Private Enterprise's Ticket to Fly Into Space

Panel May Urge Strapped NASA To Outsource Commercial Flights

Perhaps, someday, going into space will be as mundane as flying on a commercial aircraft: Buy the ticket online, drive to the aerodrome, shuffle through a cattle-pen security line, grab a burger in the food court, watch a mediocre movie on the way up, and so on.

Here's a somewhat more plausible scenario: In the near future, U.S. astronauts could ride into orbit on a rocket that says, on its side, "SpaceX." Or some such exotic company name.

The prospect of commercialized spaceflight -- with astronauts going into orbit on rockets owned and operated by private companies -- is becoming more plausible as the White House awaits a sweeping review of the human spaceflight program.

The Augustine committee, a 10-person panel created by President Obama and led by retired aerospace executive Norman R. Augustine, plans to give the White House on Tuesday the summary of a report that has the entire space community on alert. Although the committee is just an advisory panel and is offering the administration a short list of options rather than a single recommendation, the moment is fraught with tension because of the complex hardware in play, the thousands of jobs at risk and the congressional politics that will complicate any major change in strategy.

The committee, conducting its deliberations in a series of open meetings this summer, has been skeptical of the current NASA strategy, which is built around a new set of rockets that would send astronauts back to the moon. The committee concluded that there's not nearly enough money in the budget to return to the moon by 2020, as has been NASA's stated goal.

Putting several billion more dollars a year into NASA -- which operates on about $18 billion annually -- might solve that. It's not clear what priority President Obama will give to funding human spaceflight. Although the administration's stimulus package gave NASA a boost, Obama's first budget trimmed billions of dollars out of the projected budgets for human spaceflight in years to come.

The Augustine committee will ask NASA to consider some dramatic changes in strategy, including possibly skipping the moon mission. Instead, NASA could focus on developing a "Deep Space" capability that might include flights to asteroids, or to gravitationally stable points in space, far from Earth, where astronomers like to park their telescopes. (That would allow them to be serviced by astronauts in the same manner as the Hubble Space Telescope is in low Earth orbit.)

Under the Deep Space scenario, NASA also could consider a manned mission to Phobos, a tiny Martian moon whose minuscule gravity makes it easy to visit and depart than a sizeable planet like Mars.

The committee has raised concerns about the Ares 1 rocket, which has been plagued by engineering questions and is a key element of NASA's new Constellation program, the agency's major effort for space exploration in the post-shuttle era. NASA has said that $3 billion already has been spent on the Ares 1. Although canceling it may be attractive to the administration for both engineering and budgetary reasons, that would cost jobs in places such as Florida, Alabama and Utah.

Some 4,000 jobs nationwide are associated with the rocket, according to NASA. That's in addition to the 15,000 jobs associated with the Space Shuttle, which NASA plans to retire at the end of next year.

Any desire to kill the Ares 1 also would be complicated by national security questions involving solid fuel rockets, said space analyst John Logsdon.

"With the end of the shuttle program and the potential cancellation of Ares 1, the country loses a lot of its capability to build solid rockets," Logsdon said.