NASA CHIEF CITES SPACEX SUCCESS IN SHIFTING FOCUS TO DEEP SPACE
Agency reorganizes to move away from low-orbit activities
With SpaceX now responsible for flying cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, NASA is reorganizing to put a new emphasis on deep space, including setting up a new directorate to develop the technologies needed to pursue what would be some of the most ambitious missions NASA has ever attempted, including building a permanent presence on the moon and eventually Mars.
In an interview with The Washington Post, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the new directorate announced Tuesday, known as Exploration Systems Development, will oversee the development of new tools, from habitats to rovers and propulsion systems, to help NASA push new frontiers.
The success of the agency’s partnership with a growing commercial space industry allows “NASA to get out of low Earth orbit and go explore,” Nelson said.
Jim Free, a former associate NASA administrator, will run the new directorate. Kathy Lueders, who leads the agency’s current Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, will run a second new directorate, to be known as Space Operations. It will oversee programs once they transition out of development, such as the space station, the commercialization of low Earth orbit, and in the years to come, operations on the moon, NASA said.
A reorientation of NASA operations has been anticipated, hastened by the success of SpaceX, which has been delivering cargo and supplies to the space station for years. Then last year, SpaceX flew the first mission
of NASA astronauts to the space station, demonstrating that NASA no longer was the only player in getting astronauts to low Earth orbit. Last week, SpaceX flew four civilians on a three-day mission orbiting the Earth without any NASA involvement.
In addition to SpaceX, Northrop Grumman flies cargo to the station. And Boeing is under contract to fly astronauts there, though it has stumbled badly with the development of its Starliner spacecraft and is years behind schedule.
The ability to depend on commercial enterprises for low-Earth undertakings frees NASA to devote more attention to ambitious missions.
“If you look out over the next two decades, what we have is a string of programs,” Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, said in an interview. “We’re talking habitats, transportation systems like rovers. We’re talking infrastructure like power, communications, resource extraction.”
Free said the two directorates will work together, but that he will be looking ahead to future missions
and harnessing the technology that would make them happen, from new forms of propulsion to in-space manufacturing and mining.
But first the agency must be focused on returning humans to the moon under the Artemis program, Free said during a town hall meeting with NASA employees.
The Artemis moon program has already seen several delays and getting astronauts to the surface by 2024, NASA’s goal, is not likely to happen. But Nelson said that the first mission of the program, known as Artemis I, is on track to launch the Orion spacecraft, without any astronauts on board, that would orbit the moon later this year or early next. The mission would be the first flight of NASA’s Space Launch System.
The second flight, Artemis II, would be a crewed mission around the moon by the end of 2023, or early 2024, he said. But he was less confident about the timeline for landing astronauts on the surface.