New vehicles pave way for exploration
By Ken Kremer
Why is NASA’s Commercial Crew
Program to develop private human
transport ships to low Earth orbit
important?
That’s the question I posed to NASA
Administrator Charles Bolden when
we met for an exclusive interview at
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
in Maryland.
The Commercial Crew Program
(CCP) is the critical enabler
“for establishing a viable orbital
infrastructure” in the 2020s, NASA
Administrator
Charles
Bolden
explained recently in a one-on-one
interview at NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Bolden,
a
Space
Shuttle
space, says NASA wants one of the
new American-made private crewed
spaceships
under
development
by SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra
Nevada – with NASA funding – to be
ready to ferry U.S. astronauts to the
92
92
International Space Station (ISS) and
back to Earth by late 2017. Flights
for other commercial orbital space
ventures would follow later and into
the next decade.
Since the shutdown of NASA’s
space shuttle program following
(commanded by Chris Ferguson),
America has been 100 percent
astronauts to the space station and
back.
“Commercial crew is critical. We
need to have our own capability
to get our crews to space,” Bolden
exclaimed during a visit to the
NASA Goddard cleanroom with
the
agency’s
groundbreaking
Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS)
science probes.
Administrator
Bolden
foresees
a huge shift in how the U.S. will
conduct space operations in low
earth orbit (LEO) just a decade from
now. The future LEO architecture
will be dominated not by NASA and
the ISS but rather by commercial
entrepreneurs and endeavors in the
2020s.
“There are going to be other
commercial
stations
or
other
laboratories,” Bolden excitedly told
me.
And the cash strapped Commercial
Crew effort to build new astronaut
transporters is the absolutely essential
enabler to get that exploration task
done, he says.
“Commercial Crew is critical
to establishing the low Earth orbit
infrastructure that is required for
exploration. We have got to have a
way to get our crews to space.”
“You know people try to separate
stuff that NASA does into nice little
neat packages. But it’s not that way
anymore.”
Bolden and NASA are already
looking beyond the ISS in planning
how to use the new comm