Washington, February 04: Nasa’s plan for the private sector to build spacecraft to fly astronauts to the International Space Station is a high-risk undertaking that won’t show results for years, experts said.
The abrupt shift “harnesses our nation’s entrepreneurial energies, and will create thousands of new jobs”, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said in a statement issued as the budget for the fiscal year that begins October 1 was unveiled on Monday.
It also reflects a key recommendation made by the high-level Augustine Commission, which President Barack Obama set up last year to review US human space flight plans and come up with a successor to the space shuttle, which winds down in late 2010 after nearly 30 years of service.
The US space agency’s plan to turn manned space flight over to private enterprise was met with a less-than-enthusiastic reception in some quarters.
Great uncertainty
Obama has “accepted the move to put our human access to space on a commercial footing, with great uncertainty as to safety, schedule and cost”, wrote four-time space shuttle astronaut Tom Jones in the magazine Popular Mechanics.
John Logsdon, former head of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said critics of the new policy were “mainly concerned about safety”.
Similar concerns about commercially built space vehicles figured high up in a report issued in December by the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP).
“No manufacturer of commercial orbital transportation services is currently qualified for human-rating requirements, despite some claims and beliefs to the contrary,” ASAP’s panel of independent experts said.
The annual report also warned it would be “unwise” to drop Nasa’s Ares 1 rocket, part of the costly Constellation project that was effectively killed by the budget plans, and hand over the ferrying of astronauts to the ISS to private industry.
ASAP was set up by Congress in 1967 after a flash fire ripped through a command module during a launch pad test of the Apollo/Saturn space vehicle, killing three astronauts on board.
Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, one of the new generation of privately-owned companies with an eye on space, ripped into the ASAP report as “random speculation”.
“If they are to say such things, then they ought to say it on the basis of data, not on random speculation,” Musk, whose eight-year-old company has built and tested a launcher, said in an interview with Spaceflight Now.
—Agencies