John Kelly, Florida Today: Test flights will help jobs crisis

May 3, 2010 | Benefits of Space Exploration, Blog, Exploration, NASA

Source: Florida Today

From the “every little bit helps” department: Don’t be too quick to scoff at the billion or so dollars that some U.S. senators are trying to add to the NASA budget for test flights.

Bill Nelson, D-Florida, seems to have support on some influential Senate committees for adding almost 1 billion more dollars to NASA’s budget over the next five years for tests that could help lead to a Saturn V class super rocket needed for human flights beyond Earth’s orbit.There are good reasons why Nelson, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and others inside and outside the agency continue to lobby for what seems like a small amount of funding to keep a flight-testing program alive in the short-term. 

  • A scaled-back test flight plan, based on variants of the Ares I, is on the books inside NASA. The money Nelson is after could fund a flight per year from about 2012 to 2015, employing hundreds or maybe even 1,000 people after the space shuttle retirement.
  • The flights would not be a waste. Rather, they would be set up to test systems critical to the design of a heavy-lift rocket and even to some of the short-term privatized efforts to deliver crew to the International Space Station.

    Crew escape system

    NASA could test in-flight its launch abort systems, which
    would safely pull an astronaut crew away from an exploding rocket. That’s technology that will be needed regardless of what rockets are chosen in the short-term, or the long-term, to fly astronauts to low Earth orbit or beyond.Continued development of a crew escape system is critical to the future of human space flight and can’t be left out of the design as it was with the current space shuttle system.NASA could further test the solid rocket motor-based first stage of the Ares I, building upon lessons learned in the Ares I-X flight last fall, with an eye toward incorporating them into the design of a future heavy-lift vehicle later this decade.And NASA could use such test flights as part of the ongoing development of an upper stage engine, also critical to the heavy-lift rocket development effort.

    Just a jobs program?

    • To continue reading: http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20105020315