Since the announcement was made last month of the cancellation of Constellation (NASA's plan for returning to the Moon and Mars), the punditsphere has been ablaze with condemnation, support, and outright confusion over the future of American manned spaceflight.<p>Keith Cowling, editor of the Nasawatch.com blog, has posted an interesting new development that if proven right, could prove to be a compromise between those wanting NASA to get out of manned spaceflight altogether and those seeking to keep the administration in the spaceflight business.<p>According to Cowling's sources (which are usually very spot-on), the main points of the consensus are starting to emerge:<p>* Ares 1 and 5 (the parts of Constellation that involved building new rockets to lift a capsule and cargo into orbit) stay canceled.<p>* Orion (the capsule-like CEV or Crew Exploration Vehicle) is built, but in a "Lite" configuration whose primary function will be to ferry people to and from the International Space Station.<p>* Funding and R&D for the development of a commercial space infrastructure (e.g., SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Bigelow, etc.) would remain unchanged.<p>* The planned retirement of the space shuttle fleet will be delayed and stretched out to about two flights per year while<p>* Stretched-out shuttle operations will allow a rapid implementation and development of a so-called Shuttle-C ("Sidemount") heavy-lift vechicle. This is basically the same system as the current shuttle stack (orbiter, external tank, solid rocket boosters) only with the orbiter replaced by a cargo carrier. Shuttle-C will carry cargo to the space station, but no crew.<p>More details here:
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2010/04/is-a-human-spac.html<p>What do you think? Is this a sensible plan that preserves jobs and tech innovation? Or is it delaying the inevitable and preserving an obsolete stack?
If this really fits in the budget profile that gets approved, then it seems reasonable to me. (All of the following thoughts are dependent on that condition!)<p>That gives us essentially a period of time for Shuttle to overlap commercial human space-flight so we can prove the new and let it compete directly for the chance to win out over the old. The fiat switch from one system to another under the old plan simply left too many holes for doubters to poke at.<p>I like the idea of using Orion + unused ISS modules as the foundation for a deep space vehicle; at least we'd have some kind of ship to use when we pick a destination. I'm not convinced Shuttle-C is necessary given the current outline, but if we do build a deep space vehicle I could imagine times when launching a really big payload would be useful.<p>Also via NASA Watch, a great 5-min answer to what NASA means to us: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhNZENMG1o" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhNZENMG1o</a>