Review Team last week in Washington.

"They welcomed us with open arms and, basically, wanted to be briefed on some of the concerns that we have in Brevard County," Fisher said. "And the loss of jobs is one that is near and dear to my heart. That's something I don't want to see happen."

An estimated 3,500 Kennedy Space Center jobs are expected to be lost during the gap between the shuttle retirement and the first piloted flights of the Ares 1 rocket and the Orion spacecraft in March 2015.

President George W. Bush's plan calls for the United States to rely on Russia to fly American astronauts to and from the International Space Station in the interim. Obama said during his presidential campaign that he wants to minimize the gap and reduce reliance on Russia.

A list of questions submitted to NASA - excerpts of which were published this month in the trade publication Space News - shows that President-elect Barack Obama's team is gathering data on a range of options.

The team asked NASA to provide information on the costs involved with:

• Adding one or more shuttle missions beyond the 2010 retirement date.
• Flying the shuttle through 2015.
• Accelerating the development of the Ares 1 rocket and the Orion spacecraft.

But the team also is asking NASA to provide data on other options, such as:

• The costs that could be saved by canceling the Ares 1, Orion and Ares 5 projects.
• The technical challenges engineers face in fielding the Ares 1, such as launch vibrations that could damage the rocket or injure its crew.
• The cost of developing a smaller Orion space capsule that could fly to the station on an upgraded version of an Atlas 5 or Delta 4 rocket.
• The feasibility of flying smaller Orion capsules on European Ariane 5 or Japanese H2A rockets.

Former U.S. astronaut Charlie Precourt, vice president of NASA space launch systems for Ares rocket manufacturer ATK, said he isn't surprised that the team is gathering information on such a wide range of options. He calls it "due diligence."

"I think that there are certainly a lot of people that have been asking questions that NASA has revisited and reviewed a number of times, and I think the team wants to revisit and answer these questions to their own satisfaction," Precourt said. "I really struggle at trying to make conclusions on where they are going, based on the flavor of the questions, although people like to do that."

Like the Obama teams evaluating 27 other federal agencies, the NASA group is chartered to provide the president-elect with information needed to make policy, budgetary and personnel decisions before the inauguration. The team does not make recommendations.

Precourt thinks a thorough review will lead to a decision to press ahead with the development of the Ares 1 rocket and the Orion spacecraft.

"I think the questions are fairly easily answered," he said. "And those answers will point to the advantages of the Ares-Orion architecture being the right course to continue on."

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