NASA unveils new rocket design
Baku, July 4 (AZERTAC). To push farther out into the solar system — to the moon and beyond, to asteroids, eventually to Mars — NASA unveiled plans on Wednesday for a behemoth rocket that would serve as the backbone of its human spaceflight program for decades.
The finished rocket would be the most powerful ever to rise from the gravitational bonds of Earth.
“We’re investing in technologies to live and work in space, and it sets the stage for visiting asteroids and Mars,” the NASA administrator, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., said at a news conference in Washington.
The megarocket, blandly named the Space Launch System, embodies the space agency’s enduring desire to aim far and dream big. But it also reflects a shrinking of near-term ambitions as budget cutters seek to rein in federal spending. Just two years ago, NASA had hoped to build an even larger rocket that would take astronauts back to the moon and set up an outpost there. With money more limited, the pace of progress will be much slower than during NASA’s Apollo heyday in the 1960s.
William H. Gerstenmaier, the agency’s associate administrator for human exploration, said NASA expected to devote $3 billion a year to the effort, or a total of about $18 billion over the next six years.
That would be enough to finish a rocket capable of lifting 70 metric tons into orbit; the largest unmanned rockets currently available can lift about one-third that much. The first unmanned test flight is scheduled for 2017.
The design would evolve to larger versions that could lift up to 130 metric tons. (The Saturn V rocket that powered the Apollo Moon exploration program could lift 120 metric tons.)
In contrast to the previous program, Constellation, which set a very specific goal — returning to the moon by 2020 — NASA has yet to decide destinations or deadlines for what it would do with its new rocket.
“We’ve talked conceptually about multiple destinations,” Mr. Gerstenmaier said. “We talk about an asteroid in 2025. We talk about Mars being the ultimate destination.”
More details would be worked out over the next year. “We can do pretty exciting missions with the capability that we’ve got,” Mr. Gerstenmaier said.
Congressional backers of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration hailed the announcement as resolving a standoff between Congress and the White House over the agency’s future. In February 2010, the Obama administration had proposed a radical shift in space exploration, canceling the Constellation program and deferring any decision on a replacement for five years.
But the administration retreated under Congressional pressure, first reviving the crew capsule from the Constellation program and now proposing a heavy-lift rocket that looks like Constellation’s slimmer sibling.
“This is a day we’ve been looking forward to for a long time,” said Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican. “We wish it had been sooner, of course.”
Last year, Congress passed, and President Obama signed into law, a blueprint for the space agency calling for a rocket like the one announced Wednesday. But NASA missed deadlines for announcing how it would carry out the plan.
In frustration, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, where Senator Hutchison serves as ranking member, even issued a subpoena to NASA demanding information.
The unveiling of the heavy-lift rocket was a victory for Ms. Hutchison and Senator Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat who is chairman of the commerce committee’s science and space subcommittee.
Texas is home to NASA’s Mission Control and Florida is where NASA’s rockets are launched from. The two senators played key roles in writing the NASA blueprint and outlining many specifics of the rocket they wanted NASA to build, leading critics to sarcastically call it the Senate Launch System.
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