CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Space shuttle, orbital space plane and nuclear powered spacecraft launches will keep the Canaveral Spaceport busy for years to come, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said Tuesday.
O'Keefe's welcome promise kicked off the 40th Space Congress here, the nation's longest running annual space symposium.
The space agency chief, speaking to a standing-room-only audience of mostly space-related professionals, plugged NASA's integrated space transportation plan and discussed the benefits of employing nuclear technology in space if humans want to continue exploring the solar system.
"We have to step away from traditional, conventional ways that we do propulsion and power generation," O'Keefe said.
Right now it takes chemical rockets about 15 years to fly a probe from Earth to the edge of our solar system, seeking destinations such as Neptune or Pluto.
Once there, a probe has about six to eight weeks of rewarding and valuable science to perform before it flies by on its one-shot pass, O'Keefe said.
"All of the cameras and every instrument aboard, 15 years later, better work just right or it wasn't a mission worth taking," O'Keefe said.
"Even if all that works correctly, you're terribly hopeful there's going to be some principal investigator that still cares about the results 15 years after they started the mission.""Using nuclear technology, and other advanced propulsion systems, we can do an awful lot better," O'Keefe said, noting that travel times between planets could be reduced by a factor of three -- cutting a 15-year-trip down to just five years.
Nuclear solution
Officially organized under Project Prometheus, NASA will seek to improve on the use of nuclear-related activity to create electricity for spacecraft systems and science instruments, as well as find new ways to employ fission reactors in propelling ships on their way after using traditional rockets to first get into orbit.
While not directly challenging critics of the government's use of nuclear energy, O'Keefe praised the U.S. Navy's safety record and reminded the Space Coast audience that nuclear reactors aboard Trident-class submarines are routinely here at Port Canaveral to participate in offshore missile test launches.
"Over the course of the last 40-plus years we have been operating Naval reactors that are significantly larger than what we've got in mind here, plying the oceans on board U.S. aircraft carriers as well as in submarines," said O'Keefe, who once served as Secretary of the Navy.
The amount of water these ships have crossed during that time add up to about 125 million miles of experience, O'Keefe said, roughly the distance a spacecraft would have to traverse from Earth to Mars.
"If we can do that successfully here on our own planet, certainly between here and any other destination you can imagine, using a reactor significantly -- an awful lot -- smaller than what they use every single day and operate very effectively and very safely, we can achieve some tremendous things," O'Keefe said.
A nuclear technology demonstration mission, known as Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, could be launched by the end of the decade, O'Keefe said.
Shuttle update
After recognizing some of the Kennedy Space Center workers who have participated in the monumental and largely unsung effort to recover Columbia debris in Texas and Louisiana, O'Keefe repeated his conviction that it is entirely possible to resume shuttle flights by the end of this calendar year.
"We hope to be safely launching shuttles from this spaceport perhaps by the end of this calendar year. If we move ahead diligently and stay focused to the task, this is an achievable objective," O'Keefe said.
NASA already is responding to recommendations from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and is working closely with the panel headed by retired Admiral Harold Gehman to anticipate what might be said in the near future.
"We don't want to wait until the day the report comes out, open up to page one and begin to think about it. It's something we need to start thinking about right now," O'Keefe said.
The 40th Space Congress, which is chaired this year by Boeing's local director of engineering, Kevin Hoshstrasser, continues at the Radisson Resort at Port Canaveral through Friday.
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