NASA pushed back its Space Launch System (SLS) first launch goal to roughly June 2018 from its previous estimate of December 2017, a key official said Wednesday.
NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations William Gerstenmaier told a House panel the SLS program is about to manufacture hardware, which he called one of the more critical phases. Gerstenmaier said NASA will take another look at the program after the winter 2015 timeframe.
“I think we’ve been able to balance the budget needs that we have overall to try to deliver a program as effectively as we can for the nation and Congress,” Gerstenmaier said during a House Space, Science and Technology (HSSTC) space subcommittee hearing on SLS and Orion.
Government Accountability Office (GAO) Director for Acquisition and Sourcing Management Cristina Chaplain testified Wednesday that the 2018 goal was a challenge in itself. GAO warned earlier this summer that NASA could miss the December 2017 test launch deadline because it was not on path to reach the deadline at the required confidence level of 70 percent. GAO also noted in July that NASA’s funding plan for SLS may be $400 million short of what the program needed to launch by 2017 (Defense Daily, July 24).
Chaplain said SLS concerns in the short term were that the program was entering its “most risky” period and that the 2017 test launch goal was “very aggressive.” Chaplain said, over the long term, cost affordability was a real concern.
Subcommittee Chairman Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.) accused the White House of not committing to space exploration programs like SLS by providing inadequate budget requests. Subcommittee Ranking Member Donna Edwards (D-Md.) cited “flat funding levels” while disagreeing with the Palazzo for the reason behind them. Palazzo said in his opening statement Congress provided funding “well above” the budget request for fiscal year 2015 in the omnibus spending bill currently moving through the legislature.
Gerstenmaier said technological goals over the next 10-20 years include improving radiation shielding for humans and improving inflatable reentry heat shields for entry descent landing to the surface of Mars, which he called a “big technological leap.” Gerstenmaier said modern rovers that have landed on Mars’ surface have weighed around one metric ton. For a human class mission, he said, a crew vessel would weigh around 20 metric tons. Gerstenmaier said NASA performed recent tests near Hawaii to check out inflatable reentry heat shields.
Orion is to eventually launch NASA’s Orion crewed space capsule into space. Orion performed a major milestone last week with its successful test launch, known as Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1). SLS will eventually send Orion to a distant retrograde orbit around the moon in Exploration Mission-1 in the first test of the fully integrated Orion and SLS.
NASA Aug. 27 provided a development cost baseline of $7 billion for a 70-metric ton version of SLS from February 2014 through first launch no later than November 2018. NASA requested $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2015 for SLS development, program integration and support (Defense Daily, Aug. 29).