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| An artist’s rendition of NASA’s Space Launch System. NASA announced on Wednesday that it wanted to consider taking astronauts on the rocket’s first flight. |
In the first public inkling of the Trump administration’s
aspirations for space exploration, NASA announced on Wednesday that it wanted
to consider taking astronauts on the first flight of its new heavy-lift rocket.
That type of notable mission could speed up a return to the moon.
Robert M. Lightfoot Jr., the acting NASA administrator, said the
agency was studying what it would take to add a crew to the first flight of the
Space Launch System, a mammoth rocket under development for deep space
missions.
Under current plans, the first launch was scheduled for late
2018 and did not include a crew for testing the systems aboard the rocket and
the capsule, named Orion.
That would have been followed by a gap of several years before a
second flight, with astronauts, that would take off no earlier than 2021.
Mr. Lightfoot spoke at a conference for companies working on the
Space Launch System and Orion programs and also sent a memo to NASA employees.
“I know the challenges associated
with such a proposition, like reviewing the technical feasibility, additional
resources needed, and clearly the extra work would require a different launch
date,” Mr. Lightfoot wrote in the memo. “That said, I also want to hear about
the opportunities it could present to accelerate the effort of the first crewed
flight and what it would take to accomplish that first step of pushing humans
farther into space.”
Under the current plans for the first launch, a crewless Orion
capsule would spend three weeks in space, flying to the moon and entering an
orbit about 40,000 miles above the surface. With astronauts on board, the
mission would most likely be shorter, perhaps similar to the trajectory by
Apollo 8 in December 1968, when three NASA astronauts made 10 orbits around the
moon in 20 hours and then returned to Earth.
To add astronauts would require significant work and
rejiggering. Because no astronauts were planned, the Orion capsule for the
first flight currently did not contain the full working life-support system.
The first Space Launch System rocket also uses an upper stage that is derived
from the Delta 4 rocket that has not been rated for crewed missions. NASA is
developing a more powerful upper stage for the second flight.
The risks of flying people on the first launch of a rocket are
much greater. In the Apollo
program, NASA launched several crewless missions to gain confidence
before adding astronauts on Apollo 7. Two commercial systems by Boeing and
SpaceX to take astronauts to the International Space Station will also fly
crewless test flights first. The first launch of the space
shuttle in 1981 did
carry astronauts.
Trump administration officials have not provided much information
about their plans for NASA, and no permanent administrator has yet been
nominated.
During his inaugural speech, Mr. Trump made a passing mention of
a desire “to unlock the mysteries of space.”
Mr. Lightfoot wrote in his memo, “From my interactions with the
transition team, NASA is clearly a priority for the president and his
administration.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/science/nasa-looks-to-speed-timetable-for-putting-astronauts-in-deep-space.html