WASHINGTON -- NASA Administrator Mike Griffin told a
Senate panel Wednesday that development of Orion
crew spacecraft and the Ares launch vehicle
will be delayed four to six months, pushing the first operational flight of the
new system into 2015.
Griffin said the slip is
unavoidable in the face of a flat 2007 budget
that denies NASA's exploration program about half of the more than
$900 million increase it was seeking [image].
"The
reduction does not halt any planned work we were going to do on [Orion and
Ares] but it does stretch it out," Griffin told the Senate Commerce space and
aeronautics subcommittee.
He
said the slip would delay everything from the planned April
2009 test flight of the Ares I-1 rocket to the first operational flight,
which had been targeted to occur no later than 2014.
"We
can expect a slip into early 2015," he said.
NASA's Orion
spacecraft is a capsule-based successor to the space agency's aging
three-shuttle fleet -- Discovery,
Atlantis and Endeavour -- which is due to be retired in
2010 after construction of the International Space
Station (ISS) is complete.
The
spacecraft are expected to be capable of launching astronaut crews to the ISS
and teams to the Moon under NASA's vision to return humans
to the lunar surface by 2020. To be built by Lockheed Martin,
the Orion spacecraft is expected to launch atop the planned Ares I rocket.
A larger booster, the Ares V, would be used for unmanned cargo and hardware
launches [image].
Orion's now
planned slip in its first crewed flight lengthens the expected gap in NASA's
ability to independently launch astronauts into space once the space shuttle
fleet is retired. The space agency plans to rely on current agreements with ISS
partners for crew and cargo flights and is studying the possibility of
purchasing commercial spaceflight services under its Commercial Orbital
Transportation System (COTS) program.
SPACE.com
Staff Writer Tariq Malik contributed to this report from New York City.
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