NASA mulls 2010 shuttle retirement plans

NASA managers are meeting this week to discuss the impact of ending projects that have been keeping open the possibility of an extension of the shuttle program, which is currently planned to end in 2010.

NASA faces several challenges, including a tight budget, a 2010 deadline to end space shuttle operations, and a lack of concrete political support to fund additional flights or extend the current manifest. In a note to shuttle managers and engineers that was obtained by CBS News, shuttle program manager John Shannon outlined the issues in stark terms:

You have heard me say that 'hope is not an effective management tool' on many occasions. It is my position that we cannot continue to spend money to retain the capability to fly additional space shuttle missions, hoping that someone will recognize the national assets we are giving up.

We have to take our destiny in our own hands and manage within the limited budget we have been given and ensure that we will fly the full manifest and leave the International Space Station in the best configuration possible.

NASA's most recent authorization act said the space agency should take no action that "would preclude the continued safe and effective flight of the space shuttle after fiscal year 2010" if the next president--Barack Obama, as it turned out--decided to delay the orbiter's planned retirement. Depending on how one does the accounting, that directive had the potential to cost the agency nearly $90 million.

The Obama administration has expressed support for the addition of one shuttle flight to carry the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an already-built, high-priority physics experiment, to the International Space Station.

But the Office of Management and Budget said the administration is sticking with the 2010 shuttle retirement date. The Bush administration's deadline was the end of fiscal 2010, or September 30, 2010. The Obama administration has since told the space agency the deadline is the end of calendar 2010. Between now and then, NASA has nine shuttle flights planned, including the AMS mission. But only eight missions are currently funded. Money for the AMS flight has not yet been appropriated.

"If we're going to make this thing work, we've got to focus 100 percent on those nine flights and make sure we get them done," said a senior NASA manager who spoke on background and asked not to be identified. "We can no longer continue to split our attention both ways. We're going to have to have a hard discussion with our folks...we're going to have to make those nine flights real. And that's what we're going to go do."

The Obama administration has offered little visible guidance beyond support for the AMS flight and the shuttle deadline clarification. The president has yet to name a replacement for former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, the Bush-administration appointee whose tenure ended with Obama's inauguration.

Griffin inherited the job of overseeing the post-Columbia decision to complete the space station and retire the shuttle by the end of 2010 and to develop a new spacecraft to replace the shuttle. That vehicle, the Apollo-like Orion capsule and its Ares 1 rocket, is intended to ferry astronauts to and from the space station and, eventually, on to the moon.

But the Orion/Ares system will not be ready for use until 2015. During the five-year gap between the shuttle's retirement and the debut of the new rocket, NASA and its international partners will have to hitch rides to the space station aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Concern about reliance on the Russians has prompted several key lawmakers to lobby for additional funding to extend shuttle operations, stretching out the current manifest to close or narrow the gap. Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.), whose district includes the Kennedy Space Center, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) introduced legislation earlier this month to extend shuttle operations beyond 2010 and to accelerate development of the Ares/Orion spacecraft.

But so far, no such funding--or even money to cover the costs of simply keeping the extension option open--has been approved.

Complicating the picture for NASA planners, there is a very real possibility that one or two of the final shuttle missions currently envisioned will slip into the October-December 2010 time frame, i.e., the first quarter of fiscal 2011. There is no money in NASA's projected 2011 budget for any shuttle operations beyond $300 million or so intended for retirement activities.

As a result, NASA now plans to terminate work that kept open the option of a shuttle extension when the current legislation expires at the end of the month.

"We don't have enough money to keep carrying various options to extend and add additional flights," said the NASA manager who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Shuttle program managers were scheduled to meet Tuesday and Wednesday at the Kennedy Space Center for a quarterly budget review.

The final missions on NASA's shuttle manifest are critical flights to deliver spare parts and supplies to the International Space Station, and NASA managers say they do not want to risk losing one because money that could have helped cope with technical problems or launch delays had been diverted to building hardware for flights that are not expected to be approved.

[gertruded]

The Orion/ares will never be completed. This is the end of American space flights and is just another tangible event in the destruction of American technical competence. The American banksters have gambled away our future and left the country broken.

[d3vildog69]

you got it.. we are totally screwed when it comes to seeing another planet under our feet. I won't even get started on what needs to be done before Lord Vader gets here... sad day

[Rod Roddy]

NASA had years to develop and quite possibly debut a new launch vehicle...they failed. The U.S. must now rely solely on small privately funded programs such as X-Prize to continue our long, storied history of space exploration.

[Hep Cat]

Wow - thanks, genius. can you spell out - exactly - how NASA was supposed to keep up with the mandated shuttle flights while developing a new vehicle(s) and fostering existing projects on the budgets allocated by congress over the past several years? Here's a hint - Bill Clinton funded NASA to build the station - which is happening now - and Hermann Bush announced the "VSE", but didn't fund it, since he was too busy playing cowboys and indians in Iraq.

As usual, the most vehement critics of NASA know next to nothing about the agency or the budgeting process. A 33% increase in NASA's budget would still place it as the SECOND-most funded space agency - behind the Air Force's star wars playset.

Tell me again - how is that orbiting Ray-gun dream doing for all the money it gets for the Air Force? What are they doing that's so groundbreaking next to NASA?

[rayalasoler]

We have lost precious time thinking so conventionally that we have left all our dreams only to be done on sci-fi movies. The Orion system is a step backwards in design and functionality and NASA and the goverment has thrown to the trash too much money with this. Also we have spent too much money in the stupidest war; killing people, destroying humanity's future; but can't find enough money to advance humanity. You know what, put in NASA as a director someone that writes about sci-fi and watch him or her put an human on the moon again or in mars!

[Hep Cat]

Rod Rodbert:

"The U.S. must now rely solely on small privately funded programs such as X-Prize to continue our long, storied history of space exploration."

Really? I'm sure the XPrize contestants could hae done better if it had not been for 50 years of U.S. policy inured toward furthering anything that can "kill the other guy" instead of pure exploration.

Please explain how - with the system of military-industrial contractors in place - we could have done better on the paltry $18B a year NASA gets - less than the U.S. Air Force Space Budget.

[aforslund]

The USA should have never built the Space Shuttle. It is/was a distraction from what our mission in space to be. We should have followed the road map laid out by Apollo and headed for Mars a long time ago. If the shuttle had never flown we would have been exploring deeper into space and making discoveries that would benefit human kind. Not growing moss and crystals in low Earth orbit.

[Hep Cat]

The uninformed folks here are simply hilarious.

[knowles2]

It sounds like giant mess. No way nasa going to launch ten missions in a year, it just not gonna happen. Even with those ten mission then still going to be literally hundred millions dollars of hardware left on the ground which was intended for the space station.
As for the orion is one giant leap backwards in capabilities in every area. Shuttle is the best design, an provides most capability in a craft, far more than orion will any hoe, there some minor issues with safety, most them are not in the design but in the protocols use on the ground and the lack of investment in the craft before Columbia. The thing that makes me laugh is that Nasa spent billions developing stuff for the shuttle after Columbia and all of it will now literally be thrown down the drain.

And as for the person who mention where nasa should got the money for the new craft before the retirement of the shuttle, just take your pick on the fail projects or cancel projects in the past 18 years I pretty sure the few billions there somewhere, and it should really cost more than 5 billion to developed a new craft but then again lack competition in contract means the contractors will take at much cash as they can before they have to deliver the craft.

[fgsdfgdsfgdsfg]

18 billion for NASA is chump change. Their budget doesn?t even keep pace with inflation, so technically they have been seeing a budget cut every year.
We just spent 5 times that on the 8000+ earmarks in the budget Obama just signed. Earmarks for projects like studying the smell of pig dung in Montana. If they would take half of that money and put it into the space program we would have been on Mars already.

[tepmi]

This is unreal. Taking so many steps back and relying on Russia? We can't even agree on who can use what bathroom in the space station. This is a joke. Talking about the creation of jobs, how many jobs will be lost after ending the shuttle program? It's a disgrace.