There is a lot of emotion swirling around the American space agency (Nasa) at the moment, and it’s not just among the thousands of US space workers who’re losing their jobs.
The emotion goes right to the top.
Maj-Gen Charlie Bolden has given a tear-filled-but-determined interview to the BBC in which he reflects on the end of the space shuttle programme and the battle to win over critics of the president’s new exploration strategy.
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The Nasa administrator is in a dog-fight, and he knows it.
The White House wants to shut down development of the Orion crewship, its Ares launch rocket, together with the rest of the Moon-bound Constellation programme.
In their place is a $6bn commitment to seed a vibrant commercial rocket sector to lift astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), and a promise to engage in an intensive R&D effort to find “game-changing technologies” that can take people beyond low-Earth orbit.
The Obama administration says Constellation was on an unsustainable path - realisation of its goals was stretching off into the distance and at enormous cost.
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But Congress doesn’t like the replacement vision. To many politicians in Washington, the new strategy lacks an identifiable architecture, a timetable and even a destination.Simply put - many Americans want to know where US astronauts are going, in which ship and when; and right now “they just don’t get it”.
It’s Charlie Bolden’s job to make people get it - to make them understand.So, how do you think he is doing? You may well have seen some of his Congressional appearances, and the speeches he’s given of late.
There are those who think he’s just sold the vision badly; there are others who think he’s got the impossible sell.
Charlie Bolden, himself, says he was insufficiently prepared to roll out and explain the president’s plan.He’s made that confession on a number of occasions now and repeats it in the BBC interview with our Washington correspondent Philippa Thomas.
What do you make of his very public displays of emotion?We’ve seen Charlie Bolden swallow hard several times as he discusses the end of the shuttle.In our interview, the passion overwhelms him for a few moments.The tears flow:
“It is very difficult… it’s really difficult.It’s a programme that has gone for 30 years and it’s been incredible. And you know during the programme I’ve unfortunately had an opportunity to watch or witness the loss of two vehicles, but most importantly 14 people.On the first crew that we lost on the Challenger, they were very, very, very, very close friends because I had trained with them.Mike Smith on the crew I had been in school with.So they were really close friends.It was a flight so close on the heels of my first flight; I had landed just 10 days prior to Challenger.”
And speaking of the shuttle workers in Florida, he adds:
“Shuttle becomes like a person to them, and so they’re very attached to them and as each vehicle flies its last flight, they have a really difficult time.Unless you’ve been in this programme, people don’t understand that; and they think we’re crazy.”
I urge you to watch the video because a transcription can never really convey the full emotion of the message.
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This is an important month for Nasa, Charlie Bolden and the president’s plan.
Next week, on 15 April, Barack Obama will visit Florida’s Space Coast to take part in a special conference.
Many are hoping the president will use the opportunity to elucidate some sort of compromise, one that retains elements of the soon-to-close Constellation programme.
This might include a clearer roadmap to a big new rocket, or a promise to continue with the Orion crewship, albeit in a less ambitious form.
Some politicians in Washington are not in a mood to wait, however, and have already introduced legislation that would mandate Nasa to keep flying the shuttle.They dislike the idea of US astronauts having to rely on Russian Soyuz rockets to get to the ISS while America develops its new era of commercial launchers and capsules.
These senators and representatives think the gap should be filled by extending shuttle operations beyond the end of this year.
That’s something Charlie Bolden tells us quite firmly should not happen:
“It is time to move on.It’s incredibly important for Nasa to try to get to the point where we can begin to explore again.[That’s] not to say that what we’ve done in low-Earth orbit is not exploration.It is, but it’s a different kind of exploration; it’s scientific exploration; it’s medical, it’s biomedical research and the like.There are planets and other heavenly bodies out there waiting for us to come, and we can only do that if we move away from shuttle, [and] move on to a heavy-lift launch vehicle and the type of vehicle that will enable us to get away from low-Earth orbit, and do the types of things that people thought we were going to be doing in the Apollo era.”
It would cost something on the order of $2-3bn a year to keep the shuttle flying. It’s a very expensive vehicle to maintain and operate.That’s part of the reason for wanting to retire it in the first place.
To restart production of shuttle components would not be straight forward.
Hundreds of workers have already been laid off.Extending operations would mean rehiring these people, only then to lay them off a second time when the commercial rockets and capsules are introduced later this decade.
In addition, if $2-3bn a year was diverted to more shuttle flights, the money could not then be spent on a replacement vehicle and the other technologies necessary to take humans beyond low-Earth orbit - somewhere the shuttle has never been equipped to fly.
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