Extending Space Shuttle Flights Would Cost $3 Bln More Yearly; Smart Move Would Provide $2 Bln To Launch Orion One Year Earlier
The NASA basic budget would have to increase by $2 billion to $3 billion more per year, beyond the current roughly $18 billion level, to fund all NASA programs adequately, according to a congressional estimate, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said.
Further, extending space shuttle flights beyond their retirement by October next year that President Bush mandated would cost yet another $3 billion a year for two flights annually for five years, Griffin said. That would total $15 billion over half a decade.
Griffin provided those figures in responding to a question from Space & Missile Defense Report at a Space Transportation Association breakfast in the Rayburn House Office Building.
Currently, because Griffin wasn’t heading NASA when the decision to retire the space shuttles was made, NASA will be grounded for half a decade. The space agency will be unable to send even one astronaut to low Earth orbit for half a decade, beginning next year with the space shuttles retiring, until 2015 when the next-generation Orion-Ares spaceship system that the Constellation Program will develop lifts off on its first manned flight.
The Orion-Ares system will be twice as safe as the space shuttles, Griffin said. Put another way, astronauts would have half the probability of dying on Orion-Ares as on the shuttles. There is a one-in-eight chance of losing a crew, he noted. And Griffin strongly endorsed the Ares I rocket as the lifter to carry the Orion crew capsule to space.
Rather than run space shuttles for five years longer, Griffin said it would make more sense to take the $3 billion for one year of extended space shuttle operations and use the funds instead to accelerate the Orion-Ares program, with a liftoff in 2014, roughly a year earlier than currently scheduled.
“One wouldn’t want to extend shuttle for five years,” he said, even if funding were appropriated to cover the expense.
However, Congress never has asked NASA how it would shrink the half-decade gap, even with ample funding available, or how NASA would split the use of funds between extending shuttle flights and accelerating the first manned flight of Orion-Ares, Griffin told journalists.
Rep. Ralph M. Hall (R-Texas), ranking member on the House Science and Technology Committee that oversees NASA, was in the audience at the breakfast, and introduced Griffin.
Speaking of the two-way move to shrink the half-decade gap by extending shuttle flights and also accelerating Orion-Ares, he asked Griffin, “You’re saying it’s doable … if we work toward it?”
“Yes,” Griffin replied.
One critical need in accelerating Orion-Ares is to buy parts for the spacecraft system, or long-lead items, such as connectors, valves and heat-shield material, Griffin said after the event. Obtaining such items “takes forever,” so moving soon would help to speed the program, he explained.
He also would like funding for an extra flight test for the Ares I-X developmental-phase rocket in a high-altitude launch abort test. “If I had the money, I would put an extra flight test in the schedule tomorrow,” he said. But “we just don’t have the money for an extra flight test right now.”
He also would like to buy advance hardware for the J2X upper stage engine, part of the Ares I rocket, and for testing the engine including test stand infrastructure.
Griffin also repeated comments that he and other NASA leaders have made defending the Ares 1 rocket and its development, while rejecting an underground movement pushing to replace the Ares I with a military Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle provided by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] and The Boeing Co. [BA].