Members of the government panel reviewing NASA’s human spaceflight program said Tuesday that the life of the International Space Station should be extended past its planned demise in 2016.
After the shuttle Endeavour, which undocked from the space station Tuesday afternoon, returns to Earth, NASA has seven flights left on its schedule before the shuttle fleet is to be retired in September 2010. At that point the space station, under construction since 1998, would finally be complete, but current plans call for operating it only through 2015 before it is deliberately disposed of in the ocean the following year.
Part of the Obama administration’s charge to the 10-member review panel, which made its recommendation Tuesday at a public hearing in Houston, was to look at extending the station’s life. But the panel is also to consider how NASA is to push beyond low-Earth orbit in the coming years and fit the entire program within tight financial constraints.
The meeting was the second held by the panel, which is led by Norman R. Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin. At the first meeting, last month in Washington, the members listened to an array of information and opinions from others. On Tuesday, they began debating among themselves what options they will offer to the administration at the end of next month.Continue reading the main story
“We think all the options going forward should continue I.S.S. extension in some form,” said Sally K. Ride, a former NASA astronaut who was the first American woman in space.
Dr. Ride, who led a subcommittee looking at the space station, said the schedule for the remaining seven shuttle flights had little cushion left and was likely to slip into 2011, at an additional cost of $1.5 billion.
The shuttles can carry a far greater load into orbit than any other rockets now in use, and can also bring heavy items back to the ground. “We’re putting I.S.S. in a very fragile situation the moment we retire shuttle,” Dr. Ride said.
With one extra external fuel tank available, one more shuttle flight could be flown in 2012, at a cost of $2.7 billion, she said.
Another possibility would be to fly one or two shuttle missions through 2014, Dr. Ride said, but reviving the manufacturing lines used for the shuttle would make sense only if NASA canceled its plans for its next-generation rockets and switched to a shuttle-derived design.
Another member of the panel, Edward F. Crawley, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cautioned that continuing present programs would delay plans for returning to the Moon or aiming for Mars.
“This is NASA’s conundrum at the highest level,” Dr. Crawley said, “which is that the agency really doesn’t in its current budgetary structure have the resources to continue a world-class, world-leading space program and also simultaneously develop the next step.”
The panel members will continue their discussions at two more public meetings this week, in Huntsville, Ala., on Wednesday in Cocoa Beach, Fla., on Thursday.Continue reading the main story