Source: Houston Chronicle
President seeks to revive Orion capsule, speed up development of rocket, may give shuttles a reprieve
President Barack Obama will revamp NASA’s planned Orion crew capsule, speed up development of a massive deep space rocket and perhaps consider adding more shuttle flights beyond their scheduled retirement this year, a senior White House official said Tuesday.
Obama will “outline a broad vision for NASA that unlocks our ambitions and expands our frontiers in space,” ultimately reaching Mars, the official said in a telephone interview as he previewed the speech Obama will deliver Thursday at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.
“We are going to increase our investment in groundbreaking technologies to allow astronauts to reach space faster and more often, to travel farther distances for less cost and to stay in space for longer periods of time,” the official said.
Obama originally had canceled the Orion capsule along with the moon program earlier this year. The reconstituted Orion would not go to the moon, but go unmanned to the International Space Station. The “Orion Light” would be used as an emergency crew escape capsule on the space station to reduce U.S. dependence on Russia’s Soyuz capsule.
Obama will commit to making a specific decision in 2015 on the architecture of the rocket system that will be used to carry astronauts to the moon, near-Earth objects and ultimately Mars, the official said. It would have the power to blast crew and cargo far from Earth.
The official, speaking to the Houston Chronicle on condition of anonymity, said Obama hoped his detailed plans would quell the uproar within Congress, the NASA workforce and the aerospace industry over his proposal to end space shuttle operations by the end of the year and cancel the $108 billion Bush-era program to return astronauts to the moon by 2020.
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