With the United States facing five years of possible reliance on Russia for servicing the International Space Station while it continues to develop the successor to its soon-to-be-retired space shuttle fleet, news has emerged this week that NASA may yet extend the lifespan of its stalwart orbiters.
NASA considers plan to extend life of its shuttle fleet. Image: NASA.
More pointedly, a draft internal report offered up by the U.S. space administration has outlined that shuttle missions could be pushed as far as 2012 as NASA moves closer to completion of its new two-stage Ares-1 rocket and the Orion crew capsule.
The operational extension, which would include a total of three extra shuttle flights, would likely come attached to an accompanying cost of around $5 billion USD, according to the report.
Increasing the service extension to segue more smoothly with the scheduled 2015 availability of Ares-1 and Orion would cost in excess of $11 billion USD and, more importantly, would compromise NASA’s plans to create new hardware capable of carrying a manned mission to the moon by 2020.
The internal report, drafted by a team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, was ordered in August of 2008 due to gathering concerns connected to the 2010 decommissioning of the space shuttle fleet, which would leave the U.S. reliant on Russian Soyuz rockets to transport astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station.
According to the report, a copy of which was obtained by Space News, a decision on the proffered service extension must be made by May of 2009 in order leave good time to backtrack on the phase out of NASA’s remaining shuttle vehicles.
The report comes only a few weeks after NASA administrator Mike Griffin said that while an operational dependence on Russian Soyuz missions was “unfortunate in the extreme,” the development schedule of Ares-1 and Orion would suffer unless NASA’s overall budget was increased to allow for continued shuttle flights.
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