Where Do We Go From Here?

Getting full utilization from ISS is essential, but I wouldn't be so quick to write off the Moon just yet, based on both the House and Senate NASA budget bills. Both Democrats and Republicans seem to continue to hold out the Moon as a destination at some point. I could easily see a scenario whereby the U.S.provides the capsule and HLV and ESA or Russia provides a lunar lander and rover. Once China begins manned flights around the Moon in a decade or so, all the while the U.S. is building heavy lift vehicle, political and public sentiment could shift in the Moon's favor ahead of asteroids. Then again, a Republican President if elected in 2012 would almost certainly reverse the Obama space policy.

The challenge that I see is allowing some semblance of consistency across the human spaceflight and exploration community. Whenever there is a winner WRT an architecture or technology, etc., there are many losers who immediately start to undercut the position of the winner. And since those who have access can spin the story to the direction that best suits them, we have a revolving door for directions, policies, and roles and responsibilities. Consequently, we don't move very far at all...

Certainly the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program has a single point of failure with ISS logistics being its only reason for being. This is why we also need to focus on longer term exploration goals, and I think the Senate bill that would fund the Orion spacecraft and a shuttle-derived heavy lift launch vehicle is a good first step.

Agreed. Moon is not off the table at all.

Most media doesn't seem to understand that.

In fact, I think that the case for lunar return is only going to grow.

Much of the hardware that can get us there is part of the compromise plan.

A policy shift that flips on the Altair switch is all it would take.

One can only imagine the impact of an Apollo 8 style mission will have on decisions to start landing. New discoverys of water keep coming in and who knows what other discoverys will be made in the years to come that will help lunar return policy.

The current situation with the cooling pump on ISS certainly does one thing very dramatically and that is demonstrates the fragility of the ISS without a Shuttle or similar capability to support it.

On the subject of full utilization of ISS and its center place in the program, it should occupy a very significant place after 100 billion dollars and three decades of work.

There is a 'users workshop' this week in Houston. It is well attended but I think its mainly NASA and its contractors commiserating. The program scientists told everyone that loss of Shuttle was nothing to fear; as long as Dragon is on-line we will have upmass and downmass. We are all hopeful that Dragon will come along in all due haste.

Without the assurance of up and down capability, there currently are a lot of empty spaces on the US-European-Japanese segment of ISS, and likely will remain so until some serious researchers sign up. Serious researchers are not likely to be signing up until assured transportation, a reasonable integration schedule and a streamlined integration process are introduced.

You want government to do something useful with people in Earth orbit? Subsidize construction of the first orbiting Solar power station. Twenty billion dollars to whoever first delivers on the ground 100,000 MW-hours of electricity that was collected or generated in space.

Again a reporter has not read the SD HLV assessment.It has plenty of programs for human spaceflight that has nothing to do with ISS.The NASA plan can be faulted for not having a schedule to go to the Alpha Star System.They have the Solar system covered fairly well.

We've fallen back a bit, having gone from having a shuttle to having to buy Soyuz seats. So right now the Moon isn't an issue, we're fighting over how to get the basics in order.

But then what? Optimistically, in five years we'll have an HLV, Orion, private cargo flights, dozens of Falcon 9 flights done, maybe a Boeing capsule too.

And these things will be reassessed, and the Moon will probably do well for same reason VSE liked it; it is potentially useful.

It's a shame Obama doesn't like it, but I don't think it matters. Even if he's still in office when this comes up again, he's only the president.

ISS will not succeed for some time. Yes it is there, it ought to be used, but shortsightedness and poor planning led to an inability to provide significant upmass or downmass for at least a few years. So as its lifetime is used up, little use for it is yet planned.

There is another problem and that is that in terms of understanding customer needs and integration processes, the ISS organization today is about where Shuttle was in 1982. Lots of promise; poorly defined and convoluted integration processes based more on the convoluted ISS program organizational structure than on the prospective users that might be out there. At the ISS Research Academy this week, much of this discussion was how relatively easy and expedited a process was for getting payloads onto Spacehab and Mir ten years ago and that the ISS processes are something completely different.

Headquarters is trying to start a real ISS research institute and they ought to take full advantage of it to redefine the integration process and to research and pinpoint prospective experimenters in industry and academia, rather than the current ISS Program's method of hoping that maybe the almost nonexistent ISS public marketing will find someone who has a need.

In my view this uncertainty of purpose is the result of NASA's decision to emphasize human "exploration", and not developing a plan to find useful activities for humans, other than the ISS.
Space mining and space construction have somehow been ruled out, even though there is a distinct possibility of emergency ad hoc tasks, such as NEO response.

Here's my "Where do we go from here?" answer:
-We need a CEV that can do work, such as use a robotic arm, and land like a civilized 21st century spacecraft and be almost completely reusable.
-There's a proposal for an in-space manned lunar cycler.
-There's the obvious suggestion of a scaled up x37-b. A 2x scale up would allow a cargo bay cylinder of about 8x14 feet, or 703 cu.ft. The actual next gen design might be even more generous.
-There is obvious need of a cis-lunar space tug.

A human module could be a sometimes payload of that space plane. Orion-developed internals could be the guts of that module*. It could also serve as the cycler, along with the space tug.
The cycler could easily be returned to earth.
Furthermore, a manned space plane could work in concert with an unmanned one, which would be serving as a cargo bay at large.

Those three things, space plane, manned-module and the tug, would give us a lot, a versatile system. A lunar lander looks like a US-Russian(-ESA?) project.

*This need not be an added problem for the Orion people. They can forget about the heat shield, parachutes, air bags, floatation bags, and all the issues of reentry and landing. The space plane and its rocketry can serve as launch abort. The Orion engineers would only need to repack their already technology into a cylinder.

"A human module could be a sometimes payload of that space plane. Orion-developed internals could be the guts of that module"

What about crew escape?

Didn't we decide to cancel the shuttle in part due to lack of escape options?

Shuttle escape options including jumping out with a 'chute. A module in the trunk wouldn't even have that.

Since nothing is carved in stone yet for said space plane or module, the designers would be free to answer your question "What about crew escape?" as a fundamental design priority, not a retro fit.
The MLAS appears to have a hatch coincident with Orion's.
It's certainly not an intractable problem. But I agree, it should be designed optimally, with input from experienced astronauts, including the Apollo 13 guys and all the ones who remember Apollo 1.

On the same note as crew escape, I think there should be a design requirement for coincident, forward looking, direct-view windows on the space plane and the module. Let the astronauts lobby for side view if they want.

The likelihood that ISS will be fully utilized is slim to non e at the rate that NASA is managing the program.

ISS payload integration templates are 36 months long. Shuttle middeck integration templates got down to 24 months or less, and even that was too long unless the experimenters were being funded by NASA. Shuttle-Mir got down to less than a 12 month integration template. They did this with streamlined integration documentation and a smaller, more directly hands on series of integration personnel spearheaded by Spacehab, which had the major share of the work on the Shuttle side, and through a streamlined system organized with the Russian integration counterparts by NASA managers with extensive experience on Shuttle and Spacehab.

Neither industry nor academia can afford to work to a plan which says they will not get experiment results for 4 or 5 years. Industry in particular does not like the idea that NASA has three years to decide whether the payload will even fly. NASA has, in the past, proven itself as completely unreliable. On the other hand, if an academic can get NASA to commit to pay for his research, that is good job security. NASA under Bolden and Griffen has said it will not pay for the scientific research.

So do not count on ISS to be fully utilized. As near as I can tell, no one in the NASA payloads organization ever worked the earlier more successful programs and NASA's payloads contractors do not mind the extended template since it keeps them earning more money for a longer time doing less work. The NASA ISS organization has no incentive to improve the situation.