NASA administrator Michael Griffin will be meeting with lawmakers on Thursday to talk dollar signs in his effort to reduce the gap between the Space Shuttle\u2019s retirement and the man-rated implementation of the Crew Exploration Vehicle.\n<\/p>\n
Some politicians are now classing any gap as a national security issue \u2013 which may help Griffin in his aims to persuade the appropriations committee that funding needs to be in place to back up the acceleration in the CEV\u2019s development and testing.<\/font><\/p>\n \u201cThere is a plan to accelerate, at the administrator\u2019s request,\u201d NASA public affairs spokesman Michael Braukus. \u201cThe idea is that we\u2019ll have other vehicles to get us from space to the surface of the moon and Mars and back again. We\u2019re not talking Buck Rogers here with one vehicle that can do it all,\u201d <\/font><\/p>\n <\/font> A 28 launch mandate for the final years of the Space Shuttle fleet has been put in place to complete the construction of the International Space Station (ISS) by 2010 \u2013 with the CEV to follow in the next stage of President Bush\u2019s Vision of Space Exploration, a return to the Moon and eventually a manned-mission to Mars.<\/font> <\/font> One expert claims a gap between the Shuttle and the CEV \u2013 which was set to become an active member of the NASA fleet by 2014 \u2013 simply isn\u2019t acceptable.<\/font> <\/p>\n \u201cThe U.S. would be totally dependent on Russia for human access to space,\u201d said John Logsdon, director of George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute. <\/font><\/p>\n \u201cA space-faring nation must have its own critical capabilities, and among those, I believe, is the U.S.\u2019 ability to put its own people in space. Russia in this arena is not some benign, good-natured partner.\u201d <\/font><\/p>\n Chairwoman of the Senate science and space subcommittee, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, has already gone on record to say any hiatus in the US\u2019 ability to ferry astronauts into space is unacceptable and an issue of national security.<\/font> <\/font> NASA currently has just over $750 million to utilise on CEV issues in the budget that reaches to September, 2006.<\/font> <\/p>\n Lockheed Martin \u2013 who released images of a lifting body CEV initial proposal last week \u2013 and a partnership of Northrop Grumman and Boeing are looking to win the contract to go ahead and build the new spaceship. Recently, Burt Rutan\u2019s Scaled Composites offered to build and operate a complementary system.<\/font><\/p>\n The t\/Space team have said they could be ready by 2008 in building an Low Earth Orbit transit system \u2013 and have already received $6 million from NASA for study reports.<\/font><\/p>\n NASA will make a decision on which companies will win the contracts to participate in building the next generation of space vehicles that will take the agency into the next phase of the Vision for Space Exploration.<\/font><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NASA administrator Michael Griffin will be meeting with lawmakers on Thursday to talk dollar signs in his effort to reduce the gap between the Space Shuttle\u2019s retirement and the man-rated implementation of the Crew Exploration Vehicle. Some politicians are now classing any gap as a national security issue \u2013 which may help Griffin in his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42395"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}