NASA’s Constellation Program: The Back Story….
A brief review of recent NASA history might be instructive in understanding what the Obama Administration wants to do with the space program. The rationale behind the human spaceflight plan is pretty simple, actually. Much of it is getting lost in the thicket of details.
For the last five years, there has been a strong undercurrent of dislike for the Constellation architecture. In particular, Ares I was seen as too expensive, too complicated, and too long in development. The general belief among critics is that NASA’s plan to adapt existing shuttle hardware led it into a cul-de-sac. The process was so complicated that it had all the costs of building a new rocket from scratch but the drawbacks of doing so with legacy hardware.
There was always a feeling that for orbital missions, NASA could have human-rated Delta IV or Atlas V. That would have been easier and cheaper. It would have freed the space agency up to work on a real heavy-lift vehicle to go beyond low Earth orbit.
The Bush Administration looked into these options, but did not deviate from the program of record. Nor would it fund that program properly. Once the Bush Administration ended, that debate was reopened. And it is clear that critics of Ares gained the upper hand under the current administration.
In the meantime, NASA has funded COTS. That program looks like it could create two viable rockets, the Falcon 9 and Taurus II, with cargo freighters to serve the International Space Station. Those systems potentially could be upgraded for crew transport.
So, NASA now has at least four potential options on rockets. Three of these boosters are produced by companies that have long histories in rocketry. The fourth is being done by a start-up.
The Obama Administration is wagering that at least one of these bets will hit. Perhaps several of them. Thus, Charles Bolden’s often repeated statement that the U.S. is aiming for redundant domestically available access to space. Something it didn’t have with the space shuttle.
One of the major objections to the plan is that it does not set a specific date by which NASA will send humans beyond LEO. This seems to be a practical nod toward budget realities. It’s also an acknowledgment that with Constellation, the moon program wasn’t very realistic.
But, this is where Obama’s plan gets really interesting: it shifts space policy from destinations (ISS, moon, Mars) to a state of being. And that state is a low Earth orbit that is commercially viable for space stations, tourism, industrial development and eventual settlement.
In essence, it’s a government agency putting itself out of the business of orbital transportation, an area it has been in for nearly 50 years. That’s a pretty big change. And one that probably surprises many conservatives used to calling the Obama Administration as socialist.
How could this work? Consider one scenario:
In 2014, Bigelow Aerospace launches the first of seven modules into orbit for its private space station. The following year, the first crew launches to the station aboard one of the commercial systems that NASA has helped to create. Bigelow’s station is successful, the company plans more stations, and the commercial crew companies have plenty of work as they haul cargo and crews to private stations and ISS.
With orbital transport secure, NASA accelerates work on heavy-lift vehicles, orbital refueling stations, and other technologies required to go to the moon, Mars or asteroids. It could use COTS-style procurement techniques to work with the private sector. One of those projects could be adapting Bigelow’s flight proven orbital hardware for use on other worlds.
Sometime in the early 2020’s, a NASA funded heavy-lift vehicle roars off the pad at Cape Canaveral carrying a Bigelow built lunar base. The first crew follows a short time later in a smaller rocket that refuels on orbit. They land on the moon and activate humanity’s first permanent base on the lunar surface.
This is one possible scenario of the future. If the commercial sector grows over the next decade, there could be many others.
5 responses to “NASA’s Constellation Program: The Back Story….”
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good post
fix “one or viable” and “falcon 1”
Thanks. Error corrected….
ISS is a huge boondoggle a cluster of tin cans in a weightless environment that will destroy the human body in a matter of months. The Russians spent years in MIR only to learn that space kills slowly but surely. The ISS sucks away millions into a worthless black hole. So under FLEX UP we now waste billions flying to and from for the next 10 to 20 years. ISS is a distraction a dead-end a relic of a by gone blunder. But ISS is all FLEX has and it appears all FLEX plans to have until 2020-2030. Bolden said it plain as day there are no plans for HLV flights only to develop HLV technology but not to actually fly it …what the FLEX is that? Now FLEX = look but don’t touch and look but don’t fly. Not that I believe we need to develop a HLV capability. But why waste millions and years to study it then not to ever fly it? This FLEX-UP sounds just like the past forty stymied years in LEO. VSE was created to break the status quo of go no where, and endless white paper studies, to end the white elephant space shuttle and ISS that have sucked up NASA funding for past forty years. VSE was the key it always was “shoot the moon” and it still is and it always will be. Granted Griffin’s constellation was a great example of management gone bad and mad. I would not want to see it continued another day. But to chuck VSE in favor of FLEX UP is an enormous blunder that will stymie US manned space flight and commercial efforts for decades to come. The moon is the gateway to the cosmos. Going commercial is a wise move but doing it under the FLEX-UP plan is a sickening OMG what have we done distraction and tragedy. The Chinese are LOL and we are soon in for a rude awakening. NACA X-program was an amazing success with a focused goal of going higher and faster. The NACA that I loved and knew was not a random FLEX-UP style of program. It was an accelerated focused hi-risk incremental series of developments; first and foremost it was reusable. And it was heavily funded and driven by the Air Force and motivated by the Soviet threat to national security. By adopting FLEX the United States has relinquished its hold on the high ground and its claim to being the technology leader of the world.
Having a variety of launch providers and a focus on LEO will be healthy for the space sector, I believe. Keeping LEO a useful (and for some, profitable) environment is best served by denser occupation of it, and commercializing it, not by minimizing use of it.
For example, the LEO debris threat is best addressed by developing a cleanup system for collecting and disposing of satellites — in the atmosphere, in high parking orbits, and perhaps in orbital depots until salvage and materials recycling become economical. How about a probablistic emissions trading market for space debris, open to all comers? It’s long past time to take out the trash. Let’s farm it out to the private sector.
But this environmental maintenance should be just one part of a general, evolving system of making LEO a place where many things are happening that used to happen on the ground: fuel storage, spacecraft refueling, construction, repair, and the launching of payloads (including human ones, eventually) to higher orbits, to the moon and on interplanetary missions. We’ll know things are really starting to cook when we see a GEO comsat go to LEO first, then get fueled for station-keeping at an orbital depot and taken to GEO with a specialized ferry craft built in space.
This scenario necessarily means fewer astronauts for now. Most of the actual control and monitoring could and should be done from Earth — but let’s face it, that’s already true now. LEO, MEO and GEO need to become better internetworked for such purposes, but that’s happening on its own. Just the other day, I was reading about how sat-phone-in-satellite was planned for an LEO satellite, for 24×7 comm availability. Expect to see more robotic arms, and expect to see more of them run from Earth than from space. The EVA space-suit glove is productivity bottleneck, it needs to go. We might end up with more astronauts in the end, but it’s better to get there by having more paying tourists making human space travel ever cheaper.
Rand Simberg, with whom I seldom agree (on anything), put a lot of the recent ruckus on the Right rather nicely: “This is the most truly visionary space policy ever (and that includes the Apollo speech), yet a lot of people are cavilling about it because it was proposed by Barack Obama. This is stupid.”
Some of those people will eventually figure out that Obama is both a centrist and a closet space nut, one who is not going to let this particular crisis go to waste if he can possibly help it. The others? Their heads will continue to explode, as heads so often do when they contain many tightly-wound contradictions.
Nice summary of the last few years. The end of Constellation is the first Obama Administration proposal that I actually support. Obama is hardly a “centrist”, but I’m happy to support good proposals wherever they come from.