March 15 News Items

Delays Threaten Station Timetable, Future Flights May Be Scrubbed (Source: Florida Today)
NASA's task to fix a hail-hammered shuttle fuel tank creates uncertainties about its ability to resume International Space Station assembly this spring and launch European and Japanese science labs by year's end. A potential three-month delay in the next shuttle flight raises questions about agency plans to finish building and outfitting the station by a September 2010 deadline set by President Bush. But officials hope Atlantis and six astronauts can set sail during a launch period from April 22 through May 21. Otherwise, the crew will not fly before June 8.

NASA plans to launch 16 station construction and supply missions before the shuttle fleet is retired. Five flights are to launch this year. The last mission will launch in July 2010. Further delays could force NASA to cancel flights. Two supply runs would be candidates. Independent safety experts consider those missions crucial to operating the station until at least 2016. They also question whether NASA should press ahead with the $100 billion project if the outpost can't be completed as planned.

Griffin Remarks on Shuttle Retirement (Source: NasaSpaceFlight.com)
"We must recognize that 'the future' really does not, and cannot, start until after 2010," said Mike Griffin in reference to the 2010 shuttle retirement date. "Until then, we are engaged in completing a long-standing commitment to the International Space Station, with no other option besides the Space Shuttle to do it...The Shuttle offers truly stunning capability, greater than anything we will see for a long time, but the expense of owning and operating it, or any similar system, is simply too great. Any new system, to be successful, must offer a much, much lower fixed cost of ownership."

"The Space Shuttle was designed to be cost effective at a weekly flight rate, a goal that was never credible, if for no reason other than the fact that the funding for so many payloads to fly on it was never remotely available. And, if there were a predictable requirement for 50-60 government-sponsored payloads to be flown annually, that fact should be treated as a market opportunity for a private, not government, space transportation enterprise. A government human spaceflight system must be designed to be cost effective at the half-dozen or so flights per year that we can expect to fly."

Griffin Remarks on Future Exploration Systems (Source: NasaSpaceFlight.com)
"By 2020 we will have [a lunar transport] capability, and with it choices to make. We can choose between a lunar program devoted to sortie missions, or one devoted to building up a lunar outpost. And we can choose between the level of effort we intend to focus on lunar activities vs. initiating development for Mars missions...In company with other space agencies around the world, we at NASA have focused on an outpost-centered lunar exploration strategy...preferred over a sortie-only strategy for the reasons that it provides a much more effective avenue for international partnership, and because it provides the greatest opportunity to learn on the Moon what we need to know to go to Mars."

"By 2022 the ISS will be definitely behind us...the value of the work being done onboard...will be judged not to be worth the cost of sustaining its aging systems, and it will be brought down...Let us say that in 2022 we will begin a sustained lunar program of exploration and development consisting of three manned missions (two outpost crew rotations and one sortie) and one unmanned cargo mission per year, utilizing three Orion/Ares I vehicles and four Ares V launches."

"By the 2020's we will be well positioned to begin the Mars effort in earnest. The lunar campaign will have stabilized; a human-tended outpost will be well established; we will have extensive long-duration space experience in both zero - and low - gravity conditions, and it will be time to bundle these lessons and move on to Mars - which does not imply that we will bring lunar activities to an end...My prediction is that the Moon will prove to be far more interesting, and far more relevant to human affairs, than many today are prepared to believe. But by the early 2020s, it will be time to assign a stable level of support for lunar activities, and set out for Mars...We expect the Orion crew vehicle (or a modest upgrade of it) to provide the primary transportation from Earth to whatever transportation node is used for the assembly of the Mars ship, and to be the reentry vehicle in which the crew returns home at the end of the voyage."