NASA to study flying crew on first flight of big rocket

CAPE CANAVERAL — NASA’s acting administrator said Wednesday that the agency will study the risks and costs of putting astronauts on the first flight of a giant new rocket being readied to launch deep space missions from Kennedy Space Center.

The agency has been targeting a late-2018 liftoff of the Saturn V-class Space Launch System rocket with an unmanned Orion crew capsule that would fly around the moon.

Adding a crew would delay that flight, but it could accelerate by years the system’s first launch of astronauts, which is now planned in 2021 at best but realistically maybe not until 2023.

“I know the challenges associated with such a proposition, like reviewing the technical feasibility, additional resources needed, and clearly the extra work would require a different launch date,” Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s acting administrator, wrote in a memo to employees. “That said, I also want to hear about the opportunities it could present to accelerate the effort of the first crewed flight and what it would take to accomplish that first step of pushing humans farther into space.”

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Lightfoot referenced ongoing discussions with the Trump administration’s transition team at NASA, saying that “NASA is clearly a priority for the President and his administration.”

Space historian John Logsdon said the study reflects a desire to pursue an exciting crewed mission more quickly.

“It’s an intriguing proposition to do something this bold,” said Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “And given the rather slow pace of the program of record, if this proves feasible, I think it would be very exciting development.”

Bob Walker, a former congressman and adviser to the Trump administration who helped craft the Trump campaign’s space policy, said the administration wants to take a more aggressive posture on human space exploration with at least a lunar flyby as quickly as possible.

“There has been a lot of controversy over whether or not the SLS has a definable mission,” he said. “And I think what you see playing out here is that NASA is trying to find a way to meet the time schedule that they think the administration is on in terms of going back to a flyby mission to the moon.”

Flying astronauts on the first flight of a major new rocket would be riskier but not unprecedented. John Young and Bob Crippen piloted the first shuttle to blast off in 1981, a mission that revealed safety flaws that needed correcting.

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Accidents that killed two shuttle crews over the next 30 years have made NASA more risk averse.

As it stands now, the Orion capsule flying the mission known as Exploration Mission-1, or EM-1, was not slated to have life support systems installed yet.

NASA’s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel already has expressed concern that those life support systems won't be tested on Orion before astronauts fly on the second SLS mission, called EM-2.

The first SLS mission also now anticipates launching with a different upper stage than the second mission, and it would have to be human-rated if it remains in the plans.

NASA’s study will outline how much it would cost and how long it would take to fly astronauts on a loop around the moon sooner rather than later.

If the first SLS launch already faces extended delays that NASA has not yet publicly acknowledged, the agency might be able to take advantage of the extra time it needs anyway to ready crew-related systems — if the Trump administration and Congress are willing to fund the work.

Some were immediately skeptical about the motives behind the study and the crewed mission’s feasibility.

“If flying a crew on the first mission of SLS was a wise, prudent, strategically important thing to do, then the program would have baselined it in the first place,” wrote Keith Cowing, editor of NASAWatch.com. “To move this rather important milestone up now in the midst of dueling and ever-shifting policy directions — for no clearly articulated reason other than politics — starts to smell like launch fever to me — the worst kind of launch fever.”

NASA’s future will be discussed Thursday morning in a hearing held by the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

In the background of NASA’s efforts to accelerate an exciting manned exploration mission are claims by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that his company could launch astronauts to Mars in the mid-20s, a decade or more before NASA has any plans to try doing that. Other private firms, including the Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin, have ambitions to send cargo and people to the moon.

“(The study) reflects either directly or indirectly the message from the Trump White House that he is nterested in NASA doing big things,” said Logsdon. “And this is the biggest thing on the horizon they could do.”

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