NEWS

NASA has abandoned plans to get replacements for retiring US space shuttles into service by 2013 because of lack of additional funds and technical issues. The US space agency had hoped to fly astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard new spaceship Orion as early as September 2013, well before the formal deadline of March 2015. “The window of opportunity for us to accelerate Orion has closed,” said Programme Manager Jeff Hanley at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston. The US will be without a means to transport people to and from space after the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010 and intends to rely on Russia to ferry crews to the space station and on private companies to deliver cargo during the gap.

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On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush announced the development of the Orion spacecraft—known then as the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV)—as part of the Vision for Space Exploration. The primary purpose of the CEV was to carry astronauts beyond the Earth’s orbit. However, it would also act as a replacement vehicle to ferry astronauts, scientists and payloads to the ISS after the space shuttles were retired.

The Orion spacecraft was proposed partly as fallout of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and its design, therefore, is heavily influenced to include crew life saving systems in all phases of flight. The shuttle, it may be recalled, was the first reusable orbital spacecraft. Among its various tasks, it carries payloads to Low Earth Orbit, provides crew rotation for the ISS and performs servicing missions, such as in support of the Hubble Space Telescope. The orbiter can also recover satellites and other payloads from orbit and return them to Earth, but this capacity has not been used often. On the other hand, it has been used extensively to transport large payloads from the ISS to Earth.

In all, six air-worthy shuttles were built. The first orbiter, Enterprise, was not built for space flight and used only for testing purposes. The other five space-worthy shuttles built were: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into the launch phase in 1986 and Columbia broke apart during re-entry in 2003. Each shuttle was designed for a projected lifespan of 100 launches or 10 years operational life. With the first launch in 1981, while none of the shuttles have come anywhere close to 100 launches, their operational life has been periodically extended beyond 10 years. However, NASA has now announced that all the space shuttles will be retired after mission STS-133 in 2010. In the meantime, NASA was hoping that it would get the necessary financial support to hasten development of the Orion.