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:
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."
advertisement
