NASA has unveiled the next--generation space rocket it hopes will take humans on their first missions to Mars.
The long-awaited Space Launch System (SLS) would be “the most powerful rocket in history,” said Florida Senator Bill Nelson, a former space shuttle astronaut, who announced details at a presentation in Washington on Wednesday morning.
However, although NASA plans to launch unmanned test flights by 2017, it has laid out no timetable for its stated goals of landing on an asteroid, reaching Mars or sending astronauts into deep space for the first time since the Apollo era of the late 1970s.
Photo: Reuters/NASA
The announcement, by members of the US Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, returns NASA to the business of human spaceflight following the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in July.
“This allows NASA to get out beyond lower Earth orbit and start to explore the heavens, which is the job NASA has always been tasked to do,” Nelson said. “In the bosom of America there is a yearning for us to explore.”
Funding for the project, which blends existing Apollo and space shuttle technology with the development of a new crew transportation system, must now be approved by Congress, where it faces a bumpy ride.
Nelson and his fellow advocates did not deliver a long-term estimate, but the cost could reach US$62.5 billion by 2025, experts who have studied leaked NASA budget documents said.
Nelson said the government’s financial commitment over the next five to six years would be about US$18 billion — US$10 billion for the rocket, US$6 billion for the multi-purpose crew vehicle salvaged from the axed Constellation program and a further US$2 billion to be spent on ground support and developing launch facilities at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.
“We are in an era in which we have to do more with less and the competition for available dollars will be fierce, but what we have is a realistic cost,” Nelson said. “This is achievable if America is going to have a human spaceflight program.”
The SLS will stand almost twice as high as a fully assembled space shuttle on the launchpad and it places the crew capsule at the top, therefore eliminating the problems of falling insulation foam at lift-off causing the kind of catastrophic damage that doomed the Columbia and its seven astronauts in 2003.
It will be powered by five space shuttle engines and, initially at least, two solid rocket boosters taken from the shuttle. Later, Nelson said, NASA would host a competition for contractors to try to switch the boosters to contain liquid fuels, used by the giant Saturn V rockets of the Apollo era.
The crew vehicle, meanwhile, is the one technology that survives from the Constellation program shelved by US President Barack Obama last year on cost grounds despite having already eaten US$9 billion of government money. The project, part of former US president George W. Bush’s vision for space exploration, was to have returned astronauts to the moon by 2020 and sent them to Mars a decade later.
NASA hopes the SLS project will allow it to rehire many of the thousands of workers laid off at the conclusion of the 30-year space shuttle program. Scientists and engineers will be need at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, the rocket assembly plant in Huntsville, Alabama, and at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where up to 10,000 lost their jobs at the Kennedy Space Center.
The announcement also ends a long period of uncertainty for NASA, in which politicians and former astronauts criticized the Obama administration for delays in announcing a successor to the space shuttle program, while handing over lower earth orbit operations to private companies, such as SpaceX.
Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, said Obama had set NASA on “a path to mediocrity.”
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