Four-Place Space Plane Would Serve As Interim Mode Of Transportation

Remember when you were learning to fly, how the instructor said over and over again, "Keep it simple, stupid." That's the driving rationale for NASA's new and intensive effort to build something that will bridge the transportation gap 240 miles above the Earth.

Right now, swapping crews aboard the International Space Station is accomplished by one of two means: aging space shuttles or single-use Soyuz capsules. With the shuttle program in dire straits after the Columbia disaster, NASA is stinging from criticism over its lack of a replacement. Designing, testing and building a heavy-lift vehicle to take the shuttles' place could take more than ten years.

"The focus is to keep it simple and flexible," said Dennis Smith, the Orbital Space Plane program manager at the Marshall Spaceflight Center (AL). "We're doing everything we can to get it up by 2008."

Smith admitted it's "a very ambitiously rapid schedule." But he pointed out that NASA pulled off that kind of magic in the early days of the space program. "Mercury, Gemini and Apollo all did things faster than that," he said.

By applying the KISS commandment, Smith says NASA could employ existing technology to keep the vehicle's cost down. That's also a key to putting such a vehicle together as soon as possible.

What Would It Look Like?

The project to develop a four-place space plane is now funded at $2.4 billion. That's a lot of bucks, but relatively cheap by space program standards. The KISS approach has certainly produced some marvels of transportation: The DC-3, for instance, was built on the same principle. So was the venerable Army Jeep, for that matter. They've lasted more than a half-century because they were simple, durable and flexible.

The vehicle currently under consideration would have just two tasks. It would take people up to the space station and it would bring people down. Oh, and it could also serve as the emergency egress vehicle, the lifeboat that's constantly tethered to the ISS.

"The two biggest reasons that schedules slip and costs increase is that you change the requirements or you're counting on technology that didn't pan out," Smith said. "That's why we have a very focused set of requirements that we don't intend to change. We're going to set it up for the primary mission of crew rescue and crew transport."

The hard part, Smith admits, is trying to keep engineers and politicians from piling on all sorts of unnecessary bells and whistles and not holding out for "some material like 'unattainium' that isn't in existence."

But there's another problem that NASA, in its rush to find a better, cheaper, faster development path, may have failed to consider: If you put together a four-place space plane to ferry crews to the ISS, you still have to send them supplies and equipment. The Orbital Space Plane project may solve one problem while creating another.

FMI: http://www.ospnews.com/planeart.html