The Washington Post
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Faced with crippling cost overruns, NASA must reorganize the space station program, redefine the project’s science goals and sharply cut spending to keep even the current three-person lab financially feasible, a review board said Friday.
Those recommendations and others would reduce the shuttle flight rate to just four per year, eliminate hundreds, if not thousands, of contractor and civil service jobs across the nation and severely limit onboard research by Europe, Japan, Canada and other international partners.
Boeing is a primary contractor for the space station and shuttle programs.
Panel chairman Thomas Young said if these or similar measures are implemented, the agency probably could complete the space station’s current three-person design and still meet an $8.3 billion spending cap set earlier by NASA and the Office of Management and Budget.
That spending cap covers station costs between fiscal 2002 and the completion of assembly, now stretched out to 2006. The overall cost of the station is roughly $25 billion by NASA’s estimates, not counting shuttle transportation and other indirect costs.
NASA originally planned to build a crew habitation module and an emergency crew return vehicle that would support an on-board crew of six or seven. But earlier this summer, project managers found station costs would exceed the projected spending cap by $4.8 billion.
By eliminating work on the crew return vehicle, the habitation module and a multihatch node that would connect future modules, NASA reduced the projected overrun to around $480 million. That shortfall remains unresolved.
But loss of the crew return vehicle reduced the size of the station’s eventual crew to just three, the number of astronauts that can fit inside a Russian Soyuz re-entry vehicle, the station’s current lifeboat.
For the station’s international partners, a three-person crew effectively eliminates any chance for European, Japanese or Canadian astronauts to carry out significant on-board research. For them, a six- or seven-member crew is essential.
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