NASA hosts Exploration Enterprise Workshop
The technology and commercially themed exploration strategy outlined by President Obama earlier this year would mean the launching of new NASA robotic spacecraft at a rapid clip to set the stage for the human exploration of deep space.
They would join robotic missions already launched by NASA for scientific discovery.
Space agency officials outlined their still developing strategy to carry out the changes in NASA’s agenda outlined by the White House in April and February during a NASA Exploration Enterprise Workshop this week in Galveston, Texas.
The two-day session, which drew 400 aerospace professionals, scientists and government officials to Galveston as well as an Internet audience of more then 500, marked the most comprehensive effort yet by NASA to explain its transition from the Constellation Program to a more flexible path of exploration.
Obama has directed NASA to focus on the future human exploration of Mars, while fostering a new commercial capability for the launching of astronauts to the International Space Station.
“What you see is a point of departure,” Doug Cooke, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, told the workshop. “The objective is to get your ideas. What do you suggest? What can we do better? Your ideas will help us define with better fidelity what our direction should be.”
Congress is still assessing the president’s decision to cancel the back-to-the moon Constellation Program initiated by the previous administration. Lawmakers have also questioned NASA’s ability to foster commercial transportation services for astronauts by 2015.
The Obama plan increases the number and pace of robotic missions intended to develop the technologies for human voyages to a range of deep space destinations, starting with a visit to an asteroid by 2025 and the Martian environs a decade later. It calls for a consensus on a design for a new heavy lift rocket by 2015 and assigns Constellation’s Orion crew exploration vehicle a new role — life boat for the space station and test bed for a planetary craft.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Ames Research Center would lead two classes of Exploration Precursor Robotic Missions similar to the Surveyor missions that blazed a trail to the moon for the Apollo astronauts.
Assigned projects in the $500 million to $800 million range, Marshall would lead orbiter and lander missions to asteroids and Mars as well as the moon to identify sources of water and oxygen and other resources of use to future human explorers. Other missions launched every one to two years starting in 2014 would characterize environmental hazards like radiation and dust, and demonstrate communications techniques. Most of the mission objectives would be defined by NASA.
Ames would lead a more flexible, faster-paced class of planetary missions, each capped at $200 million. Ames’ successful L-CROSS mission that furnished proof of ice trapped in the polar craters of the moon last year serves as an example of the kind of tightly focused NASA has in mind. The space agency would rely on competed proposals for most of these planetary excursions, dispatched every 18 to 24 months, starting in 2014.
NASA’s Johnson Space Center would manage four new Flagship Technology Demonstrations, missions budgeted at $400 million to $1 billion, starting in 2014. The initial mission would test the use of solar electric propulsion, or the use of sunlight to create an ion thrust from xenon, to carry out interplanetary travel.
After reaching geosynchronous orbit, the test craft would attempt to maneuver into a Martian transfer orbit.
A subsequent mission would test long-term techniques for the storage and transfer of super cold propellants in space. It’s a strategy that would permit small and medium lift rockets to initiate deep space missions with spacecraft that could re-fueled in orbit.
Another of the Flagship missions would deliver an inflatable habitation module to the space station, where it would be outfitted with advanced closed-loop life support systems for the recycling of water, air and wastes.
All three of the early Flagship missions would be equipped with developmental automated/autonomous rendezvous and docking systems that could bring two spacecraft together without a human pilot.
A fourth Flagship mission would focus on aero-braking techniques to increase the mass of payloads that could be launched to Mars and improve their landing accuracy.
The heavy lift rocket development strategy outlined by NASA at the workshop seeks a more affordable rocket engine suited to national security, science and future commercial mission needs as well as human exploration.
Earlier this month, experts from Marshall and the U. S. Air Force met in an effort to define a performance “sweet spot” for a new rocket engine with wide utility.
As the effort gets under way, NASA is looking to a heavy lift with a first stage performance of at least one million pounds of thrust, using kerosene and liquid oxygen as propellants. The space agency’s baseline second stage would be powered by methane and liquid oxygen, though NASA has not ruled out the higher performance of liquid hydrogen and oxygen
NASA’s proposed 2011 budget envisions $3 billion for heavy lift rocket development through 2015.