Space Pioneers

NASA’S HUMAN EXPLORATION AND OPERATIONS MISSION DIRECTORATE AND HUMANKIND’S NEXT GIANT LEAP

By Craig Collins

It happened at 7:05 a.m. on Dec. 5, 2014, just as the morning sun began to whiten the sky above Cape Canaveral: A 234-foot-tall Delta IV heavylift rocket, carrying NASA’s new Orion spacecraft, blasted off from Launch Complex 37, trailing three orange plumes that glowed like sparklers. “Liftoff at dawn,” said Communications Specialist Mike Curie, via NASA’s live feed of the event. “The dawn of Orion and a new era of American space exploration.”

Orion’s first mission took the uncrewed capsule farther than any spacecraft designed for humans had gone since the Apollo program ended more than 40 years ago: past low-Earth orbit (LEO), through the inner Van Allen radiation belt, to an orbital altitude of about 3,600 miles above Earth. Though it lasted only four-and-a-half hours, Orion’s first mission yielded valuable data about critical procedures and on-board systems, avionics, computers, separation events, and the capsule’s heat shield and parachutes. The spacecraft hit speeds of up to 20,000 mph; during re-entry, it endured temperatures approaching 4,000°F before splashing down into the Pacific Ocean, about 600 miles southwest of San Diego.

A mission known officially as Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT-1), Orion’s test flight was a critical step in achieving NASA’s ambitious vision for the nation’s space program. Orion was designed specifically to take up to six astronauts into deep space, much farther than any person has ever traveled: eventually, to become pioneers on the surface of Mars.

Establishing a lasting human presence on Mars might seem a farfetched idea if NASA hadn’t already, nearly 50 years ago, fulfilled the equally preposterous quest to put men on the Moon. As Project Apollo began to wind down in 1972, President Richard Nixon announced NASA’s new Space Shuttle Program, which he said would provide “routine access to space.”

Routine manned spaceflight has been a remarkable accomplishment, enabling a sustained human presence aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the largest artificial body ever to orbit the Earth, since 2000. But it’s also an achievement viewed with ambivalence among the far-sighted thinkers at NASA – an agency conceived to view the routine with profound restlessness.

The impending end of the Space Shuttle era (it came in 2011) left NASA with a critical choice for its Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate: It could continue to pour its expertise and resources into work it had already mastered – designing a new generation of transport vehicles to bring cargo and crew to the ISS and other destinations in LEO – or it could foster competition for these tasks among private-sector innovators, while freeing its own visionaries to turn their gaze farther outward, to Mars and beyond. It chose the latter.

The transition to commercial service of the ISS began in 2006, when NASA launched its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program and invited private companies to submit competing designs for commercial cargo vehicles. These efforts bore fruit in May 2012, when the SpaceX Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to the ISS, and in September 2013, when Orbital Sciences Corporation’s (later Orbital ATK and finally Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems) Cygnus followed with its own resupply mission. NASA considers the COTS program an unqualified success – an $800 million investment that yielded two new medium-class launch vehicles and two automated cargo spacecraft.

COTS, which ended with Orbital’s 2013 demonstration flight, has transitioned into the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program, which now focuses on actual deliveries to the ISS: deliveries by SpaceX, which launched the Dragon vehicle with the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, now depart from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, while Cygnus capsules are launched from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia. A second round of contracts was awarded in 2016 to Orbital ATK (now Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems), SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada Corporation for cargo delivery to the ISS through 2024.

A parallel initiative, the Commercial Crew Program, was launched in 2010, the year before the Space Shuttle’s retirement. On Sept. 16, 2014, after several phases of preliminary development and competing designs, NASA announced that two private companies – Boeing and SpaceX – had been awarded contracts to complete development and provide initial crewed launch services to the ISS. Both companies were assigned the same set of requirements: to develop and certify the crew vehicle and to fly up to six operational flights to the ISS after successfully completing the NASA certification process.

As of August 2018, first crewed flights of certified transportation systems – Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon – are anticipated to take place in 2019, with test flights preceding. The Crew Dragon will be launched with a Falcon 9, while the CST- 100, designed to be used with multiple launch vehicles, will initially be launched with an Atlas V 412 rocket.

The model used to develop these cargo and crew transports is remarkably different from the way hardware and capabilities were developed in the space program’s past: The three-person Apollo spacecraft, for example, was built largely by North American Aviation, but its design and development were controlled almost completely by engineers from NASA – who needed to integrate it with the Apollo Service Module, Saturn V launch vehicle, and Lunar Excursion Module to accomplish the Apollo program missions.

By contrast, said Phil McAlister, director of HEO’s Commercial Spaceflight Division, today’s cargo and crew transport systems are public-private partnerships to provide a service on a commercial basis to an existing outpost in space — the ISS. “Our responsibility is to establish our requirements and then to certify that those requirements have been met,” he said. While NASA has much insight – and, in fact, has personnel stationed on the factory floors at both Boeing and SpaceX to learn and evaluate whether the crew transports will meet NASA’s requirements – it leaves design decisions up to the private sector. “They make the decisions about how their systems are going to operate, what they’re going to look like, and what the hardware is going to be,” said McAlister. “We want them to be able to take these systems and sell them not only to NASA, but to other customers as well. They’re going to be the owner-operators of these systems.”

Over the long term, said McAlister, the commercialization of space will create a new service economy – delivering cargo and crew not only to the ISS, but also to other LEO destinations – while freeing NASA and other space agencies to work together on the big questions facing crewed spaceflight: how far, how fast, and for how long crews can function in flights long enough to require crew members to look to somewhere other than Earth for resupply – “Earth-independent” space travel.

“We want low-Earth orbit to be a profitable, robust enterprise with multiple service providers and multiple users,” McAlister said. “We’d like to be a part of making these operations less dominated by the government.”

In December 2017, the Trump administration issued Space Policy Directive 1, which charges the NASA administrator with leading “an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities. Beginning with missions beyond low-Earth orbit, the United States will lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations.”

Space Policy Directive 1 differs from the 2010 National Space Policy issued by the Obama administration by a single paragraph, but that small amount of text represents a significant shift, with priority now placed on returning to the Moon rather than aiming for Mars outright. Important to note also is the emphasis on “commercial and international partners” going forward.

To carry out the directive, NASA has devised a national agency effort called “the Exploration Campaign,” released in April 2018, which centers on three domains – low-Earth orbit, lunar orbit and surface, and Mars and deep space – and lists four strategic goals:

• Transition U.S. human spaceflight in low-Earth orbit to commercial operations, which support NASA and the needs of an emerging private sector market.

• Extend long-duration U.S. human spaceflight operations to lunar orbit.

• Enable long-term robotic exploration of the Moon.

• Enable human exploration of the Moon as preparation for human missions to Mars and deeper into the solar system.

The name of the game in low-Earth orbit is commercialization. The Exploration Campaign’s objectives in LEO include ending direct U.S. government funding for the ISS by 2025 while stimulating commercial industry to develop capabilities that the agency and the private sector can utilize. Such industry capabilities would be required to meet NASA’s exploration risk mitigation and science requirements.

Additionally, the campaign calls – beginning this year – for increasing the breadth and depth of commercial and international LEO activities by expanding ISS partnerships to new nations (including new international astronaut visits); expanding public-private partnerships to develop and demonstrate technologies and capabilities to enable new commercial space products and services; and drawing on input from current ISS partners, commercial partners, and stakeholders to plan for the transition of LEO activities from direct government funding to a commercial basis on independent commercial platforms or a non-NASA operating model for some form of the ISS by 2025.

The overarching objective on the Moon and in its orbit – to “establish a long-term presence in the vicinity of and on the Moon, realizing science and human exploration advancement, while also enabling other national and commercial goals” – divides more specifically into lunar orbit activities and lunar surface activities.

Currently, the first integrated flight of Orion (uncrewed) and the Space Launch System rocket, the workhorse designed to propel people and equipment into deep space, is planned to the lunar vicinity in 2020. A crewed flight of Americans will travel around the Moon in 2023. Essential to the plan to return humans to the Moon is establishment of the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G). The human-tended platform for crews to visit from Earth, to transit to and from the lunar surface, and to depart to and return from Mars will consist of at least a power and propulsion element (PPE) as well as habitation, logistics, and airlock capabilities, and will enable science and technology activities such as lunar sample return and operation of lunar, robotic, and in-space systems. “The power and propulsion element will be the initial component of the gateway, and is targeted to launch in 2022,” according to a February 2018 NASA release. “Using advanced high-power solar electric propulsion, the element will maintain the gateway’s position and can move the gateway between lunar orbits over its lifetime to maximize science and exploration operations. … The power and propulsion element will also provide high-rate and reliable communications for the gateway including space-to-Earth and space-to-lunar uplinks and downlinks, spacecraft-to-spacecraft crosslinks, and support for spacewalk communications. Finally, it also can accommodate an optical communications demonstration – using lasers to transfer large data packages at faster rates than traditional radio frequency systems.”

“The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway will give us a strategic presence in cislunar space. It will drive our activity with commercial and international partners and help us explore the Moon and its resources,” said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator of the HEO Mission Directorate, in February 2018. “We will ultimately translate that experience toward human missions to Mars.”

Endeavors on the lunar surface center on a lunar robotics campaign. “Drawing on the interests and capabilities of industry and international partners, NASA will develop progressively complex robotic missions to the surface of the Moon with scientific and exploration objectives in advance of a human return,” according to the agency. These missions include a small commercial lander on the Moon no later than 2020, development of a mid- to large-scale lander (working toward a human-rated lander), and support for an early science and technology initiative involving Lunar CubeSats and a Virtual Lunar institute, among other activities.

In September 2018, NASA issued a Request for Proposals for Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), services that it envisions as a means of sending instruments, experiments, and small payloads to the Moon to achieve a variety of exploration, science, and technology demonstration objectives. And in March 2018, NASA issued a “Lunar Surface Transportation Capability Request for Information” to “assess commercial interest in development of domestic lunar lander capabilities that would evolve to meeting the identified performance towards human-class landers.” Responses from the RFI are helping the agency to mature plans for the first two upcoming landers built through public/ private partnerships. “The agency’s two lander demonstration missions will help NASA understand the requirements and systems needed for a human class lander starting with the development of a minimum 1,100 pound (500 kilogram) lander, which is targeted to launch in 2022,” states a March 2018 press release. It explains that the ongoing small payload delivery missions enabled by CLPS will provide important data on landing precision, long-term survivability, guidance, and navigation for future landers, and that the landers will be capable of sample return, resource prospecting, and demonstrating use of in-space resources, which will reduce the risk when building landers for humans.

While Space Policy Directive 1 and the Exploration Campaign place focus on returning to the Moon for science, exploration, and commercial activities, that focus is still seen as a stepping off point and preparation for missions to Mars and beyond. As such, the Exploration Campaign includes plans for the red planet as well. A Mars rover mission in 2020 will serve as the first step of a samplereturn strategy searching for past life and demonstrating oxygen production. That mission, in turn, will serve as a building block for a subsequent round-trip robotic mission with the historic first launch off another planet and sample return through the LOP-G. Standards for human long-duration deep space transportation vehicles will also be developed and investments and partnerships in technology areas and resource characterization needed for exploration of Mars and other deep space destinations will be prioritized and guided.

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek in late July 2018, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine summed up the agency’s near-term plans and made clear its ultimate objective:

“The vision is: NASA does things that nobody else can or will do. So if there’s a robust commercial space industry in low-Earth orbit, then NASA doesn’t need to be there. We want to be one of many customers in the mature economic domain we’re hoping low-Earth orbit will become in a matter of years.

“What NASA can do is go further. So we use our resources to go to the Moon, and we build an architecture around the Moon that includes landers that can get us to the surface, initially with robots and rovers and eventually with humans. And we build a gateway, an outpost around the Moon [the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, planned for the 2020s], so that everything is reusable. We want to build an architecture that has NASA’s critical infrastructure, so that our commercial partners can go to the surface of the Moon, and our international partners can go to the surface of the Moon, and NASA can go to the surface of the Moon. We call it the Gateway, but it’s really an outpost that has human habitation capabilities.

“President Trump’s [first] Space Policy Directive says he wants our return to the Moon to be sustainable. In other words, it’s going to be there forever. We’re not going to leave the Moon as we did in 1972. We’re going this time to stay. Then the next step is taking the architecture we’re building around the Moon and applying it to Mars. Everything feeds forward, and this is our objective: to get to Mars. It’s a lofty ambition, but it’s eminently doable.”