NASA Goes Full Throttle on New Space Vehicle Plan

The Columbia accident and growing doubts about the safety of the space shuttle are forcing NASA to accelerate efforts to build a new space vehicle -- one that can begin operating in less than a decade.

The space agency is awarding $135 million to three major aerospace companies to begin designing what could become a multibillion-dollar fleet of orbital space planes just big enough to ferry crews of about four astronauts back and forth to the international space station.

The plan, with little fanfare, represents a potential watershed in the U.S. space program.

In a departure from the ambitious goals it has set since the dawn of the Space Age, NASA wants a modest system that will break no new technological barriers but instead reduce costs and improve safety -- perhaps by adding a crew escape system, for example.

The space plane would not have its own main engines, but rather ride atop an expendable rocket, such as a Delta 4 or an Atlas 5. Pilots would be a thing of the past, and maneuvering the craft in space would be small, automated thrusters. The plane would carry only tiny payloads -- making room for them would require reducing the size of the crew and removing seats, NASA officials say.

The plane may even lack wings and take the form of a capsule, like the 1960s-era Mercury, Gemini and Apollo ships, splashing down in the ocean or parachuting onto land.

At least in popular perception, it could amount to an uninspiring step backward.

“On some level, it may appear it is just some lower-technology way to get people to and from space,” said Dennis Smith, NASA’s program manager. “But the key thing is we need them there to perform science, and we need to improve safety.”

Some critics say the new program lacks vision and fails to make clear why the United States even has a space program. The infrastructure planned by the Bush administration, they say, will preclude any human exploration of space for decades and limit all human activity in space to low Earth orbit at the space station.

But others say NASA’s new goals are long overdue for an agency that tried too hard to be the technological vanguard of America.

The change is one measure of the tremendous effect of the Columbia loss, which appears to be surpassing the Challenger explosion 17 years ago in terms of realigning the space program and forcing a confrontation with limits. When Challenger was lost, the space shuttle fleet was relatively young, but today NASA recognizes it can no longer put off a replacement.

The space plane, however, will not fully replace the shuttle or its remarkable ability to lift heavy loads in its 60-foot-long payload bay. John Rogacki, NASA’s senior official overseeing spacecraft development, says the agency cannot operate the space station with only the space plane, meaning the shuttle fleet could be around an additional 20 years.

NASA has repeatedly attempted to replace the shuttle since the late 1980s with an advanced launch system capable of reaching orbit on a single stage and cutting costs by tenfold. The agency spent billions on such programs as the National Aerospace Plane, the X-33 and the Delta Clipper, among others. It designed exotic engines like the aerospike and supersonic ramjet. One by one, the replacement efforts collapsed, leaving the agency dependent on the shuttle for far longer than it ever envisioned.

Thus, the space plane is only a partial solution to NASA’s predicament. The agency also is studying a new reusable launch vehicle, though that effort is lagging well behind the space plane. If it gets built, it could carry the space plane, but for the foreseeable future the space plane will ride on expendable rockets.

Dave Urie, creator of the X-33 and now an aerospace consultant, said NASA and Congress were too ready to give up in earlier programs any time a technical problem came up. It has created a wasteful cycle in which billions of dollars are spent on projects abandoned prematurely, and now the agency has embarked on a program that seems to lack ambition, he said.

“Where’s the progress?” Urie asked. “NASA should be sticking its neck out, doing things that nobody else has the guts to do.”

The space plane program originated in the fall, when the Bush administration quietly outlined its intentions in a budget document submitted to Congress. But the Columbia accident gave the project urgency, and NASA is forming a plan to sharply accelerate the development schedule, which originally called for the plane to be operational in 2012.

“With 113 flights and two accidents, the shuttle is not as safe a system as we thought it was,” said Mike Coats, Lockheed Martin Corp.’s program manager for the space plane. “I want to give the crew a fighting chance.”

NASA said Friday that it will begin concept studies at Lockheed, Boeing Co. and a partnership of Northrop Grumman Corp. and Orbital Sciences Inc. Much of the work will occur in Southern California, which remains the largest industrial and engineering center for space hardware. After 16 months, NASA will select one company to proceed with full-scale development of the plane.

Rogacki acknowledges the cost will be in the billions, though how many billions will depend on the craft’s shape, how many astronauts it can carry and how many planes are built. The size of the fleet could be four or more. Experienced space industry hands put the cost at between $5 billion and $10 billion, not including modifications to the expendable launchers to “rate” them safe for human flight.

About 1,000 engineers are involved across the country, though that figure will jump sharply in the next year. Northrop Grumman is basing its efforts in El Segundo, Lockheed in Denver and Boeing in Houston. All three teams have substantial engineering operations going on across Southern California, including in Huntington Beach, Anaheim, Canoga Park and Palmdale.

Northrop Grumman program director Doug Young, a former manager on the B-2 bomber program, said the company assigned about 120 engineers to the effort, including a couple who had experience building the lunar landing module at Grumman Corp. in the 1960s.

At Lockheed, Coats is directing a staff of 150 engineers.

Boeing, the company that built the space shuttle and the Apollo spacecraft, has about 80 engineers on the program and is being led by Bill Rothschild, an engineer who has worked for the Air Force, Pratt & Whitney and Rockwell International.

All three program managers say safety will play a commanding role. The spacecraft will almost certainly provide the crew an escape system during launch, a capability that might have saved the Challenger crew in 1986. The thermal protection system will be superior to the fragile and trouble-prone system on the shuttle.

If the plane enters production, it would employ thousands, though not on the scale of the shuttle in the late 1970s. Historians say the Nixon White House pumped up the size of the shuttle program to help rescue the California economy from the Vietnam War bust, according to Howard McCurdy, a space policy expert at American University in Washington, D.C.

Although to a layman the space plane might pale in comparison with the shuttle, aerospace engineers bristle at the notion that it does not represent a technical challenge.

“Taking a crew into space is no minor task,” Rothschild said. “There are only a few companies in the world that have ever built a vehicle that can do that.”

The space plane would be shot into orbit on a three-stage rocket, which would place it close to the space station. The plane -- whether a winged spacecraft or a capsule -- would use small maneuvering thrusters to rendezvous with a docking port on the space station.

The space plane probably will not have a pilot and co-pilot, according to Coats and Rothschild.

“I am in the camp that says we have to automate the vehicle as much as possible,” said Coats, a former shuttle astronaut who acknowledges his opinion won’t please his astronaut friends. “My personal view is that it costs a lot of money to train the crews to intervene. We have flown 113 missions on the shuttle and the crew has never intervened.”

Beyond such touchy issues is the conundrum of what purpose the somewhat-limited space plane will serve. “Exploration is the justification for the space program,” says Louis Friedman, president of the Planetary Society. “We have a space shuttle that is barely 1970s technology and a space station that is mid-1980s technology. We still don’t have a purpose for either.”

Friedman, like other proponents of space exploration, still hopes that the U.S. will attempt to visit Mars, land on an asteroid or revisit the moon in the foreseeable future, and questions how the space plane will advance such farsighted goals.

NASA critics say the space plane does nothing to answer the question of why the U.S. has a manned space program in the first place. John Pike, a Washington-based space expert, characterizes most space research as an effort to find “mystery crystals and miracle cures” that never seem to have any purpose.

Rogacki dismisses such barbs, saying the space program has yielded important science, enhanced education and contributed to the nation’s international prestige.

At least some of the issues involving the future of the U.S. space program will be dealt with by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and by Congress. This month, the space plane will get its first close assessment by Congress in a hearing called by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), chairman of the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics.

“The space plane may be a step back,” Rohrabacher said, “but if it is a step back that saves us hundreds of millions of dollars every time we go to space and improves the safety of astronauts, then it is a step back that may be justified.”