NASA Worries About Design Flaws
Posted on: Tuesday, 12 August 2008, 08:00 CDT
Money, morale, and leadership: all problems that NASA is facing as it embarks on the design of a new spaceship and a return-to-the moon project, according to a safety panel.
The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel found "surprising anxiety among NASA employees" about the Constellation moon program and said the project "lacks clear direction."
The 143-page annual report blamed the agency's design of the Orion crew capsule for not putting safety features first.
NASA wanted to fly astronauts to the International Space Station aboard a new spaceship called Orion as early as September 2013, well before its formal deadline or goal of March 2015.
"The window of opportunity for us to accelerate Orion has closed," program manager Jeff Hanley at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston said.
The report found previous NASA spaceships were built with enough backup safety systems "to ensure safety and reliability," from the start.
The safety panel said weight problems with the Orion design caused NASA to use a different approach, one "without all safeguards included" from the beginning.
According to the report, any added safety feature in the Orion Project would have to "earn its way in" to the design by justifying that the increased safety was worth the extra cost and weight.
"That has made some folks uncomfortable, but guess what? We're not done yet," Hanley said Monday. "We are not just blindly cutting out" back-up safety systems.
"We're not going to please everybody," he said. "If we tried to please everybody the spacecraft would not get off the ground."
Hanley said he had not seen the safety panel's report, which also evaluated the agency in general.
The safety advisory panel includes two former space shuttle astronauts and was created after the deadly 1967 Apollo 1 fire.
The panel said it is "concerned that this process may not be capable of providing adequate protection against hazards that will only come to light once the spacecraft is in operation."
NASA's Constellation program officials acknowledged that some NASA employees are not pleased with the safety of the evolving spaceship design.
The United States will not have a way to transport people to and from space after the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010 until the new ships are ready to fly.
NASA plans to rely on Russia to ferry crews to the space station and on private companies to deliver cargo during the gap.
The U.S. wanted to close that gap, but Congress has not approved additional funding.
By September 2014, the agency hopes to be able to fly an Orion crew to the International Space Station.
Constellation program officials announced in a press conference that an internal schedule for the first launch of the Orion capsule with astronauts aboard is being pushed back one year due to a lack of money. Now it's aiming internally for September 2014.
"The funding over the next two years became too tight for us, so I had to adjust the schedule for that," Hanley said.
NASA plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2020.
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Image Caption: A mock-up of the Orion space capsule heads to its temporary home in a hangar at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. In late 2008, the full-size structural model will be jettisoned off a simulated launch pad at the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to test the spacecraft's astronaut escape system, which will ensure a safe, reliable method of escape for astronauts in case of an emergency. NASA's Constellation program is building the Orion crew vehicle to carry humans to the International Space Station by 2015 and to the moon beginning in 2020. Image Credit: NASA/Sean Smith
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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