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.