Bernie Roehl

There have been a lot of changes since I last blogged about human spaceflight.

President Obama has cancelled the Constellation program. The whole thing. Not ust Ares I, which everyone was expecting, but also the Ares V heavy-lift launch vehicle and the Orion spacecraft.

Now, I like Obama. I like most of his policies, and if I were an American I probably would have voted for him in the last election.

However, as a life-long supporter of the space program, I'm very disappointed. He talks about "jobs, jobs, jobs", but then wipes out tens of thousands of jobs in the aerospace industry with the stroke of a pen.

The new direction he's taking is not all bad. There's some money for researching new technologies for space travel beyond low earth orbit, also good (if he doesn't wipe that out with the next budget). And there's some money for the commercialization of human spaceflight, which I think is a good thing, and which leads me to (yet again) update my list of spacecraft.

All of a sudden some of the "dark horse" candidates are looking more likely. NASA just awarded $20 to Sierra Nevada (who acquired SpaceDev) towards development of the Dream Chaser, which is exciting. There was also some funding for human-rating the Atlas V and Delta IV launch vehicles, as well as a "kicker" launch abort system and a turnkey life support system that could be used with any spacecraft.

Orion is gone, but could theoretically be proposed by its developer, Lockheed-Martin, as a commercial crew vehicle. Presumably at somewhat less than the $20 billion development cost NASA was planning o spend. The Boeing-Bigelow capsule is also a likely contender, and the SpaceX Dragon is likely to get the funds to upgrade it to carry a crew (mostly adding a launch abort system).

A new vehicle might be coming from Blue Origin. They were originally working on suborbital ship, but it's a lightweight, composite design that might be adaptable to orbital flight by adding some thermal protection (including a heat shield) and the aforementioned life support system.

So if anything, the list of contenders has grown by at last one, to 19 in total. Again, most won't fly -- but enough will to make things interesting.

Unfortunately Orion, the only spacecraft that was intended to go beyond low earth orbit, is now no longer being funded by NASA. It's possible that some of the others might be adapted by adding more heat shielding and maybe some radiation protection as well, possibly as a "block II" version.

Interesting times.