NASA Discusses Possible Manned Commercial Flights To Transport Crew To International Space Station
Talks Commence On International Participation In U.S. Orion-Ares Missions To Moon, And Japan Also Hopes For Its Own Manned Lunar Mission
Space Shuttle Discovery wrapped up the two-week STS-124 Mission with a picture-perfect landing in the sun at 11:15 a.m. ET Saturday at Kennedy Space Center, marking the halfway point between the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in October 2010.
After that, the United States will have no manned space flight program for half a decade, becoming dependent upon the Russian Soyuz vehicles to transport American astronauts between Earth and the International Space Station (ISS) until the first manned flight of the next-generation U.S. spaceship system, Orion-Ares, in 2015.
That five-year gap can’t be whittled down to anything much less than four years, even if Congress provides billions of extra dollars, because limited space-flight support facilities won’t be able to handle both shuttle flights and work on Orion-Ares simultaneously, Bill Gerstenmaier, associate NASA administrator for space operations, said in a post-Discovery landing news conference Saturday afternoon.
The 5.7 million-mile Discovery voyage was the last space shuttle mission for almost a third of a year, until the STS-125 Mission of Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off Oct. 8 to repair and refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope.
During the STS-124 Mission, Discovery carried an immense Japanese laboratory to the ISS, and helped further sleuthing as to just what is impairing movement of a solar alpha rotary joint (SARJ), a crucial mechanism on the space station that permits giant solar arrays to point toward the sun so they generate maximum electrical power for the station.
Trundle bearing assemblies may be taken up to the station to help fix the SARJ.
The Japanese laboratory called Kibo (Hope) is so large it is being hauled up to the space station in three sections. This was the second shuttle mission to carry a segment of the lab, involving a bus-sized segment called the Japanese Pressurized Module, or JPM. Huge and heavy, at 37 feet long and 32,000 pounds in the gravitational pull down on Earth, it is the largest module on the space station.
Astronauts conducted three spacewalks to install and activate the JPM and install its robotic arm.
Then the Japanese logistics module that was hauled to the space station in March to a temporary location was moved on this STS-124 mission to its permanent location on the larger Kibo module.
Discovery also carried aloft a much needed (and much appreciated by the space station crew) new pump for the space station toilet, after the old one malfunctioned. (Please see Space & Missile Defense Report, Monday, June 2, 2008.)
The international nature of the space station is reflected in the fact that it has control centers not only in the United States at Johnson Space Center, but also in other nations such as Russia (cosmonauts are part of each crew, and Russian components are found in many areas in the ISS), Germany (the European Space Agency laboratory Columbus already is affixed to the ISS), and Japan.
During the Discovery mission, spacewalkers checked out the SARJ, taking samples of grit from the joint, and checking whether lubrication may help increase the SARJ range of motion.
As well, NASA also is checking why Discovery lost a metal clip that broke off and drifted away into space. Initial estimates are that it posed no safety hazard, but further checks are needed to ensure that is so, Gerstenmaier said.
The part is mounted aft on the orbiter vehicle, near the rudder speed brake system, where it shields that area from the searing heat of the main engines and the solid rocket boosters during launch and ascent, he explained.
During ascent, it would be unlikely the clip would come loose, but once on orbit and the rudder speed brake was opened and moved around for a checkout, the clip broke off and drifted away from the shuttle. So the crew took a picture of the part and beamed the picture down to ground personnel, who immediately recognized what it was, Gerstenmaier explained.
This isn’t unprecedented. Those clips have been seen before on the runway at Kennedy after a shuttle lands, he said.
To resolve the problem, “we’ll figure out a better way to attach it” on the shuttle, Gerstenmaier said. Currently, “it’s spot-welded, I believe.” With a simple fix, “we’ll be fine,” he said.
Manned Commercial Spaceships
NASA is reviewing the possibility of private commercial companies providing not only cargo carrying capabilities for supplying the space station, but also is reviewing the potential for commercial crew transportation to the station, Gerstenmaier said.
“We’re investigating that a little bit to see if that makes sense to us,” he explained.
However, he said, cargo clearly will be the preferred priority for private companies.
“I think from just a pure technical standpoint, we think there’s a little bit of a logic to fly cargo first, and gain some experience with cargo, and then move into crew.”
The thought here is that if an untried privately designed and built cargo spaceship suffers a surprise catastrophic glitch in an early flight, all that’s lost is cargo that can be replaced with new materiel. But if an untried manned spaceship is lost, crew lives are lost as well.
“We’re still looking at” whether commercial manned spaceships might be feasible soon, he said. “We’re talking to the commercial companies about what their logic is, what they think is the right plan to go forward. But we’re still kind of investigating it at this point. … I think there’s kind of a technical logic that makes sense with what we’re doing,” focusing on cargo missions rather than crew-carrying trips to the space station. “We’re going to talk to the commercial side to see if they have any suggestions or something we haven’t thought of.”
Gerstenmaier also reiterated that NASA wishes to use two so-called contingency shuttle flights for logistics work, carrying spare parts to the space station so that it can continue to function during the 2010-2015 gap between the shuttle fleet retirement and the first manned Orion-Ares flights.
If commercial companies don’t — on schedule — develop expected unmanned cargo spacecraft to supply the space station during the gap, the spare parts would be critically needed, Gerstenmaier said.
Some people, however, wish to use at least part of one of those flights to take the $1.5 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment to the space station. Otherwise, it will sit uselessly on the ground, the money wasted.
Japanese Manned Moon Missions?
Japan would like to participate in U.S. manned lunar missions, but Japan also has a longer-range plan aiming to have its own rocket and spacecraft to take a Japanese crew to the moon, said Kaoru Mamiya, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) vice president.
For the moment, Japan will content itself with sending unmanned probes to the moon “and stars,” Mamiya said at the press briefing.
And Japan also will cooperate with the United States and other partners in operations at the International Space Station, he said, including scientific work in the Kibo laboratory.
“Of course, in the distant future, we would like to have our own rocket to go to the moon,” he said. But this would be in the far future. “We are conducting only a preliminary study on that,” he said.
As for NASA, Gerstenmaier explained, “We’ve had a couple of conferences” concerning NASA lunar missions, and “we definitely want to do the lunar activities in an international sense, and we’ve been working that pretty good with the [other-nations] partners.”
That doesn’t mean that other nations participating in U.S. manned moon missions couldn’t also initiate their own lunar voyages, Gerstenmaier indicated.
“We’re doing a transportation” capability for lunar trips, “but they’re free to do their own transportation if they would like. … We’re starting to look at cooperative agreements” with other nations joining U.S. missions to the moon, he said.
There already is a functioning example of such cooperation: the space station, he said. “We can learn what worked well from a memorandum-of-understanding standpoint, from an agreement standpoint,” and transfer some of that experience in negotiating agreements with others participating in American moon missions, he said. “I think we can learn directly from that and put together some really good agreements as soon as we move to the moon and Mars with our international partner team.”
One small facet of the international nature of the space station is that Russians bring wealthy space tourists to the orbiting facility for brief stays.
NASA this summer likely will discuss with the Russian space agency whether it will begin sending not one, but two space tourists at a time up to the space station, Gerstenmaier said in response to a question.
“The Russian space agency really hasn’t talked to us about what those plans are,” he said. “And, in fact, we’re hearing some kind of different things from them. So we have some meetings scheduled this summer, some heads of agencies meetings, some other things with our international partners, and probably at that time frame we’ll have some discussions with them along those lines.”
Various individuals have spent up to $20 million each to journey to the space station on the Russian Soyuz vehicles. So a single Soyuz mission with two tourists could be worth a substantial sum.
Smooth Reentry, Landing
Commander Mark Kelly and Pilot Ken Ham were at the controls of Discovery as it glided through Florida skies to touch down on time.
Kelly is the husband of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), a member of the House Science and Technology Committee that oversees NASA. She also is a member of the House Armed Services Committee that oversees the Missile Defense Agency.
Kelly, Ham and Mission Specialists Karen Nyberg, Ron Garan, Mike Fossum and Akihiko Hoshide, of JAXA, spent about 14 days in orbit. Astronaut Garrett Reisman also returned onboard Discovery. He spent three months living on the space station.
Despite that, and despite the fact that any astronaut returning from months in the weightlessness of space usually has difficulty standing upon returning to Earth and its gravitational pull, Reisman not only was able to stand easily, after touchdown and wheels stop, he exited Discovery on the landing strip and walked around under the shuttle with the rest of the crew.
A NASA source said Reisman was highly observant in performing rigorous exercises while on the space station as part of Expedition 17.
Flight engineer Reisman was replaced on the space station crew by U.S. astronaut Greg Chamitoff, who will be up there for half a year. Because the next space shuttle mission involves Atlantis going to service the Hubble Space Telescope in October, rather than stopping at the space station, Chamitoff will have to remain on station until Space Shuttle Endeavour blasts off Nov. 10 for the STS-126 Mission to the station. That November mission, aside from furthering work on the space station, also may see some spacewalks to help solve the problem with the balky SARJ, Gerstenmaier said. The SARJ is limited in its motion, so that it can’t keep huge solar arrays pointed optimally toward the sun for maximum electrical power generation for the space station.
NASA experts now are weighing whether cleaning and/or lubrication would solve or lessen the problem, he said.
The Discovery STS-124 Mission was the 123rd space shuttle flight, the 35th flight for Discovery and the 26th flight of a shuttle to the station.
Mike Leinbach, shuttle program launch director, said after the shuttle landed that the Discovery orbiter vehicle “looks to be in terrific shape,” terming it especially “clean” and free of any dings or damage. “The vehicle looks great,” he said.
Gerstenmaier also enthused that “I can’t think of a mission that [was] much better than this one,” from a trouble-free pre-launch routine, to an easy liftoff and ascent, to a mission that performed its assignments in space, and to a smooth reentry and landing.
He added that the STS-124 Mission showed how astronauts and space travelers from other nations are learning how to work in space. For example, he said, on one spacewalk, astronauts retrieved a dysfunctional camera outside the space station, then brought it inside for repairs, and then on a later extravehicular activity took it back outside and reinstalled it. At one time, he noted, that might have involved having to bring the camera back to Earth for repairs that now can be performed in space.
Atlantis Safety Problem
When Atlantis in October heads to the Hubble telescope to rescue, repair and refurbish it, there will be a safety problem. If some crisis arises during the Atlantis liftoff and ascent to orbit, the shuttle won’t be able to use the space station as a life raft until help can be provided.
Rather, Space Shuttle Endeavour already will be on a pad at Kennedy, ready to blast off on a rescue rendezvous with Atlantis, if need be. Hopefully, that won’t be necessary, and Endeavour later will be moved to a nearby launch pad for its Nov. 10 mission to the space station.
Over 12 days and five spacewalks, Atlantis’ crew will make repairs and upgrades to the telescope, preparing it for at least another five years of research. Eventually, Hubble will be supplanted by the future James Webb Space Telescope, a joint project of NASA and the Canadian and European space agencies.