Posted on 02/27/2003 9:26:08 AM PST by Indy Pendance
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Russian space capsule now docked at the international space station will be used to bring the space station crew back to Earth now that the U.S. shuttle fleet is grounded, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said Thursday.
O'Keefe told a congressional committee that the 16 countries participating in the space station had agreed to use the docked Soyuz capsule to ferry the crew home. Two new residents, one American and one Russian will go up on a fresh Soyuz that will remain attached to the station for the next six months.
With space shuttle flights on hold because of the Columbia disaster, the Russian craft is "the sole means of support for the space station until the shuttle fleet returns to service," said Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Texas, who introduced legislation to allow NASA to help Russia purchase additional spacecraft if President Bush notifies Congress that the vehicles are needed to ensure the safety of the space station crew.
O'Keefe told the House Science Committee that the next long-term crew was in training at the cosmonaut headquarters in Star City, Russia, to be proficient in Soyuz systems. A NASA spokesman said the space agency was not yet ready to identify the two crewmen.
Another Soyuz will be launched in October with the follow-on station crew, O'Keefe said. He added that the station partners have agreed to accelerate the flights of unmanned cargo ships, called Progress. An additional Progress will be launched this year and an extra one next year, he said.
Only one American has ever returned to Earth in a Soyuz spacecraft: the world's first paying space tourist, California businessman Dennis Tito.
The Feb. 1 Columbia space shuttle accident, which killed the seven astronauts, forced NASA to ground the entire shuttle fleet. The shuttle is used to ferry astronauts from Earth to the space station, and a crew change-out flight had been scheduled for March. That flight is indefinitely suspended until the Columbia accident investigation is completed.
The NASA astronauts returning in late April or early May will be Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit, O'Keefe said. Their Russian crewmate, Nikolai Budarin, a former resident of his country's Mir station, has landed in a Soyuz before.
Lampson's bill would exempt NASA from the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000, which forbids payments to Russia. The proposed legislation would allow NASA to make such payments to cover the cost of additional spacecraft.
As a huge proponent of manned space, this is painful thought. As an optimistic pragmatist, however, this is unfortunately what I fear will be the shuttles fate. And so goes the fate of Station as well. In retrospect, our civilian space transportation system had a huge vulnerability, all eggs in one basket.
We have a robust unmmanned launch system, but it will be 10 years minimum to get a new manned vehicle going, and if we keep setting our sites on unrealistic requirements given the time to develop technologies (like single stage to orbit) we will never get there.
It will be a shame to see more billions spent on station go unused.
As I have previously stated, manned space is a (sadly) political creature. Hopefully, the current political powers will have more foresight in its implementation that those in the past.
What would be a disaster, grounding the Shuttle fleet, or using the Soyuz platform?
I just mean the Soyuz capsule. Short story: Russian space program is underfunded, with all their budgetary crises, and thus, like I said before, it's probably just a "disaster waiting to happen". HOPEFULLY I'm wrong of course, but we should either get the fleet up and running again or scrap the space station for now, because I fear a continued reliance on the Soyuz capsules may be a recipe for disaster.
To call our unmanned launch system "robust" is an abuse of the word. It is all based on 40+ year old converted ICBMs.
There is no technical reason this must be the case, but inside the bureaucratic world of NASA, I suppose even engineering obstacles that have been solved again and again are insurmountable obstacles. Maybe it is time to put that tired old organization out to pasture.
Under NASA, a whole new sector of the economy was reduced to a bureaucratic niche.
A reality little known in the public, is that during the station redesign under Klintoon/Goldberg, the US and Russian manned programs were essentially merged. They are one program, funded primarily by us. Talk to anyone in the astronaut corp to confirm this. Like it or not (and I don't like it), the russian program is OUR manned access to space for the duration.
You haven't looked at the new Delta or Atlas lately, have you? They sport pretty impresive numbers.
The Air Force smartly went off and built up reliable unmanned systems following Challenger. Nasa should have been thinking similarly with the manned side, and one could argue they were, but they either were not funded sufficiently or choose not to prioritize funding for a shuttle replacement.
It is a commentary that in our society, if you ask people if manned space is important, 80% will say yes. But if you ask them to prioritize spending, of twelve priorities, NASA will rank near dead last, second only to foriegn aid. That might explain the space budget.
Which numbers are those? The only numbers that really matter are cost. That has been the legacy of launchers: The have been steadily improving in the eyes of the engineers, but in the eyes of the customer, they are the same as they ever were.
I never knew myopia could be terminal until I talked to a launcher designer.
What I keep hearing from so many bureaucrats is that launch costs are stuck where they are for the forseeable future because of technical challenges.
If that is the case, then manned space will continue to be a fool's errand. As things currently sit, every aspect of manned space amounts to little more than pork barrel spending and should be stopped immediately. Of course, because it is pork it has far more staying power than any legitimate expenditure.
But I don't believe the bureaucrats and I have talked with plenty of engineers who don't either. They tell me the problem of lowering launch costs isn't technical so much as political and economic. The history is long and it is out there for anyone who is intellectually honest enough to pursue it, so I won't belabor the point by repeating it here.
Suffice to say that the status quo marches on and of every dollar spent on space ninety cents represents pork or waste. In that environment, hell can freeze over and your only customer will still be government.
I disagree, but there must be a realization that until a cheaper way is developed, space exploration will be expensive. The problems are both technical and political. The technical problems are difficult and solutions will not come cheap. The political problems generally manifest themselves in continuity of funding. Without long term commitment, all the start/stop/start efforts only increase total cost and wasted effort. Sadly, the nature of the federal budget process is such that beyond the next year, funding is an uncertainty.
I disagree, but there must be a realization that until a cheaper way is developed, space exploration will be expensive. The problems are both technical and political. The technical problems are difficult and solutions will not come cheap. The political problems generally manifest themselves in continuity of funding. Without long term commitment, all the start/stop/start efforts only increase total cost and wasted effort. Sadly, the nature of the federal budget process is such that beyond the next year, funding is an uncertainty.
The technical problems have been solved again and again for forty years. The people whining about the technical challenges are NASA bureaucrats wanting every single project to mean employment for life.
Even if you work your way out to the concepts that send NASA bureaucrats hiding under their beds, such as SSTO, you don't find insurmountable technical obstacles.
Rocket engines, thermal protection systems, tanks, these are all relatively mature technologies.
Eventually, some private enterprise (Beal looks like the front runner now) will integrate these systems in a sane way and launch costs will start coming down. Until that happens, the bureaucrats will continue to maximize the dollars spent and minimize the return.
Again, I respectfully disagree. While technologies have matured, the types of beakthroughs we are discussing are the ones that reduce cost from $10000 per pound to orbit to $1000 per pound to orbit. And experience bears out that we aren't there yet.
But all this is diverging from my point, which was simply that strategically, unmanned lift in the US is relatively healthy, where as manned lift is grounded for anywhere from the next two to ten years or more.
Which breakthroughs might those be? Rocket engines exist that can be fired again and again. A more robust thermal protection system is hardly unobtainable. Tanks are no problem. Structure is only a challenge if you are shooting for SSTO mass fraction and plenty of engineers think even that is doable; and if you are wanting to be a pessimist, staging is a mature technology. Flight control systems are a known problem that has been solved again and again.
As far as experience, what experience? The last manned launcher developed was the shuttle; Its development was driven by a political situation that precluded a serious effort at cost reduction.
It has never really been tried. First of all, NASA isn't interested in easy or obvious answers. They aren't going to design a vehicle that is an exercise in engineering with little or no research. Every single proposal to come out of NASA for thirty years has required research, usually lots of it. They aren't interested in taking existing technology and using it, they want to invent new technology.
Since we have been going into space for forty years now, it is ludicrous to suggest new technology is continually a requirement.
In addition, NASA has to secure political backing, which means making everyone happy. It means adopting everyone's requirements and greatly increasing the scope of the project.
Finally, NASA has been poisoning the well for private enterprise for a long time. Anyone thinking of investing in launcher development will invariably seek the opinion of NASA managers, and will invariably be told that no idea outside the hallowed halls of NASA ever has a chance of success. Any effort also faces the grim prospect of marketing themselves to a government likely to develop and subsidize its own launcher efforts. It is hard to sell bread to the baker.
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