Down to Business

President Bush unveils a Fiscal 2006 budget this week that continues support for his plan to explore the inner Solar System with humans, but fiscal realities are already squeezing NASA's detailed exploration plans.

Rising costs to return the space shuttle fleet to service and use it to complete the International Space Station--Bush's mandatory first steps on the way to Mars--are pinching the rest of NASA's program. A number of cuts are in the works, and managers have already eliminated a completely new heavy-lift rocket from consideration as the agency sifts options for getting exploration hardware off the ground.

"We cannot return to the days of Saturn V, when we put all of our eggs in a basket with a few huge, expensive fire-belching rockets," Administrator Sean O'Keefe told a conference on the space exploration program here last week.

The agency has committed some $1.5 billion to develop the technologies that will be needed to send men and women to Mars, using the Moon as a testbed. With most of that money aimed at exploration beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO), the critical task of putting the new hardware into space will likely fall to variants of existing expendable launch vehicles, such as the Atlas V and Delta IV, and perhaps an "evolved launch vehicle" based on space shuttle and other existing components cobbled together for heavy lift.

The new NASA budget, due for official release Feb. 7, won't hit the 5% increase planned last year to pay up-front exploration costs, or even the 3.7% increase called for in the Fiscal 2004 budget runout drafted before Bush issued his exploration directive (AW&ST Jan. 19, 2004, p. 394). Instead, sources said the budget seeks a 2.4% increase.

Even that diminished boost indicates strong White House support for NASA's new program in an era when most other departments and agencies face cuts. But O'Keefe said on Jan. 26 the cost of fixing shuttle weaknesses identified after the Columbia accident stood at $1.5 billion and could be higher. The combination of a smaller-than-planned increase in Fiscal 2006 and the return-to-flight cost growth is squeezing the rest of the budget.

The agency has already let it be known the new budget won't fund a $1-billion robotic mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope (AW&ST Jan. 31, p. 19), and sources last week confirmed a report on the NASA Watch web site that the nuclear-powered Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) will be delayed.

Both efforts had been justified as important for exploration. JIMO was proposed as a testbed for the space nuclear reactor NASA and the Dept. of Energy plan to develop under Project Prometheus for exploration power and propulsion applications. And using a robot to service Hubble could hold valuable lessons for the robotic operations that doubtless will be needed in space and on the lunar and Martian surfaces as the Bush plan proceeds.

O'Keefe's decision to scratch the previously planned human mission to service the Hubble telescope has been a political football on Capitol Hill since it was announced a year ago, and scrubbing the robotic version promises more of the same. At a hearing on Feb. 2, Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee, ranking Democrat on the House Science Space and Aeronautics subcommittee, called for "a hard look at the priorities behind such a cut." Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), the newly named subcommittee chairman, also called for "an open and healthy debate" about NASA's priorities.

In a long valedictory speech here, O'Keefe, who is scheduled to leave NASA at the end of this week, cautioned his audience of contractors and NASA managers against losing the focus on exploration ordered by Bush.

"It's not the two-bit [pork barrel] earmarks," O'Keefe said. "Those are bad enough. It's the things that we promote among ourselves as a community. When we disagree with each other about what the priorities ought to be, and when it doesn't make it into the president's budget submission, we then go find a friendly member of Congress to make sure it stays alive."

Instead, O'Keefe called on the space-industrial complex to "think expeditionary" as it plans missions and develops vehicles to take human crews--and their robotic scouts and supply trains--away from the relative comfort of near-Earth space. That work is already underway as contractors team up for the formal request for proposals Mar. 1 on the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), which will form the nucleus of the "system of systems" that will enable the exploration plan (AW&ST Jan. 31, p. 20).

NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) is using input from 11 concept-study contracts last year as it begins to evaluate the architecture that will be used to get the CEV from low-Earth orbit to the Moon and, ultimately, to Mars. Concepts include the lunar- orbit rendezvous approach used in the Apollo program and missions using the Earth-Moon L-1 lagrangian point as a staging area offering greater flexibility in choosing landing sites on the lunar surface.

THE CONCEPT studies used as a point of departure four separate launches from Earth of payloads sized to the Atlas V or Delta IV Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle--the largest U.S. launch vehicles available today. However, technical talks at the exploration conference suggested there is a concern that a heavier lift capacity will be needed as the exploration program begins to set up human-tended bases on the lunar surface.

With a clean-sheet rocket off the table, launch vehicle planners continue to study a vehicle based on space shuttle components, including the external tank, solid rocket boosters (SRBs) and space shuttle main engines (SSMEs), but without the orbiter and its weighty life-support hardware (AW&ST June 28, 2004, p. 26). Variants that remain under study include both in-line stacks with the payload on top of the external tank and the engines and avionics on the bottom, a single SRB with an upper stage powered by the Apollo-era J-2S engine, and a variant that mounts a cargo carrier on the side of the external tank where the orbiter goes today.

THAT LAST OPTION would make the most use of existing shuttle ground infrastructure, although it wouldn't be able to carry as much payload as the in-line stack. Estimates presented by Bill Rothschild of Boeing on behalf of a consortium that also included three NASA centers--ATK Thiokol, Lockheed Martin and United Space Alliance--had the side-mounted version able to lift about 77 tons to a 220-mi., 28.5-deg. orbit, while the in-line version could lift more than 100 tons. The SRB/J-2S medium lifter, composed of human-rated components, could lift the 20-ton CEV.

Rothschild said all of the estimated payloads took into account the propellant weight that would be needed for an upper stage to provide the 400 ft./sec. velocity change needed to circularize the orbit. Rocketdyne, which makes the SSME, has proposed several cost-cutting changes to the expensive reusable engine to make an expendable variant, including replacing the hand-brazed, liquid hydrogen-cooled nozzle with a single-use version.

World News & Analysis



NASA Accelerating Robotic and Human Exploration Planning

Aviation Week & Space Technology

02/07/2005, page 32



Craig Covault

Orlando, Fla.





Work accelerates to align robotic and human exploration

Coupling Moon/Mars

The joint NASA/industry team laying out the new U.S. plan for the future robotic and eventual human exploration of Mars will meet this week to formulate an initial outline of a new Mars-exploration road map.

A key tenet of the plan will be to form a course that can be closely aligned with a similar effort underway for renewed robotic and human exploration of the Moon. The lunar team will meet again in late March.

The Mars effort this week at the Carnegie Institution in Washington will focus on how NASA's current "follow-the-water" strategy for Mars can transition to human-mission planning.

The Carnegie sessions will also focus on how Mars robotic sample-return missions, scheduled to start around 2013, can be used additionally to guide planning for human missions after 2020, says Doug Stetson, an advanced Mars study manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a deputy for advanced planning and integration at NASA headquarters.

Progress in the ambitious NASA lunar and Mars replanning effort was reviewed here at the First Space Exploration Conference by various managers, including Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and chief of NASA Advanced Planning.

A recurring theme at the Exploration Conference was how best to couple robotic and human operations.

There are 13 such NASA/industry road map teams looking at mission areas. They include a key effort to shift work and facilities on the International Space Station toward "expeditionary"-related science directly supporting lunar and Mars exploration goals.

Large NASA/industry road map teams devoted to nuclear power systems, solar studies and the search for Earth-like planets will also meet throughout the country in mid-February.

There is also a major effort getting underway to integrate the output of these teams with each other and with separate "capability" and "core competency" assessments in NASA and industry, said Bernard Seery, head of advanced planning and integration at NASA headquarters.

Each team of more than 20 experts comprises about one-third each of NASA, industry and academia members, said Elachi.

Both the lunar and Mars teams held organizational meetings in January, and they will continue to hold more mission-specific sessions until they can provide draft recommendations to the National Research Council for oversight and review by early summer. This will be followed up in the fall by more formal recommendations from each team. All of this activity is a direct response to carry out the Bush administration's new Exploration Vision for NASA.

Use of a deep-drilling Mars robotic lander to obtain subsurface data is a future option. Road map team is defining Mars goals, supporting both robotic and human exploration.Credit: NASA/JPL

THE OUTPUT ALSO will be used to make major changes in the overall decision- making process in NASA toward exploration planning across the board, said Mary Kicza, associate deputy administrator for systems integration. "I have been with the agency for 25 years and never seen such a high level of cross coordination," Kicza told the Exploration Conference.

The lunar team plans its draft by April, said Lisa Guerra of the Exploration Systems mission directorate.

The definition of alternative road maps to maintain planning flexibility will be a hallmark of each team. At its initial organizational session at the Johnson Space Center in late January, the lunar team looked at four separate road map alternatives:

*Evolutionary buildup with modest lunar robotic sorties.

*An "outpost" architecture similar to the current U.S. McMurdo Station in Antarctica, where the base camp is used to stage short human or robotic forays to more distant areas.

*An "expedited" Moon-to-Mars strategy involving less lunar surface development before moving to human Mars operations.

*A commercially-based architecture for lunar operations supporting Mars planning.

The lunar team is also posing key questions, such as how long it will take to transition from a manned-lunar to a manned-Mars focus and how long it will take to develop manned Mars mission technologies on the Moon.

The Mars team's initial meeting at the California Institute of Technology addressed such issues as the role of human explorers in satisfying science objectives on Mars and the near-term actions NASA can take to facilitate critical Mars mission decision-making, Stetson said. A key issue was coupling the "science-driven Mars robotic program with the emerging human program," he said.

"We want a series of exciting missions continually before the public to maintain national interest in the exploration program," said Kicza.