America is planning to replace its troubled, ageing fleet of space shuttles with a powerful new craft modelled on the Apollo vehicles that took US astronauts to the Moon 30 years ago.
The new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) will be designed to ferry crew and cargo to and from the International Space Station, take men and women to the Moon, and eventually participate in manned missions to Mars.
The detailed plan to develop the spaceship, revealed on Saturday, is to form the cornerstone of President George Bush’s proposal — announced earlier last week — to take his country back to the Moon in order to build a base that will act as a staging post to Mars.
As the first part of this programme, the President is to seek a five percent increase in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s $15,5-billion annual budget for 2005 and will also seek a major re-ordering of spending priorities at the space agency.
At present Nasa is committed to the construction of a light spaceplane for carrying astronauts to and from the beleaguered International Space Station — now manned by an emergency crew of two. That plan will now be scrapped and the space agency will be ordered to construct instead a heavy-duty rocket system able to carry large cargoes into orbit, a prerequisite for any manned mission to deep space.
As part of the new Bush plan, America’s space shuttle fleet — currently grounded and reduced to only three craft following last year’s Columbia disaster — would be completely phased out within the next four or five years. And according to Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the House Science Committee’s subcommittee on space, test flights of unmanned versions of the CEV could begin by 2007.
This schedule would still leave the US without a manned space vehicle for a couple of years, during which time America would have to rely on Russian and European launchers to get to the International Space Station. This dependence would not be new for the US, however. At present, only Russia’s Soyuz spaceship can ferry crew to the stricken station, which last week began to suffer a worrying loss of air pressure.
The proposal to use a capsule that distances astronauts from main engines of their rocket (the shuttle carries both crew and main engines) represents a major U-turn in space technology and follows the recommendations of a report by Nasa experts last year. They concluded that Apollo — which suffered no fatalities in flight, despite the crippling explosion that struck Apollo 13 — was a ‘highly successful, rugged and robust’ system; that its re-entry into the atmosphere posed little risk to astronauts, and that its abort system provided a very high level of safety for the crew, unlike the shuttle.
However, in reordering Nasa priorities so the agency is committed even more to manned space flight, Bush is likely to infuriate many space scientists. They believe that robot spacecraft like the Spirit rover — now standing on Mars in preparation of a first traverse across its surface this week — represent far better value for money than human missions.
The money spent on the space station — its total bill is likely to reach almost $100-billion — has already siphoned money away from key science projects, they say, and the new Bush initiative, which would use up hundreds of billions of dollars in taking astronauts to Mars, will only worsen the situation. – Guardian Unlimited Â