"It's a deliberately opaque process."īut in a Sept. "The way NASA does accounting, you can make the numbers come out to be anything you want it to be," said Jeff Greason, chief executive of XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., which is developing vehicles to carry paying passengers to suborbital space. The head of one commercial space company said it is unclear how NASA arrived at the cost estimates contained in the leaked document. Obama canceled Constellation in favor of commercializing space station crew transport while developing technology for deep-space exploration, but many of the Moon-bound program's main elements were restored in the NASA Authorization Act. Congress just canceled Constellation last year for these very same reasons."Ĭonstellation refers to the hardware designed under the previous administration's plan to return astronauts to the Moon by around 2020. "There is no way that the American people want us to spend more than $60 billion for a space exploration program that includes only one manned spaceflight before the end of the decade. "If true, these estimates are ridiculous," Rohrabacher said in response to a Space News query. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who has advocated redirecting funds from SLS to NASA's effort to nurture commercially developed systems for ferrying crews to and from the international space station, said the cost estimates are grounds for terminating the heavy-lifter program. The leak of the SLS numbers brought out the program's critics as well. He is a fierce advocate for the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., which will host the SLS program office. Shelby is the ranking member of the Senate subcommittee that makes appropriations for NASA. When the Booz Allen Hamilton study didn't reach the conclusion that the Obama Administration had hoped for, it started leaking figures from some new 'internal study' in an attempt to justify its dithering and flagrant defiance of the law," Shelby said in a statement emailed to Space News. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), another SLS backer, called the leak of the cost estimates "typical of an administration that has been determined to kill this program all along. A 130 metric-ton version of SLS would be ready in 2021, under this scenario. Also included in this scenario is $4.5 billion for "in space elements," which could include things like Earth-departure stages, landing craft and in-space propellant storage. In this scenario, costs through 2025 would be about $62.3 billion, and the 70 metric-ton SLS variant would fly crewed missions once a year beginning in 2018. The high-end estimate assumes a funding scenario where SLS development is accelerated so that the rocket and its crew capsule can achieve a greater flight rate. Also under this scenario, an SLS variant capable of launching 130 metric tons would not be ready until the 2030s, the document says. This version of SLS would fly once every two years, after that. SLS and associated programs would cost about $41.6 billion under this scenario, with the first crewed flight of the MPCV, also known as Orion, taking place in 2021 on an SLS variant capable of launching 70 metric tons into Earth orbit. The most conservative funding scenario is based on the administration's 2012 budget request and assumes a no-growth NASA budget for the next five years. Besides development costs, personnel costs at NASA centers were included.
Each cost estimate runs from 2012 to 2025, and each assumes a different funding scenario.
The NASA document lays out five cost scenarios for SLS, the MPCV and supporting ground infrastructure. This artist's concept shows the Ares V cargo launch vehicle, a rocket that may be similar to NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) in many ways.
0 kommentar(er)
