WASHINGTON — While NASA seeks to maintain an uninterrupted human presence in low Earth orbit, an agency official said a short-term gap between the International Space Station and commercial successors would not be “the end of the world.”
NASA’s current approach to its future in LEO counts on supporting development of commercial space stations with the goal of having at least one such station ready to support NASA astronauts and research by 2030, when the ISS is scheduled for retirement. A key question, though, will be whether any of the several companies working on such concepts will be ready by the end of the decade.
Speaking at a Nov. 20 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee, Phil McAlister, director of NASA’s commercial space division, said the agency would not jeopardize safety to meet a schedule, following the lessons from the commercial crew program. “I do not feel like this is a safety risk at all,” he said. “It is a schedule risk and we are doing several things to mitigate that risk.”
One risk mitigation step is working with several companies, three of which — Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Voyager Space — have funded contracts or agreements with NASA to support initial work on their stations. Several others have unfunded Space Act Agreements to assist their own station plans, known by NASA as commercial LEO destinations or CLDs, or are working independently of NASA.
“Having more than one company in this stage of development, so you’re not relying on a single provider, really increases the probability that somebody’s going to be ready on time,” he said.
There is also some schedule flexibility in the transition between the ISS and commercial stations. McAlister noted there is a two-year overlap currently projected between the start of commercial space station operations around 2028 and the retirement of the ISS in 2030. “Less than that is certainly…
Read the full article here