Danny Sirdofsky/MEDILL
Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator, addresses the controversy surrounding the future of American spaceflight.
WASHINGTON — At a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies this week, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver attempted to clarify the administration’s future plans amidst the controversy over President Barack Obama’s decision to cancel Constellation, the program overseeing manned spaceflight.
Though Garver tried to draw attention to some of the new, less-contentious space projects, she spent much of her time acknowledging the battle the FY 2011 budget request is facing in Congress.
“We understand that the realignment of our priorities and the more expansive vision of what we can accomplish is unsettling in some quarters, and I guess I would suggest that it’s not the radical change that has been described,” she said on Monday.
Astronaut safety was listed as the top priority of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA’s budget proposals. Specifically, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., the chairwoman, wanted to know whether the safety ratings systems would remain constant from direct NASA control of spacecraft construction to private industry management.
Garver attempted to quell these fears in her speech.
“The bottom line is that NASA will be there every step of the way and won’t let astronauts fly in vehicles that have not successfully gone through a rigorous human rating process, period,” she said. “If you really want to break this down, lives already depend on commercial companies because industry is trusted to launch certain critical national security measures upon which the lives of our troops overseas depend. Further, our commercial partners have already demonstrated significant reliability.”
Rep. Parker Griffith, R-Al., whose district includes NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, said he is worried that private companies would not be able to stay afloat financially if an accident happened.
“Which company, if we turned manned space flight over to them, could survive the Columbia accident? If it were a private company, it would be bankrupted,” he said. “If we turn a critical component of our national security over to a company that reports to Wall Street or its hedge fund investors, and it has an accident and decides to cease development, where is America?”
Garver also tried to address contracting out manned spaceflight to private industry.
“For some reason there is a disconnect that people are assuming that for us commercial means only entrepreneurial start-ups. It is absolutely not the case,” she said.
“Eighty-five percent of NASA’s dollars (in general, over time) go to private industry. We believe they are very mature in this field. NASA civil servants manage contractors and contractors do this work. So what we are talking about is using many of those very same contractors in a new way to have a better value to the tax payer through instead of renewing cost-plus contracting, doing fixed price contracting.”
For Griffith, it’s not that simple.
“Putting things out for competitive bids, when we’re competing with China, Russia, India and other countries for what we consider the military high ground—space—is a mistake.”
He pointed towards the Pentagon’s attempt to have private contractors bid for an aerial refueling tanker project, which began in 2001, but is still unresolved.
“Should we put out for competitive bids and get the political process and the lobbying process involved in our national security?” he asked. “It would be a mistake for America to do that.”
Future NASA projects
Garver also discussed the president’s decision to attempt an asteroid landing by 2025, instead of another trip to the moon. The space administration has its eye on a “promising target” in Asteroid 1999 AO10, though this choice may change as the project progresses. The mission would last 150 days, with two weeks spent on the rock’s surface.
Among the reasons listed for visiting an asteroid as opposed to the moon, were:
• It provides an intermediate destination for human space travel to other areas of the galaxy.
• It doesn’t require a high-gravity landing, making it more accessible than the moon from a hardware development standpoint.
• An asteroid trip (5,000,000 miles) is longer than a moon trip (239,000 miles), which will allow for use of more technologically advanced systems.
• Allows for scientific discovery, as ”asteroids are remnants of the birth of our solar system, and may preserve the primitive material from which our earth, and possibly life, formed.”
• Some have valuable metals which could prove to be an important resource.
• The possibility of mass extinction due to asteroid impact means we should learn as much as possible about them to have a chance of averting disaster in the future.
To the last point, Garver mentioned that “it’s not really a question of whether we’ll be hit by an extinction-scale NEO (Near-Earth Object) in the future, but merely when this will happen. Only by gaining experience operating at these objects might it be possible to someday prevent one from changing the course of humanity’s future.”
Some innovations that NASA will continue to work on in the future include the creation of solar sails, which provide propulsion without fuel by using the momentum of reflected sunlight, inflatable habitats, advanced life-support systems and autonomous docking and rendezvous technology for spacecrafts.