NASA's investment in enabling technologies for space
exploration has been scaled back dramatically in the past year and focused on
areas deemed critical to fielding the Crew Exploration
Vehicle (CEV) and conducting the first
human lunar sorties since the Apollo program.
The $1 billion worth of human and robotic technology
projects NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate selected in late 2004
would have kept scores of researchers in industry and academia busy for years
working on a mix of pressing problems and longer-range considerations facing a
space agency daring to venture beyond Earth's orbit.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, sworn in several months
after the selections were made by the previous NASA regime, did not waste much
time deciding that the agency could not afford such a robust
technology-development portfolio if it wanted to keep its exploration agenda on
track.
"The old portfolio included 118 separate projects
valued at around $1 billion annually," said Chris Moore, the NASA program
executive managing the agency's downsized exploration-technology-development
portfolio. "Griffin quickly decided that NASA could not afford that
approach and cut the effort back significantly."
In the 10 months since Griffin first put industry on notice
that the exploration-technology portfolio would be pared back, 80 of the 118
originally selected projects have been canceled. The 38 projects remaining,
Moore said, would be seen through to at least the end of their initial one-year
phase.
Moore said NASA also has set up roughly two dozen new
projects led by NASA field centers to develop technologies deemed high
priorities by the Exploration
System Architecture Study the agency commissioned last year to chart its
course back to the Moon.
Among the key technology needs the study identified were ablative
heat shields for the CEV, lightweight fuel tanks, radiation
shielding, electronics able to function in extreme environments and
techniques for producing
oxygen from the lunar regolith, to name just a few.
Moore said NASA's regional field centers will be leading the
technology-development efforts, an approach, he said, that is consistent with
Griffin's plan to involve all of its centers in the agency's exploration
program.
"Before we had competed everything in the program and
the centers had to propose along with industry and the universities,"
Moore said. "Under this approach we are assigning centers to lead
particular technology areas and then give them authority to solicit the
projects that would support technology development in that area. We are trying
to maintain healthy work forces at the centers."
With an anticipated annual budget of roughly $300 million,
the new field center-led effort is intended to see promising exploration
technologies through to prototype-level demonstrations in a relevant
environment - what NASA refers to as Technology Readiness Level 6.
At that point, Moore said, the technologies are considered
mature enough to be adopted by NASA's Constellation Program for inclusion in
the CEV, launchers
and other systems needed to reach the Moon and operate on the surface for
increasingly extended periods.
"We've phased the program so that we are working on
technologies needed right way for the CEV and [Crew Launch Vehicle] and also on
long-lead technologies we are going to need to support the lunar outpost, like
in-situ resource utilization," Moore said.
The biggest of the new field center-led technology projects,
according to Moore, has been given to Ames Research Center. The Mountain View,
Calif.-based field center has been put in charge of a three-year project to
evaluate candidate materials for the CEV's ablative heat shields and producing
a prototype ready for testing in 2007 or 2008.
The next two biggest efforts in Moore's portfolio are being
led by Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Glenn has awarded several contracts
to industry to help develop so-called green propulsion systems that could be
used in place of highly reliable but highly toxic hydrazine-powered systems on
the lunar
lander and elements of NASA's exploration architecture. Glenn also is
working to develop non-toxic auxiliary power units for the CEV.
So far, four other NASA field centers have been brought into
the mix to manage some of the new efforts as well as the 38 competed projects
that escaped Griffin's budget ax.
Some of the competed projects that remain funded include
work on lightweight fuel tanks, radiation-hardened electronics and lightweight
power storage devices.
Leora Peltz, a scientist at Boeing Phantom Works in
Huntington Beach, Calif., is working with the Georgia Institute of Technology
in Atlanta on robust electronic components that can survive the Moon's
radiation environment and dramatic temperature swings. Peltz and her
colleagues' work on silicon germanium integrated electronics for extreme
environments remains funded at least through this year.
If NASA continues the project through to completion, Peltz
said she and her colleagues would produce prototype components ready to prove
their worth in thermal vacuum chambers and bombarded with radiation.
Larry Clark, manager of spacecraft technology development at
Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, has two competed projects that remain
funded for now, albeit at substantially reduced levels. Clark and his team are
working on a process for making
oxygen from the lunar soil and a regenerative
fuel cell system that could substantially reduce the number of batteries
NASA would have to carry on a human mission to the Moon.
NASA originally planned to spend $38 million on the oxygen-production
technology, but Clark said the funding has been severely reduced. The same
holds true for the regenerative fuel cell project, which was selected as a $15
million undertaking, but is now funded at a "caretaker level,"
according to Clark.
Smaller companies also picked up some of the original
competed projects and remain funded today. For example, XCOR
Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., remains hard at work on a lightweight
composite liquid-oxygen fuel tank.
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