Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, took NASA to task for its 2001 decision to abandon development of the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle as a cost-saving measure in order to pursue the development of an OSP that would likely cost several times more to build.
NASA hasnt yet convinced me that the Orbital Space Plane should be our main transportation goal for the next decade, Gordon said. There are still too many unanswered questions surrounding this program.
Lawmakers also criticized NASA for failing to follow through on its past efforts to field new space transportation systems.
Ticking off a list of NASAs abandoned attempts, from the National Aerospace Plane to the X-33 single stage to orbit prototype, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), the subcommittees chairman, complained that the American people have seen little in return for these investments.
Rohrabacher said he welcomed NASAs restructuring of the Space Launch Initiative and was hopeful that the revamped Integrated Space Transportation Plan would bring about cheap, reliable and safe access to space. As we begin to peel back the layers, however, NASAs proposed plan appears to be just another initiative that is long on promises and short on likely results, he said. That simply wont cut it any more with this subcommittee.
Rohrabacher said he regretted that NASA could not offer specifics on its proposed OSP given the millions of dollars it has spent on crew transfer vehicle studies and technology development efforts in recent years.
There has been money available for the last five or six years for an effort like this, Rohrabacher said. I helped put it in the budget, yet we dont have any idea what it will look like, let alone have a blueprint for it. And here we are in the middle of a crisis. This does not speak well for the American space program.
Gordon and Rohrabacher both expressed concern that NASA has not given full consideration to the budget implications of its long-term space transportation plan.
It is unclear how NASA will pay to develop the OSP while operating the shuttle, which we all know is a costly transportation system, let alone whether NASA can afford to operate both the shuttle and the OSP at the same time, Rohrabacher said.
Gordon said he was specifically concerned that the OSP could cost more to launch than the space shuttle given that NASA would have to pay around $150 million a launch for the heavy-lift evolved expendable launch vehicles it could need to put the crew transfer version on orbit.
Taking the flak for NASA was the agencys deputy administrator, Fred Gregory, who agreed with Gordon that a heavy lift launcher could very well cost NASA $150 million apiece or more, depending on market conditions at the end of the decade. Gregory testified that the marginal cost of a space shuttle launch that is, the cost of adding an extra shuttle launch to the manifest is $60 million to $70 million. The average cost of a shuttle launch, he said, is $600 million, a figure that is derived by taking the annual shuttle budget and dividing it by the number of launches in a year.
Gregory said that the motivation behind the OSP is not to save money but to ensure crew safety for the duration of the space station program,which is, at least formally, scheduled to remain in operation through 2016.
Rep. Nick Lampson (D-Texas) said he was concerned that OSP may not be ready to fly until 2010, four years after NASA had committed to provide a rescue capability for station.
Gregory testified that at the time of X-38s cancellation, it appeared to NASA that the Crew Return Vehicle would not be ready until 2008. Cost also entered into the equation, Gregory said, with some estimates coming back as high as $3 billion to $5 billion, a figure several times larger than NASAs earlier $1.2 billion estimate.
Gregory said the OSP is the end result of NASAs desire to develop a vehicle that is more capable than the one-way-only Crew Return Vehicle it abandoned. A number of former NASA officials also testified and they too were skeptical of NASAs space transportation plans and its OSP centerpiece.
Mike Griffin, a former NASA chief technologist and associate administrator for exploration who is now president and chief operating officer of Arlington, Va.-based In-Q-Tel, said the primary shortcoming of the OSP is that, as currently envisioned, it leads nowhere besides the space station.
It scarcely needs to be said that it will be extremely hard to justify the development of such a vehicle, at a cost of several billions of dollars, for such a limited purpose as OSP will have, given the requirements envisioned for it today, Griffin said.
Griffin said NASA needs to pursue an alternative that offers greater promise for phasing out the space shuttle sooner rather than later. Despite grand ambitions for the shuttle, he said, the vehicle has proven more costly to operate and less reliable than hoped. It is time to move on, he said. Griffin proposed modifying the space shuttle for extended stays at the space station, a move that would buy NASA some time for developing an OSP that does more than go back and forth to the station.
At the same time, Griffin said, NASA ought to restore the Alternate Access to the Station program that it plans to shut down at the end of July.
Dale Myer, the president of Dale Myers and Associates and a former NASA deputy administrator, said NASA ought to conduct an in-depth study of developing a crew rescue and transfer vehicle based on the Apollo command module. An assessment Myers conducted on behalf of NASA earlier this year found that an Apollo-derived capsule could meet most of NASAs requirements for the OSP program, be ready to go in four to six years and cost considerably less than a winged vehicle.
Jerry Grey, director of aerospace and science policy for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said NASA might be better off taking an evolutionary approach to OSP, concentrating on a simpler crew rescue vehicle and attempting a more capable crew transfer vehicle once it gains some confidence.
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) called on NASA to stop flying astronauts on the space shuttle and to concentrate its efforts on producing a safer vehicle.
An accident rate of one every 62 and a half missions, if 14 Americans have lost their lives, is not acceptable. And its my opinion that we cant make the existing orbiter as safe as it needs to be, Barton said.
I think we ought to scrap that program. I think we ought to spend the money on building the best technology orbiter or space plane that we have. If it takes ten years to do it, so be it.
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