U.S. Spaceflight Gap Wider Than Thought

The bottom line: the shuttle won't retire on time and its replacement won't be ready on time. Those are some preliminary findings of the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee, led by Norm Augustine and briefed by former astronaut Sally Ride.

In total, the delays could add another year without a U.S. provided ride to the ISS. That gap could be mitigated by adding one or more shuttle missions. Man-rating the Delta IV EELV won't change the timelines appreciably.

The ISS may be a beneficiary of this review. The ISS is planned for deorbit in 2016, but the panel seems poised to advocate it stay on orbit longer. Why? Because the planned deorbit might hurt NASA partners and "U.S. leadership in space."

I cringe at that type of attitude. Rather, what should be considered is how (or if) our partners are helping us achieve the ISS's objectives and what could be done if we didn't have to support the money-sucking ISS.

Air Force: NASA's New Rocket Unsafe for Astronauts

The Air Force thinks the crew escape capsule for the shuttle replacement, known as the Ares I, will not allow the crew to escape if a low-altitude disaster were to occur. Given the capsule's nylon parachutes might well have to fly through a massive debris-field of flaming chunks of solid rocket motor, that seems reasonable.

Historically, the crew escape module is analogous to a very expensive good luck charm--it really is not up to getting the job done and is rather a kind of tool to ease the astronaut's cognitive dissonance about a near-ground (in this scenario, about 30 to 60 seconds into the flight profile) mishap. What does the shuttle have, you ask? Nothing. Remember? It was engineered to fail only once every 10,000 missions.

NASA says the Air Force's sample size in coming to this conclusion--one mishap involving a Titan IV in 1998--is too small.

A lesson is when you man-rate anything, the costs go through the roof. Likewise, there is no reasonable way to plan for every contingency.