The Space Review by Jeff Foust Monday, May 15, 2017
Three weeks ago, President Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office, flanked by his daughter Ivanka—formally a special assistant to the president—and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins. Their attention was focused on a television screen for a videoconference with International Space Station astronauts Jack Fischer and Peggy Whitson on the day that Whitson set a new NASA record for cumulative time in space. Some in the space community wondered if the president might use the occasion to discuss his space policy plans.
“They’ve asked us to look at the plan that we’ve got today and see if we can keep going on that plan,” Lightfoot said. “They have not asked us to go to Mars by 2024.”
He did something else. During the 20-minute interview, Trump asked Whitson what NASA’s plans were for human missions to Mars. “Well, I think as your bill directed, it will be approximately in the 2030s,” she responded, a reference to the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017 that the president signed into law in March, which made human missions to Mars in that decade a priority, and included a call for a study to examine the feasibility of such a mission in 2033.
Trump, it seemed, was having none of that. “Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term,” he said. “So we’ll have to speed that up a little bit, okay?”
The space community’s reaction to that comment was split. Some dismissed it as a joke: sending humans to Mars by 2024, let alone 2020, seemed unreasonable to anyone. Others, though, took it more seriously, even if they were also concerned about the feasibility of such missions. Nonetheless, it seemed to suggest that the administration was looking to accelerate NASA’s human spaceflight program in some way.
Or not, as it turns out. In a teleconference with reporters Friday, NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot put to rest any thoughts that the White House was seriously considering any Mars missions on the timeframe the president indicated last month. “The administration has been very supportive of our plan,” he said when asked about Trump’s comments. “They’ve asked us to look at the plan that we’ve got today and see if we can keep going on that plan. They have not asked us to go to Mars by 2024.”
That teleconference, arranged on just several hours’ notice, was used to announce that NASA would not, after all, put a crew on the first flight of the Space Launch System, known as Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1). NASA announced in February that, at the request of the new administration, it would look at what it would take to put astronauts on a flight that originally planned to be uncrewed.
Lightfoot and Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said that the study found no technical showstoppers that would prevent flying a crew on EM-1. “At the end of the day, we found it technically feasible to fly crew on EM-1, as long as we had a commitment of additional resources and schedule,” Lightfoot said during the call.
Gerstenmaier added that he was surprised that there were fewer issues than expected about the work needed to make SLS and the Orion spacecraft able to support a crewed mission on the first flight. “I thought there would be a whole lot of really negative work that would actually maybe make this not very attractive to us,” he said, which turned out not to be the case.
However, they acknowledged that adding a crew would involve increased risk for those astronauts. The work to human-rate EM-1 would also cost NASA $600–900 million, and delay the launch until the first half of 2020. Those factors—cost, risk, and schedule—combined to make it ultimately undesirable to put astronauts on the flight.
“The culmination of changes in all three of those areas said that overall, probably the best plan we have is actually the plan we’re on right now,” Gerstenmaier said. “When we looked at the overall integrated activity, even though it was feasible, it just didn’t seem warranted in this environment.”
That decision, Lightfoot said, was made jointly by NASA and the White House. “We definitely sat with them after we heard the feasibility study and came to this conclusion together,” he said. “We didn’t throw it over the fence and they didn’t throw it back. We pretty much made it together.”
NASA also used the briefing to announce that the EM-1 launch, previously scheduled for November 2018, would slip to some time in 2019. That announcement was anticlimactic, though: NASA had already revealed, in a response to a Government Accountability Office report published April 27 about NASA’s exploration program, that it planned to delay the EM-1 launch to 2019 regardless of whether or not it carried a crew.
“We see 2033 or 2035 as the sweet spot for boots on the ground,” said Mike Fuller of Orbital ATK.
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