Publications
Partners
Washington - Nasa says its new giant rocket system passed an internal milestone on Wednesday, but the first test launch got pushed back a year to 2018.
Nasa is designing its Space Launch System to take astronauts beyond Earth orbit to an asteroid and eventually to Mars. The rockets will be more powerful than the Saturn V rockets that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon.
Agency officials gave the programme the go-ahead for further planning with its first and smaller version of the rocket after it passed a key internal review. The smaller of the rockets would be able to carry 77 tons of crew and cargo into orbit. Larger ones could hoist 143 tons.
Nasa says building that smaller rocket will cost more than $7bn between 2014 and launch.
The agency is 70% confident of making a November 2018 launch date, given the technical, financial and management hurdles the Space Launch System faces on the road to development, Nasa associate administrators Robert Lightfoot and Bill Gerstenmaier told reporters on a conference call.
Budget
Nasa estimates it could spend almost $12bn developing the first of three variations of the rocket and associated ground systems through the debut flight, and potentially billions more to build and fly heavier-lift next-generation boosters, a July 2014 General Accountability Office report on the programme said.
While the rocket might be ready for a test flight in December 2017, as previously planned, the new assessment showed the odds of that were "significantly less" than the 70% confidence level Nasa requires of new programmes, Gerstenmaier said.
"We want to commit to this [November 2018] date and show that we can meet it," added Lightfoot.
The schedule assumes flat annual budgets of about $1.3bn for the SLS rocket and another $1.5bn for Orion crew capsule and associated ground launch systems at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
The GAO report found that Nasa's SLS rocket programme was about $400m short of meeting its December 2017 target.
The rocket is a modified version of the shuttle-derived, heavy-lift booster developed under Nasa's previous exploration initiative known as Constellation.
The US space agency spent about $9bn on Constellation, which included the Orion capsule, from 2005 to 2010, before President Obama axed the programme. Its goal was to return astronauts to the surface of the moon by 2020.
Instead, the White House and Congress approved a flexible path toward Mars, including a visit to an asteroid that will be robotically relocated into a high lunar orbit.
Nasa did not say if the 11-month slip in the new rocket's debut flight, which will be an unmanned test run around the moon, would impact the second mission, slated for 2021, with a two-member crew.
"Our nation has embarked on a very ambitious space exploration program and we owe it to the American taxpayers to get this right," Lightfoot said.
