14 DAY TRIAL // In an unexpected turn of events, the Obama administration seems intent to launch a full review of NASA plans for the future, this week. The report will assess whether the Constellation Project, which involves the ARES array of delivery systems, the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, and the Altair Lunar Lander, is the best course of action for the country, in its plans to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020. Insiders at the White House, as well as sources at the space agency, have revealed that the plan will most likely be set in motion next week, and that the President expects the conclusions by this fall, if a panel of experts can be assembled in the allotted time-frame.
According to the plans devised at NASA, the Project will ensure that America regains its orbital capabilities by 2015, when the first journey to the International Space Station using proprietary vehicles is scheduled. These same outlines also suggest that the first unmanned lunar mission of the new series could be attempted by 2018, and that the first four-astronaut crew could arrive on Earth's natural satellite by 2020, at the latest.
But, over the past few months, these plans have come under increased criticism from all sides, mostly due to the fact that delays in the design and development stages have driven the initially estimated costs up, and the launch dates even further away. The space agency also wants to retire the space shuttles by the end of 2010, despite the fact that none of the three spacecraft has carried out even half of its estimated mission numbers. However, engineers at NASA say that the vehicles are under too much strain, and that missions beyond 2010 would jeopardize the safety of the astronauts they carry.
The results of the review will mostly affect the Kennedy Space Center, as employees here risk some 10,000 jobs, if the shuttle program is retired. As a whole, the agency itself risks losing a large number of highly trained, highly skilled professionals to the private sector, without the certainty that they will return in 2015, when the first ARES launch is scheduled to take place. Critics of the shuttle withdrawal plan say that there are numerous rocket designs other than ARES that would allow the US to shorten the five-year gap between the withdrawal and the completion of the Constellation Project.
“I don't agree that there is a better approach for the money, but if there were, so what? Any proposed approach would need to be enormously better to justify wiping out four years' worth of solid progress,” the former NASA Administrator, Michel Griffin, who resigned from the job in January, argued recently. He made the statement in a speech last month, while talking to a conference at the National Space Club. Griffin was the one who selected the Project from many others, back in 2005, PhysOrg reports.
“I think the people who are going to oversee this want to take another hard look at this. And there are people in some quarters, not all, who say that the study done in 2005 might have been shaded in such a way to lead you to the current architecture and [the review] now wants to take a look at whether [the Project] is the right answer,” National Air and Space Museum curator Roger Launius shared. The 2005 study was ordered by Griffin, and established that the agency shouldn't try “beefing up” existing rocket models, and that it should proceed with building one from scratch.