Commercial Human ISS Flight Funds Backed
By Frank Morring, Jr.
The Obama administration has cleared NASA to use $150 million of the $1 billion in economic stimulus package funding it will receive this year to advance possible commercial human spaceflight to the International Space Station (ISS).
Acting Administrator Christopher Scolese told the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA that the agency's fiscal 2009 operating plan includes $400 million in stimulus funding for the agency's exploration activities, including the $150 million for what is known as COTS D - human versions of the Commercial Orbital Transportation System vehicles under development with almost $500 million in NASA seed money.
The new effort will extend beyond the two COTS contractors - Orbital Sciences Corp. (OSC) and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) - to anyone who responds to a request for information (RFI) on commercial crew delivery to the station, Scolese said April 29.
Among specific objectives in the RFI will be information on the docking systems needed for berthing commercial crew vehicles to the ISS and a better definition of what it will take to human-rate a vehicle originally built to deliver cargo to the station - a subject addressed with concern in the 2008 report of the independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.
Some $80 million of the $150 million will go to accelerate the use of commercial cargo flights to the ISS to gain experience for future missions with crews on board. "Fundamentally the plan we see going forward is to logically proceed from cargo, which will be difficult in and of itself, to a crew-escape capability to ultimately bringing crew up to the space station," Scolese told the House Appropriations subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies.
The remaining $250 million in FY '09 stimulus money will go into the Constellation Program, which is developing the Orion crew exploration vehicle and the Ares I rocket intended to launch Orion into low-Earth orbit. But the FY '10 budget request for NASA won't be out until next week at the earliest, and Scolese said until it is released the Houston-based Constellation Program won't have a chance to calculate how it will affect NASA's ability to begin flying astronauts in Orion.
Members of the House committee expressed concern that the gap between the end of the shuttle program, now planned by the end of 2010, and initial operational capability (IOC) for Orion/Ares I may grow beyond the five years NASA now expects.
Scolese discounted a prediction by the Congressional Budget Office that the IOC won't come until late 2016, saying the 50 percent cost-growth estimate the CBO used was overly pessimistic. And he said NASA expects to continue working under the Obama administration on a goal of returning to the moon by 2020.
However, he said new budget priorities - including renewed emphasis on Earth-observation missions to monitor climate change - may force a shift in the agency's plans for returning to the moon down from at least a human-tended outpost to something more like the short-term surface sortie missions NASA flew to the moon during the Apollo era.
International Space Station photo: NASA
