Henry Spencer takes a look at the increasingly public problems with NASA’s Ares I and Ares V boosters, which are designed to carry the agency’s new Orion spacecraft to Earth orbit and the moon, respectively.
NASA thought it could easily adapt legacy shuttle hardware to the task. Not so much. Considerable upgrades were required, especially after Orion began to gain weight. That, in turn, caused the weight and cost of the rocket to grow as the schedule slipped. Meanwhile, Ares V might not be as cost effective to fly as NASA has stated.
Spencer believes that NASA’s savior could be its investment in the COTS program, which is providing funding to Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation to develop commercial transportation to the International Space Station. SpaceX is developing a human and cargo-rated versions of its Dragon spacecraft, which Musk says could also fly to the moon. Orbital’s program is building a robotic freighter.
“If COTS works out well and Ares continues to blunder on, I expect that Congress will quickly run out of patience and force NASA’s hand by cutting off Ares funding,” Spencer writes.
“The one ray of hope for NASA is that with the White House about to change hands, there will almost certainly be a new NASA administrator next year. Immediately upon assuming office, he or she might declare the Ares programme a write-off and order a major change of direction, blaming the problems on the previous administration. But this would have to be done quickly, while it’s still plausible to blame his or her predecessor.”
NASA’s Orion spacecraft apparently has a viable escape engine should its underpowered Ares rocket be able to lift the capsule off the ground. NASA’s full press release follows.
HAMPTON, Va. - NASA completed a full-scale rocket motor test on Thursday, July 17, to further development of the Orion jettison motor, which will separate the spacecraft’s launch abort system from the crew module during launch. Orion, the Constellation Program’s crew exploration vehicle now under development, will fly to the International Space Station and be part of the spaceflight system to conduct sustained human exploration of the moon.
NASA and Aerojet successfully fired the jettison motor at the Aerojet facility in Sacramento, Calif. The demonstration is part of a series of developmental tests that pave the way for delivery of the motor to be used for the first full-scale test of the launch abort system at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico late this year.
Continue reading ‘Well, the Escape Engine Works at Least….’
Russia to Double Space Exploration Expenditure in 2009 - Agency
Interfax-AVN
“Russian budgetary expenditure on space exploration will more than double in 2009, Federal Space Agency Deputy Director Vitaly Davydov told Interfax- AVN at the Farnborough Air Show.
“‘The Finance Ministry has informed us of budgetary allocations planned for the federal space program in 2009. I am glad to say that the allocations will more than double,’ he said.”
Orion program over budget, behind schedule
Florida Today
The cost problems include an $80 million overrun on a motor system. The Orion spacecraft’s current design remains too heavy for the proposed Ares 1 rocket. Software development, heat-shield testing and a host of other complex work remains either behind schedule or over budget. Those are just a few of dozens of serious challenges and issues, many of which are noted as ‘worsening.’
NASA has repeatedly stressed its aggressive internal 2013 target required few technical surprises and stable budget. The new report indicates neither of those conditions exist.
Congratulations are apparent due to NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. He is now the proud father of a five pound bouncing baby year gap in U.S. human spaceflight.
Doug Cooke, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration, confirmed this week that the space agency has given up on its Quixote like efforts to get its new Orion spacecraft flying by 2013. However, he still expects they will be able to launch its new human space vehicle in March 2015 - almost five years after it retires the space shuttle.
The main problem: money. NASA has not been getting enough of it under George W. Bush - who proposed the program in the first place. His plan to send humans back to the moon and on to Mars has been apparently limping along like Tiny Tim since he announced it four years ago.
With the economy slipping, banks failing, mortgages defaulting, inflation accelerating, gas prices rising, the dollar sinking, unemployment increasing, the national debt soaring, and two wars a-waging, the next President already has his hands tied trying to find more money for NASA. And without the extra funding, the schedule will likely slip even further as engineers struggle to overcome numerous technical problems with the Orion capsule and its shuttle-derived Ares boosters.
As for the technical difficulties, Cooke’s reaction is pretty much what you’d expect: it’s all normal for projects like this, nothing to see here, please move along. “What you’re seeing is sausage-making,” he told Newsweek. “I’m really satisfied with the work that’s getting done.”
Could be a pork product. Or the chickens - in the form of Mr. Griffin’s mission architecture - are coming home to roost and crapping all over everything.
NASA has released the schedule for its remaining ten space shuttle missions. The plan includes nine flights to the International Space Station and a Hubble servicing mission in October. Endeavour is set to close out the shuttle era beginning on May 31, 2010 - about 10 months short of the 30th anniversary of the program’s inaugural mission on April 12, 1981.
Meanwhile, NASA has ramped work on the shuttle’s successor, Constellation. In lieu of actual test flights (which won’t begin until next year), the space agency has created a really snazzy video showing how Constellation will place us on a path back to the moon beginning in 2013….or 2015.
And how is work going on the Ares rockets and Orion capsule? Officially, everything’s coming up Milhouse. In fact, you can read about how well things are going on NASA’s official Constellation website. Or read this story about Ares in the Houston Chronicle.
Others aren’t so sure.
Continue reading ‘Space Shuttle to Remain Forever 29; Successor Program Going Great…or Not’
NASA’s preliminary design review (PDR) for its new Orion spacecraft has slipped two months as engineers continue to work through one minor little problem: the capsule is too heavy for the Ares I rocket to launch to orbit.
NASA Space Flight reports that engineers are hoping to deal with the system’s negative-mass-to-orbit problem in order to conduct the PDR in November. Weight and performance problems have long dogged the agency’s Apollo-style capsule and shuttle-derived booster.
Quoting an internal NASA document, the website says that the slip in the PDR will ripple through Orion’s schedule. The Critical Design Review will slip more than six months from September 25, 2009 to April 2, 2010. However, the agency expects the Design Certification Review to slip only two months from mid-January to March 2013.
NASA Spaceflight also reports that engineers are trying to work out scenarios for astronauts to survive up to 36 hours should Orion land in the ocean far from assistance.
The NASA Inspector General released a blistering report on Monday claiming that the agency broke the law when it created a key advisory board for its Orion lunar program and stocked it full of advisers who were employed by and stockholders in the companies they are supposed to oversee.
“NASA did not establish the Orion SRB [Standing Review Board] in accordance with Federal law or NASA guidance,” the report’s Executive Summary reads. “The Orion SRB meets the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) definition of an advisory committee. Although FACA committees must be established in accordance with FACA and NASA Policy Directive (NPD) 1150.11, ‘Federal Advisory Committee Act Committees,’ September 22, 2004, the Orion SRB was not.
“Had NASA initially recognized the Orion SRB as an advisory committee subject to FACA, NASA’s ethics process associated with advisory committee participation would have been triggered, resulting in a focus on board member independence and conflict of interest resolution. Aside from these considerations, independence is a requirement for SRB participation; however, of the 19 members of the Orion SRB, 6 (32 percent) were not independent of the Orion Project.”
The SRB’s chairman, former Skylab astronaut Edward Gibson, is a senior vice president and stockholder in Orion contractor SAIC, as is fellow member and former NASA flight director Neil Hutchinson, the Associated Press reports. Another unidentified SRB member works for SAIC.
Continue reading ‘IG: NASA Broke Law, Appointed Foxes to Oversee Orion Henhouse’
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin was in New Jersey last week, promoting his agency’s efforts at exploring and settling space as the ultimate way of ensuring humanity’s survival in the face of a likely global holocaust, NJHerald.com reports.
Speaking before an audience at the County College of Morris, Griffin played a video narrated by physicist Stephen Hawking that showed the Earth shrinking into the vast cosmos. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers,” Hawking intoned ominously. “I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space.”
Griffin heartily agreed, saying that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then the video is worth “a thousand pictures.” He then proceeded to make a pitch for why it’s also worth billions in tax dollars for his space agency’s efforts to explore and settle Earth orbit, the moon and Mars.
“People ask me why we’re going back to the moon. Haven’t we already been there?” Griffin said. “Well, yes, we have. But using that critereon, then Spain should have stopped colonizing the New World. We’re returning to the moon both to learn how to go further and for the science we can learn about the moon, on the moon.”
Continue reading ‘Mike Griffin’s New Math: 1 Video = 1,000,000 Words + 17,614,000,000 Dollars’
NASA needs to make a number of crucial improvements in its Exploration Technology Development Program (ETDP) if it wants to land humans on the moon and Mars, according to a new National Research Council report.
In an interim report released on Friday, a NRC review committee said that NASA is underfunding research in key areas and has left “mission critical tests” out of its schedule due to budgetary and time constraints.
“Although near term budgetary pressures are clear, the need for adequate testing is a recurrent theme in program failure reports and should be addressed,” the reviewers wrote.
The committee found that NASA was focusing too much of its technology development on getting astronauts back to the moon. “The committee did not find evidence that the extensibility of technologies to the exploration of Mars is a routine consideration. A possible consequence is the development of technologies that will not be extensible to the full VSE,” the report states.
Continue reading ‘NRC: NASA Should Beef up Tech Development for Lunar, Mars Missions’
AEROJET AND ORBITAL SCIENCES PRESS RELEASE
April 7, 2008
Aerojet and Orbital Sciences Corporation announced today that together the two companies successfully conducted a static firing of the jettison motor, a key component of the Launch Abort System (LAS) for NASA’s Orion next generation human spaceflight program.
Orion’s LAS, being developed by Orbital, is a new capability that will allow the astronaut crew to safely escape in the event of an emergency during pad operations or during the ascent phase of the flight.
Aerojet is responsible for the jettison motor, which would be used on every mission to jettison the LAS when it is no longer needed. The successful test firing of the jettison motor increases the technical readiness of the LAS and is a major operational accomplishment as the first full-scale rocket propulsion test for the Orion program.
Continue reading ‘Aerojet and Orbital Successful Fire Orion Jettison Motor’