Quotes of the Day
It's never easy to avoid the ghosts at the Kennedy Space Center. They're everywhere, all the time. There's the Challenger Memorial Highway and Columbia Road and Grissom Way — and the name Kennedy affixed to nearly everything. There are the full-size mock-ups of the famous old rockets — the tiny Redstone, the massive Saturn — now taxidermized for public display, decades after the last of them flew.
This week, it's easier than ever to surrender to the ghosts, and it's not just the heavy cloud cover and the torrential downpour that passed through the cape Thursday afternoon, July 7, and included a lightning strike on launchpad 39A, where the shuttle Atlantis is being prepped for flight. It is, of course, what's planned for Friday — that unsettled weather permitting. At some point between 11:56 a.m. and 12:16 p.m., Atlantis will take off, ending a 30-year program that will have included 135 launches (though only 133 returned safely to Earth) and put 777 people in orbit (though 14 of them never came home).
NASA is happy about the global media swarm that's here for Friday's event but would love it if folks didn't focus quite so much on the sense of finality to the proceedings. That's not an entirely realistic wish. NASA programs have come to a close before, but there was always something that came next: Mercury gave us Gemini, which gave us Apollo, which gave us Skylab, which gave us the shuttle. And the shuttle will give us — well, no one knows for sure.
NASA does, however, have a plan, and it's a potentially very good one. Sometime in 2016, money and politics permitting, a sort of grandson of Apollo will fly. The ship will have the same conical shape as the Apollo of old and will launch atop a conventional upright booster like Apollo did, but it will be much bigger — with room for six astronauts, not just three. It will be stuffed with software and electronics Apollo couldn't even have imagined, and it will be rated not just for low-Earth orbit and flights to the nearby moon but also for deep-space destinations like Mars.
"The physics haven't changed since the 1960s," says aeronautical engineer Olivia Fuentes of Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the new vehicle. "The old Apollo guys got that all figured out for us. We're just applying 21st century technology to that original idea." The question is, In an era of shrinking budgets and an uncertain American commitment to space, will the old idea be good enough to fly?
The jumbo Apollo — officially dubbed Orion, and more prosaically known as a multipurpose crew vehicle (MPCV) — has actually been around for a while. It's the last surviving component of the Bush Administration's former push for a return-to-the-moon program, which also included plans for a lunar lander and two new boosters — one for low-Earth orbit and one for deep space. Announced in 2004, the program died in 2009, mostly because of budget constraints and the Obama Administration's lack of enthusiasm for the grandiose idea. The White House agreed to let Orion and the deep-space booster continue in development but scrapped the lunar lander and left it to the private sector to figure out how to build spacecraft and rockets for trips to and from the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit.
Still, in the five years Orion got before the program changed, the engineers made a lot of progress. Last year, a full-size, full-weight model of the capsule took its first flight, blasting off from a launchpad in White Sands, N.M., in an initial test of the vehicle's launch-abort system. The spacecraft flew just a mile up and a mile down range, but all the same, it flew, serving as a stake in the ground both symbolically and technologically.
"We accelerated the ship to 15 Gs and brought it back down safely," says program manager Mark Geyer. "A launch abort is the most difficult thing a spacecraft will ever have to withstand, and this one withstood it fine." To prove the point — and, not incidentally, to help sell the Orion program — that test model is on display in a tent at the space center this week, its interior beams covered with the celebratory autographs of the flight team that built and flew it.
That, admittedly, is an awful lot of self-congratulation for a vehicle that has climbed just a mile into the sky. But the long-term missions being considered for Orion show a true exploratory cunning. The hardest and most expensive part of any deep-space mission is the business of landing on another world and taking off again. Once you descend into the gravity well of a cosmic body, you need a lot of fuel, hardware and energy just to get back off the surface, much less to accelerate to deep-space speeds. But what if you did away with the landings altogether — or at least simplified them dramatically?
That's exactly what the Orion crews would do. Rather than aiming to land on the moon or Mars, they would instead go for lunar orbits or flybys or trips into deep space to the various Lagrange points (gravitationally quirky spots where the pulls of the moon, the Earth and the sun cancel one another out and a ship could simply hang in place, allowing astronauts to conduct astronomical studies and materials research. Orion might also aim for asteroids near Earth, where entering or leaving orbit would require little more than a puff of propellant, since the gravity of the bodies is so tenuous. A landing on Mars — of sorts — would be possible too, with crews using a lighter, less expensive lander to touch down on one of Mars' tiny, low-gravity moons, from which they could dispatch unmanned rovers to the surface.
"We are building Orion with capabilities to do deep-space missions exclusively at the moment," says Geyer. "The ship can carry six people, but we'd configure it for four to provide more room for the astronauts to move around."
The program is also being built with an eye to making it Washington-proof. So far, $3.2 billion has been spent on Orion, and another $3.2 billion is slated through 2015. Whether that money is actually made available is no sure thing, with the antideficit frenzy consuming the Capitol — and the decision this week by a House committee to scrap funds for NASA's James Webb telescope does not bode well. But Lockheed Martin has taken care to spread the Orion work among subcontractors in 28 states, which means that a lot of Washington legislators have local skin and local jobs in the game. "Orion is being built near me!" chirps a poster in Lockheed Martin's media tent, with a map of the U.S. showing the locations of all of the subcontractors' plants.
Even if the funding spigot stays open, it's not certain that Orion will actually be able to carry people aloft as early as 2016. The private-sector companies vying to build the low-orbit spacecraft to service the space station are well along in the development of their ships, but NASA has not yet even picked a general design for its heavy-lift rocket, much less chosen a contractor. The idea that the space agency can make those decisions, secure the funding and get a whole new rocket — the biggest the U.S. has ever built — from computer screen to launchpad within five years is an improbable one at best.
"The Orion team is closely working with NASA management to figure out a plan for the rocket," says Geyer; it's all the assurance he is willing to offer for now. Come 2016, he and his team could well find themselves with a spanking-new deep-space vehicle and no rocket to take it anywhere.
All that, however, is for sometime after Friday — when the final shuttle is at last off the pad and, much more important, home again safe. When that chapter is closed, NASA's already extraordinary past will have become greater still. It's up to the current stewards of the agency to provide it with an equally rich future. Perhaps if they do, they will at last appease the ghosts.
- Jeffrey Kluger