WASHINGTON
— The blue-ribbon panel asked by the White House in May to come up with a set of
options for NASA's human spaceflight future is expected to brief senior
administration officials Friday on as many as eight such scenarios, according
to retired Lockheed Martin Chief Executive Norman Augustine, the man leading
the 10-member committee.
"My guess
is there will be between six and
eight options," he told Space News, SPACE.com's sister publication,
in an interview Tuesday. "We're still mulling. There are some other options
we'd like to add, but to give the president 15 options would be to do a
disservice."
The
Augustine panel has spent the past two months reviewing alternatives to the
U.S. space agency's Moon-focused Constellation program, which includes the
Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and the Ares I rocket designed to launch it into
low-Earth orbit. Last week the panel debated the merits of a list of seven
options that ranged from the conservative — including a plan to stretch out
Constellation beyond its planned operational capability of March 2015 — to more
costly scenarios that would have NASA bypass the Moon and send humans
to Mars.
The panel
meets today to finalize its options before Augustine presents them to NASA
Administrator Charlie Bolden and White House science adviser John Holdren
on Friday.
Augustine
made clear that he will be presenting options, not recommendations.
"We were
asked to provide options and I would undermine the president's ability to make
a sound recommendation if I were to voice my opinion," he said. "But one of the
major facts being weighed is what we can afford. I just don't have the ability
to judge that. I'd love to see us have a very aggressive human spaceflight
program that would not damage the robotic program, I should emphasize, but I
just don't know what we're going to be spending on healthcare and the two wars
and how that will evolve. Only the president and the Congress are in a position
to do that."
Among the
panel's seven or eight options, two are expected to fit within NASA's planned
funding 10-year profile, which includes about $80 billion for manned
spaceflight programs. In addition, Augustine said, the panel will provide more
than one option "with a commercial
crew characterization" for getting humans to low-Earth orbit.
"I've
developed a great deal more confidence in commercial spaceflight than I would
have had at the beginning," he said. "I've always believed there was a great
commercial role in the unmanned arena, but the more I've thought about it, the
more I think that applies to the human arena as well."
Augustine
also said he has not seen any showstoppers that would prevent NASA from fielding
Ares and Orion.
"All
aggressive technical programs have problems. I've never worked on one that
didn't," he said. "For example, Ares I has some problems. Some of those
problems have not yet been solved. Most are of an engineering nature, as
opposed to requiring new science."
He said while
some of these issues could prove difficult to resolve, they are not unlike
challenges NASA faced in developing the Apollo
lunar program that in 1969 sent humans to the surface of the Moon for the
first time.
"I look
back at the problem Apollo faced at this point in time, and the problems that
Apollo faced in my mind were much more serious than what one sees with the
existing program," he said. "But the fact is that this is a new era, with a new
risk-taking mentality, so I'm not sure that's relevant. But it's interesting."
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