NASA’s near future bleak despite help from Congress
WASHINGTON (MCT) — A new law passed by Congress on Wednesday finally gives NASA some badly needed direction, but the future of the space agency remains bleak — at least in the near term.
The bill cements a new philosophy for the agency that largely bypasses its previous moon mission and instead opts for a new approach that relies on commercial spacecraft to ferry cargo and astronauts to the space station so that NASA engineers can concentrate on designing futuristic spacecraft.
Gone is the agency’s troubled Constellation moon rocket, effectively replaced by a new heavy-lift rocket that Congress said must be ready for flights to the International Space Station by Dec. 31, 2016, with the capability to someday attempt groundbreaking missions to nearby asteroids.
But even as backers celebrated the 304-118 vote late Wednesday night, a number of fault lines were already apparent:
To build a new heavy-lift rocket and its companion crew capsule, Congress recommended that NASA receive about $11 billion during the next three years — less money that what the Constellation program (which already has cost at least $9 billion) would have received during the same time period.
Engineers at Kennedy Space Center are looking to build a rocket for a test flight in 2014, using the space shuttle’s giant orange fuel tank, main engines and solid rocket boosters as mandated by the pending law. But program managers in NASA headquarters are looking at flying the Orion crew capsule as early as 2013 aboard a commercial Delta IV heavy rocket, the kind used successfully by the military to put secret spy satellites into orbit.
The bill does little to stem the brain drain within NASA, though its addition of a third shuttle flight next year extends the life of perhaps 1,500 jobs at Kennedy Space Center. Still, about 1,100 space-shuttle workers will lose their jobs there Friday — and a total of at least 7,000 will be gone within a year. Also facing pink slips are as many as 200 employees at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and 426 Ares rocket workers at Utah rocket-maker ATK, while other NASA centers also fear that they too could be looking at layoffs.
