The heads of the five agency partners of the International Space Station said Thursday they have agreed on a new plan to complete construction of the station that will focus for now on completing its assembly rather than on utilizing the facility for research.
That plan, the partners admitted, depends on NASA's ability to reactivate the space shuttle fleet safely and on mounting 16 more flights to the orbiting facility before retiring the three remaining spacecraft in fiscal year 2010. That number means 12 fewer flights than originally scheduled to complete the station and maintain its science activities.
"What you're seeing today is the result of 10 months of work between the United States and our partners," NASA administrator Michael Griffin told reporters at a joint new conference. He shared the podium with Virendra Jha, acting Canadian Space Agency president; Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA's director general; Keiji Tachikawa, president of JAXA, and Anatony Perminov, head of Roskosmos, the Russian space agency.
All five men agreed they had constructed a workable strategy to complete construction of the station within five years, and to keep it running for at least 10 years. The strategy includes carrying the European Columbus Laboratory module on the seventh shuttle flight, and JEM, the Japanese experimental module, plus its associated equipment, on the eighth, ninth and 12th flights.
It also includes continued supply flights by Russian Soyuz and Progress spacecraft, and by the ACV, ESA's Automated Cargo Vehicle, an unpiloted cargo carrier with more than twice the capacity of Progress.
The ACV is scheduled to be launched on an Ariane rocket from Kourou, in French Guiana, between the fifth and sixth shuttle flights in the station-assembly sequence, probably in the spring of 2007.
Among the agreements made, NASA and Roskosmos reached a deal in which NASA relinquished responsibility for flying the Russian module to the station. As compensation, NASA will provide sufficient power for the module until 2015. Perminov said his agency and NASA had not signed anything formally and they were "still working on the details of the documents." He added that he has made certain proposals regarding transportation of cargo to the ISS. "I have proposed to take stock of the vehicles Soyuz and Progress and there are a number of other issues which we have decided to work through during this year," he said through an interpreter.
Despite the reduced flight schedule, Griffin told reporters it includes almost a year's cushion for completion of station assembly by 2010. The schedule still includes an expansion of the station's crew to three astronauts, beginning with the STS-121 mission, currently scheduled for shuttle Discovery in May. The international partners have agreed to expand the station crew to six in 2009.
Griffin said when he was confirmed as the new head of NASA, in April 2005, he quickly determined "that a 28 flight shuttle assembly and utilization sequence (as originally planned) was not possible within the remaining lifetime of the space shuttle program. We simply did not have the flights in the system to be able to do it. Not everyone agreed with that judgment, and I regret that, but that was my judgment."
Instead, he said, "we focused on redefining the station assembly sequence to concentrate on assembly, and we are largely deferring utilization and we are paring logistics to the bone. We don't like that, but confronted with a choice between having a high confidence to be able to complete the assembly of the station and deferring utilization, or utilizing it heavily as we build it and possibly not finishing, we chose the former course."
Griffin explained that the heads of the agencies have put together an assembly sequence "that allows us to have a very high confidence that we will finish the space station assembly by the time the shuttle must be retired."
He said he would not speculate about NASA's plans for station activities after assembly is completed, but added "it is our plan to fly most of the U.S. hardware, in fact, everybody's hardware to the station – the station will be completed."
Griffin noted that during the 25-year history of the space shuttle, the program has totaled 114 flights, or 4.5 flights per year, and "if we can maintain that, we will easily complete the station."
In answer to several reporters' questions, Griffin insisted that NASA was not skimping on science on the station in order to get its construction completed. "We are doing all of the science that our budget allows us to do," he said. "If we had a bigger budget, we would do more science. We're doing what we can."
Responding to a specific comment about a commercial for a Canadian golf equipment manufacturer to be filmed outside the station, in which a Russian cosmonaut hits a golf ball, a noticeably tensed Griffin said the ISS partners have the right to propose and to conduct commercial activities on the station, "provided that all appropriate safety considerations have been dealt with."
He noted that the commercial would be "a revenue-generating opportunity, not a source of expenditures, and so I do not see it as being opposed to scientific or engineering research at all."
Meanwhile, Griffin expanded on something he has mentioned publicly in recent weeks – the possibility of mounting a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. That mission, he said, "if we're able to perform it, is of course not linked to station assembly.
I regard the scheduling of the Hubble flight as being primary a technical matter that will be best determined by looking at the needs of the telescope and, frankly, the details of the actual timing of the assembly sequence."
He said he has been paying a lot of attention to Hubble and will be working with Bill Gerstenmeier, NASA's associate administrator for operations, to "pick a schedule for that flight that best works under the confines of the station assembly sequence. Right now we're looking at something possibly in '08, but final details to follow."
Griffin said the first of those details "is whether we can do that mission at all, and I have consistently said we need to get the return-to-flight sequence behind us before we can get to any other details."
Find out how you can visit Kennedy Space Center to watch a future space shuttle launch and/or landing.
Date
Assembly
Flight
Launch
Vehicle
Element(s)
No earlier than May 2006
Discovery
Return
to Flight test mission
Multi-Purpose
Logistics Module (MPLM)
Integrated Cargo
Carrier (ICC)
Lightweight Multi-Purpose
Experiment Support Structure Carrier (LMC)
No earlier than Aug. 2006
12A
Atlantis
Second
port truss segment (ITS P3/P4)
Second set of solar arrays and batteries
Under
review
12A.1
U.S.
Orbiter
Third
port truss segment (ITS P5)
SPACEHAB
single cargo module
Integrated Cargo Carrier (ICC)
Under
review
13A
U.S.
Orbiter
Second
starboard truss segment (ITS S3/S4) with Photovoltaic Radiator (PVR)
Third set of solar arrays and batteries
Under
review
13A.1
U.S.
Orbiter
SPACEHAB
Single Cargo Module
Third
starboard truss segment (ITS S5)
External Stowage Platform 3 (ESP3)
Under review
ATV1
Ariane
European
Automated Transfer Vehicle
Under review
10A
U.S. Orbiter
Node 2
Sidewall – Power and Data Grapple Fixture (PDGF)
Under review
1E
U.S. Orbiter
Columbus European Laboratory Module
Multi-Purpose Experiment Support Structure – Non-Deployable (MPESS-ND)
Under review
1J/A
U.S. Orbiter
Kibo Japanese Experiment Logistics Module – Pressurized Section (ELM-PS)
Spacelab Pallet – Deployable 1 (SLP-D1)
with Canadian Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator, Dextre
Under review
1J
U.S. Orbiter
Kibo Japanese Experiment Module Pressurized Module (JEM-PM)
Japanese Remote Manipulator System (JEM RMS)
Under
review
15A
U.S.
Orbiter
Fourth
starboard truss segment (ITS S6)
Fourth set of solar arrays and batteries
Under
review
ULF2
U.S.
Orbiter
Multi-Purpose
Logistics Module (MPLM)
Under
review
3R
Russian Proton
Multipurpose
Laboratory Module with European Robotic Arm (ERA)
Under review
2J/A
U.S. Orbiter
Kibo Japanese Experiment Module Exposed Facility (JEM EF)
Kibo Japanese Experiment Logistics Module – Exposed Section (ELM-ES)
Spacelab Pallet – Deployable 2 (SLP-D2)
Under
review
17A
U.S.
Orbiter
Multi-Purpose
Logistics Module (MPLM)
Lightweight Multi-Purpose Experiment Support Structure Carrier (LMC)
Three crew quarters, galley, second treadmill (TVIS2), Crew Health Care System 2 (CHeCS 2)
Establish
Six Person Crew Capability
Under
review
HTV-1
H-IIA
Japanese H-II Transfer
Vehicle
Under review
ULF3
U.S. Orbiter
EXPRESS Logistics Carrier 1 (ELC1)
EXPRESS Logistics Carrier 2 (ELC2)
Under review
19A
U.S. Orbiter
Multi-Purpose Logistics Module (MPLM)
Lightweight Multi-Purpose Experiment Support Structure Carrier (LMC)
Under review
*ULF4
U.S. Orbiter
EXPRESS Logistics Carrier 3 (ELC3)
EXPRESS Logistics Carrier 4 (ELC4)
Under
review
20A
U.S.
Orbiter
Node
3 with Cupola
Under review
*ULF5
U.S. Orbiter
EXPRESS Logistics Carrier 5 (ELC5)
EXPRESS Logistics Carrier 1 (ELC1)
ISS
Assembly Complete
Under review
9R
Russian Proton
Research Module
* Two shuttle-equivalent flights for contingency
Notes: Additional Progress and Soyuz flights for crew
transport, logistics and resupply are not listed.
