One more space shuttle flight in 2011

A bill voted on Thursday in the United States Senate will enable NASA to make an additional space shuttle flight next summer and to improve the transition to a human space flight programme to explore asteroids and Mars.

Endeavour – seen here during the STS-118 mission in August 2007 – might not be the last space shuttle to go to the ISS next March. Atlantis could blast off again in the summer. Credit: NASA.

The elements produced for a possible space shuttle rescue mission are going to be used for organising an additional mission to the International Space Station which should take place next summer. It is one of the most significant points of a text that was unanimously approved on Thursday 15 July by the Republican and Democrat members of the American Senate Commerce Committee.

Furthermore, other available equipment – including an external tank – is to be brought up to flight standards so as to be available at the end of 2011 should another space shuttle mission prove necessary.

In search of a compromise
Between the road map set out for NASA by the White House and the partisans of the Constellation lunar programme, the Senate has chosen an intermediate path with the adoption of an authorization bill for saving jobs and industrial know-how and experience in the sector and for speeding up the development of means that will enable the United States to continue manned exploration of space.

The last external tank produced, for STS-134 mission in February 2011, arrived at the Kennedy Space Center’s VAB (Vertical Assembly Building) on 14 July 2010. Equipment at Michoud’s production site, near to New Orleans in Louisiana, has been mothballed. Credit: NASA, KSC

Generally speaking, the main elements of the space policy put forward by President Obama are preserved, with the abandoning of the development of the Ares launch vehicles and the continuing of the ISS until 2020. Moreover, the Presidency and NASA have reacted positively to the Senate’s bill.

Florida’s senator Bill Nelson (who flew on a space shuttle in 1985) believes that the American human space flight programme is being restructured and not abandoned as had been understood by some.

A very, very heavy launcher
The second major point of the bill is that it asks NASA to start developing a heavy launch vehicle that takes advantage of the technological legacy from the space shuttle and the Ares programme immediately, and not to wait until 2015 as was initially planned by the White House. Works for a launcher capable of placing at least 70 to 130 tonnes in low Earth orbit are to begin in 2011. This immediate start would make it possible to save about a quarter of the jobs in Florida which were meant to have been lost with the retirement of the space shuttles and more than three quarters of the jobs under threat in Texas.

There is no shortage of possible concepts for heavy launch vehicles derived from the space shuttle as is proved by this “Jupiter” family imagined by the Direct committee, composed of engineers from NASA and the space industry opposed to the architecture of the Constellation programme’s Ares launchers. All that remains now is to choose the right one. Credit: Direct

The Orion capsule works are to continue in order to procure a capsule intended for interplanetary flights that would be available as of 2016. Works are also to continue on new technologies essential to future missions beyond near-Earth space such as the transfer of propellants in orbit and protection against radiation.

As regards transporting astronauts to low Earth orbit and the ISS, the principle of recourse to the Russian Soyuz and then to private spaceships, such as the Dragon capsule, is maintained, but the existence of a system based on Orion should make it possible to make space access safe for American astronauts in the event that the private sector does not manage to develop its solutions.

Successive readings
The text adopted yesterday has not yet been given any financing. This will be the task of another of the Senate’s committees which is to take care of this in the coming weeks. Nevertheless, the financing already requested by NASA has been authorised until 2013.

If the reactions of the American press are to be believed, this bill appears to have unanimous support, but it still has to be approved by the House of Representatives.