On Thursday, August 3, Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space science, and Carl Pilcher, NASA director for solar system exploration held a joint press conference, in which they confirmed recent rumors that NASA's current space science program has costs saw, with overruns ranging from "a few percent" all the way up to 30-40 percent on individual projects.
Costs are under pressure due to a mixture of factors including NASA's added caution about under funding its projects in the wake of the 1998 twin failures to Mars. Another is the fact that many of these missions rely on new kinds of boosters – such as the upcoming Boeing Delta 4 and Lockheed-Martin Atlas 5.
But these new rockets are somewhat behind schedule — and more seriously (as Weiler grimly quipped): "Surprise, surprise, some of those launch vehicles aren't going to be as cheap as some of the people promised."
Another factor – the ever-growing money appetite of the International Space Station – went unmentioned.
Weiler, however, was completely nonspecific about what cuts NASA has in mind for its science missions.
In particular, he denied rumors that NASA has decided to cancel its "Pluto-Kuiper Express", a little spacecraft that will make the first flyby of the last planet unexplored by any spacecraft – with an optional mission extension afterward to fly by one or more of the recently discovered smaller "Kuiper Belt Objects".
However, on Wednesday, NASA spokesman Don Savage told SpaceDaily that while the Pluto mission is not yet firmly pegged for cancellation, the budget problems are serious enough that it is almost certain to be delayed beyond its planned December 2004 launch date.
As remarked recently in another SpaceDaily article, this in itself will cause serious problems for the mission.
Specifically, Pluto Express is scheduled to make a gravity-assist flyby of Jupiter in order to gain the added boost needed to catapult it out to Pluto and its equally interesting moon Charon after an 8-year flight.
But after 2004, Jupiter will be much more poorly lined up for such a flyby — it may still be possible, but the flight would probably be prolonged by several years.
There are alternative flight plans. In one, the Express would skip Jupiter, and instead make three successive gravity-assist flybys of Venus to catapult itself out directly out to Pluto — but this, again, would significantly prolong the flight.
