American president-elect Barack Obama's recently chosen NASA transition team has come up with a long list of questions (five pages of them) for the agency. If the implications behind the questionnaire addressed to the agency's officials are speculated upon, the fate of some of NASA's most important programs and missions may enter a strange course. Perhaps they should be perceived only as important aspects that ought to be known before taking the proper decisions.

For instance, some of the questions in the list referred to the sum that could be saved by canceling the development of the Ares I rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle during next year. Although Obama promised a $2 billion infusion into NASA's budget in order to reduce the gap between the retired space shuttle fleet and its replacement system, among other things, he did not specifically name any of the two craft.

 

The list contained references to the canceling of Ares 1, the Ares 5 heavy-lift cargo launcher or the Orion capsule, but not to similar approaches concerning other NASA projects like the Mars Science Laboratory, which is way over budget, or the James Webb Space Telescope. Both the near-term canceling and the long-term budget savings linked to the canceling process had to be assessed.

 

The scenarios presented by the questionnaire envisioned dropping works on the Ares 1 and concentrating on Ares 5, resizing the Orion vehicle and adapting an Atlas 5 or Delta 4 expendable rocket to be able to launch it, or even "[e]stimate the feasibility of designing a resized Orion capsule that could be launched by international launch vehicles such as the [European] Ariane 5 or the [Japanese] H2A," as Space indicates. Comment requests were declined by both sides, represented by Lori Garver, leader of the Obama NASA transition team and NASA spokesman David Mould.

 

John Logsdon, a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's space policy expert, believes further interpretation of the questionnaire should be avoided, "After all, these are the questions that everyone is asking, and the transition team certainly must get NASA's best answers to them". Charlie Precourt, vice president of Alliant Techsystems' NASA space launch systems, is confident that Ares 1 / Orion is the best replacement for the retired fleet, "Alternatives that could be brought to the table today don't get a pass on that because NASA requirements are going to need to be met," he explained, adding that the preliminary design review "is not a couple-of-months effort. It puts Ares a few years ahead of any alternatives at this point".