December 11 News Items

No Decision on Orion's Landing Method (Source: Florida Today)
NASA has not decided whether the next generation of vehicles taking humans into space will return to Earth for a landing on water, ground or both, agency administrators said Monday. "We have not picked a landing mode for the Orion yet," said a NASA official. NASA had hoped to make that decision by this month for Orion. As a matter of overall safety, the agency prefers the water landings. One of the main considerations is a 1,500-pound airbag system that will be part of Orion's landing design. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, suggested that NASA postpone plans for a crucial July 2008 "preliminary design review" of Ares. The review is intended to kick off a major flurry of fine-tuned planning.

Editorial: Space Program's Real Risk is Believing NASA (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
It seems the shuttle is too expensive to fly past 2010. Or too risky. I recall former NASA director Sean O'Keefe telling me the shuttle was good to go until 2030. The shuttle's life span seems directly correlated to how long NASA wants to fly the shuttle. Obviously, NASA doesn't want to fly it much longer. The agency's once-beloved space plane is eating up money that could be spent going to the moon and Mars. The older it gets, the more money it munches. So the agency is undercutting those in Congress who want flights to continue. Risk is relative in the world of NASA. There is the risk of exploding shuttles. And there is the even greater risk of imploding budgets. To understand how NASA games the latter, look at the space station.

When NASA needed the station to keep its budget fat and its shuttles flying, it promised grand scientific discoveries at a discount price. The money flowed out of Washington and into key congressional districts. Over time the cost skyrocketed, and expectations soured. But billions already had been invested. So there was a battle between those in Congress who wanted to stop the bleeding and those who only saw jobs in their districts. The station barely survived. So now we have these two boondoggles weighing NASA down as it seeks to move on to the moon and Mars. True to form, NASA hopes to dump as much money into this new program as quickly as possible, hoping to reach that point of no return.

The rush is understandable. George W. Bush soon will be gone, leaving us more than $9 trillion in debt and with a Medicare system scheduled for bankruptcy in 2019. Here is a better idea: Forget the moon. Forget Mars. NASA sold us a space station, and it should deliver one, complete with all the research capacities NASA promised. Instead, the agency now is blowing off the $1.5 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which scientists from 16 countries have spent a decade building. It's supposed to go on the space station, but NASA doesn't want to pay for the shuttle flight. All of which shows NASA's promises are about as believable as its risk assessments.

Editorial: Problems with NASA's Return to the Moon Plan (Source: SpaceRef.com)
This past week has given me confirmation of something that has been a growing dread and suspicion by many of us in the space community regarding our latest return to the Moon effort. The Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) is being suffocated. It is literally having the life choked out of it. The reason that I place the VSE on the critical list of space exploration efforts are many and there is no one major death strike but a lot of little bleeding cuts, some of which have started to become public. The agency -- which is barely beyond the viewgraph engineering phase for the design of the new exploration launch vehicles -- is delaying the preliminary design review by half a year! The "gap" where the U.S. will have no access to space, much less our own orbiting national laboratory, has grown by nearly a year for every year since the new effort began.

If the engineering difficulties that are whispered in the halls at various NASA centers are anywhere near true, then the gap will not close and Congress may soon act to direct NASA to come up with yet another plan. International politics are unlikely to come to the rescue here (as happened with the Space Station) as NASA has barely nodded in the direction of our partners in space regarding the VSE. For all of these signals of patient ill health the worst was articulated this week at a panel discussion. The statement was that the VSE has failed to connect to the American people. That single sentence goes to the heart of the problem, one that is far larger than missed schedules, delayed milestones and a dearth of funding. Despite the fact that year-in and year-out, Americans typically support the space program by a two-to-one margin, often the rhetoric, like perception, becomes reality. Visit http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1254 to view the article.