Discovery News February 17, 2003
NASA to Unveil New Space Transport Plans
By Irene Brown, Discovery News
Feb. 17 - With the shuttle fleet grounded in the wake of the Columbia accident and America now dependent on Russia to ferry crews and supplies to the space station, NASA is keenly focused on launching a seven-year development program to create a new space transport.
The program, called the Orbital Space Plane, was unveiled last year. Details were expected to be announced Feb. 3, along with NASA's 2004 spending plan. The loss of Columbia and its seven astronauts two days earlier, however, temporarily shattered NASA's spirit and pushed all other matters into the background. With the accident investigation well under way, NASA plans on Tuesday to turn its attention back to the space plane, with the goal of having a ship in orbit by 2010 to serve as a lifeboat for space station crews.
By 2012, NASA intends to have the space plane ready to launch people to the outpost as well.
"It's reached the point where we need an alternative system to the space station," said Dennis Smith, the program manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "(After the accident), we looked if we could do it faster, but the plan we have in place already is a year faster than what shuttle development took."
NASA tried for years to develop a new reusable spaceship like the shuttle, but found the technological hurdles too great to overcome.
Last year, the old program was split into two: an advanced technologies research and development effort and the Orbital Space Plane, which, like the Russian Soyuz as well as the old U.S. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spaceships, would be launched on expendable, or one-time-use, rockets.
"A fully reusable singe-stage-to-orbit shuttle only makes sense if you're flying its several times a week," said John Pike, a space program analyst with GlobalSecurity.org. "The largely reusable shuttle makes sense if you're flying it several times a month, but if you're flying just several times a year, you basically want to throw away the booster and just reuse the expensive electronics and life support systems."
Whether or not the space plane will be a reusable capsule or a single-use system is not expected to be made clear at first. Instead, reusability likely will become part of studies that will assess cost, performance and technical requirements.
The initial goal of the program, which is expected to cost about $2.4 billion to develop, is to build a spaceship that can serve as a station emergency escape craft.
The Soyuz currently serves that function, though it can carry only three people. NASA and its space station partners have pledged to expand the crew size to six or seven so that it will be adequately staffed to conduct science.
NASA is expected to require the space plane to carry up to four people, though it could be flown with fewer. One option under consideration is develop the spaceship so that it could be flown with cargo instead of a crew, said Smith.
Concurrent with the space plane effort are two related programs to design, build and test an automated rendezvous and docking system and an on-pad escape system that would jettison a crew's capsule to safety in case of an accident at launch.
Safety enhancements, such as more robust thermal shielding and better orbital debris protection, also are expected to be among the program's core requirements.
"Safety will be a key focus," Smith said.
Copyright © 2003, Discovery Communications Inc.
