CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Anyone need a $500 million, 355-foot steel tower for launching rockets into space?
There’s one available at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Brand new, never been used.
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The mobile launcher has been built for a rocket called the Ares 1. The problem is, there is not yet any such thing as an Ares 1 rocket – and if the Obama administration has its way, there never will be.
President Obama’s 2011 budget kills that rocket, along with the rest of NASA’s Constellation program, the ambitious back-to-the-moon effort initiated under President George W. Bush.
People here were shocked when they heard the news last month. They were already facing the imminent retirement of the aging space shuttle, and the likelihood of thousands of layoffs in the contracting corps, but many hoped to find a Constellation job, stay on site and essentially just switch badges.
Now suddenly, they’re looking at no shuttle, no Ares 1, no NASA-owned spaceship of any kind in the near future. American astronauts for years to come will hitch rides to space on Russian rockets.
“It’s almost like losing manned space flight,” said Michele Kosiba, 44, a quality inspector for United Space Alliance, the primary shuttle contractor.
People are dismayed and bewildered. Obama has gotten the message and will fly to the Kennedy Space Center on April 15 to hold a space conference and a town hall meeting.
He is certain to point out that his budget actually boosts funding for NASA. The new NASA strategy shifts the task of launching astronauts to low Earth orbit from traditional government contracts to commercial contracts. If the private sector can create a taxi to space, NASA can focus on new technologies and longer journeys in the solar system.
A presidential commission, led by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine, reported to Obama in September that the Ares 1 would have limited use and that the heavy-lift rocket necessary for a moon mission probably wouldn’t be ready until 2028.
At that point, the panel said, there’d be no money left in the program for a moon lander or moon habitat. In effect, the Augustine committee said Constellation, which has already cost $9.4 billion, was destined for a (metaphorical) crash landing.
“We could get to the moon and do what?” said Dale Ketcham, a University of Central Florida professor who runs a think tank called the Spaceport Research and Technology Institute. “The taxpayers would really be ticked off: Sixty years later we go back and plant the flag and go home.”
Lawmakers in Congress of both parties, particularly those in districts with space jobs, have given the Obama plan a cold reception. Congress still must approve Obama’s budget. Until that happens, Constellation maintains a ghostly existence as “the program of record.”
Which means that, every day, workers are still adding elements to the mobile launcher. Across the country, work continues on Ares and the new crew capsule, Orion.
The Orion launchpad abort system will be tested later this spring in New Mexico. Even if Congress sanctions Obama’s plan, the administration expects to spend $2.5 billion just closing out contracts and shutting down Constellation.
NASA employees and contractors at Cape Canaveral say they were caught off guard by the new strategy.
“We just pulled the rug out from human space flight,” said Jim Bolton, a NASA manager for shuttle processing. The morning of the announcement, Bolton said, “People were just truly shocked. ‘How can that be? Cancel Constellation? What are you talking about?’ “
Bolton spoke as he stood directly beneath the shuttle Atlantis, which was jacked up in its processing bay and shrouded in scaffolding and fuel lines. The orbiter is being prepped for its 32nd, and most likely final, journey to and from orbit. From below, some of the gray thermal tiles that keep it from burning up upon reentry are slightly scuffed, but it’s still a pretty spiffy spaceship.
“It’s such an awesome machine,” said Tim Keyser, a mechanical lead in another orbiter bay. “It’s not old. I go in the midbody, it’s pristine. It looks like it rolled off the assembly line.”
People here talk of the orbiters – Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour – as if they are beloved members of the family. There are only four shuttle flights left, with the last scheduled for September, although the timetable could slip a few months. Some lawmakers are scrambling to keep the shuttle flying, perhaps with a drawn-out flight manifest.
Howard DeCastro, shuttle program manager for United Space Alliance, said the shuttle is flying better than ever. The main challenge for shuttle extension is restarting supply contracts that have already shut down. It would take two years, for example, to produce a new external fuel tank for an additional shuttle flight. Still, DeCastro said, “there are no showstoppers in flying the shuttle longer.”
What will really hurt, workers say, is the disappearance of the know-how accumulated over decades here at the Cape.
“We lose that knowledge base, it’s very hard to get that back,” said Chris Loines, 43, a United Space Alliance contractor who has been launching rockets his entire adult life.
The administration has promised to spend $2 billion upgrading the Kennedy Space Center. But workers here said they don’t know what that means, exactly. They don’t want to work on facilities, they want to work on spaceships. Terry White, a United Space Alliance worker who supervises the thermal protection system on the orbiters, said that putting money into the space center without a spaceship is like having a fancy showroom with no cars to sell.
Ketcham said the decision to retire the shuttle has only recently hit home.
“There was this communal epiphany – ‘Oh my God, they’re going to cancel the shuttle.’ And then we plunged into the classic five stages of grief. And rational thought is not one of the stages of grief,” Ketcham said.
NASA officials insist they could still find a use for the half-billion-dollar tower even if the Ares 1 never materializes. But space technology tends to be highly customized. A worker on his way to the cafeteria the other day was overhead saying he wanted to climb the mobile launcher “before it becomes an artificial reef.”
DeCastro, the United Space Alliance executive, said he doubted the mobile launcher could be useful without the Ares 1.
“It’s just a big old tower now,” DeCastro said. “I guess you could sell it to SeaWorld or something and put a big ol’ slide on it.”
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