America's new shuttles

On the last day of summer, NASA announced the winners of the tender for the construction of new spacecraft, which in the future should replace the current shuttles. Atlantis and Discovery will replace the Orions, which will be created by the Lockheed Martin corporation. The company won a competition from the Boeing-Northrop-Grumman alliance and will receive billions of dollars from NASA to build a fleet of new reusable spacecraft.

“Orion” will not be like the current shuttles - “space gliders”, which descend along a gentle trajectory and actually land on a regular airfield. Rather, it resembles the old series of Apollo spacecraft, scrapped after the advent of the shuttles. However, Orions must be reusable and multi-purpose vehicles. It is significant that they will not have external fuel tanks, the safety (more precisely, unsafety) of which is considered the main problem of currently flying shuttles. The main task of the new ships will be to ensure the operation of the ISS and flights to the Moon. Perhaps in the future they will be involved in expeditions to Mars.

But the first Orion will not go into orbit very soon: according to the plan, the first manned flight of the new spacecraft is tentatively scheduled for 2014, and Orion’s flight to the Moon will occur by 2020. For now, Lockheed Martin must develop a ship design, build prototypes, and only then begin creating spacecraft. NASA estimates $7.5 billion will be spent on the project by 2020, the AP reported.

It is interesting that until now the corporation has not had successful projects to create manned spacecraft, although Lockheed Martin has already designed several automatic stations commissioned by NASA. Among the projects of this US military-industrial giant are the famous Lunar Prospector and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. However, Lockheed Martin's only attempt to create a manned spacecraft failed: in 1996, the corporation received an order from NASA to build a new shuttle. But this project ended in a huge fiasco: the X-33 ship, on which the agency spent $912 million, was never realized in metal.

This relatively recent failure allowed outside experts to predict victory in the new tender for the Boeing-Northrop-Grumman alliance, but Lockheed-Martin unexpectedly outperformed its competitors. To do this, the corporation had to radically redraw its technical plans. Apparently, the competition was originally supposed to include another variation on the “space plane” theme, but NASA, tired of the problems with the current shuttles, demanded that the commission be shown “something like Apollo.” And then Lockheed Martin finally abandoned the ideas for the X-33 project and designed what NASA head Michael Griffin figuratively called “Apollo the Jock” (literally “Apollo” on steroids).

Orion will have two round solar panels and four compartments, including a launch emergency unit in case of technical problems during the launch of the ship. Apparently, NASA was seduced by the relative simplicity of Orion: the designers tried to avoid particularly complex technological solutions. National Aerospace Agency executive Doug Cook said: “We know it can be built, although there are some quirks.” It is possible that the simplicity of the project also led to relative cheapness, which also makes NASA happy: although US President George W. Bush, when setting America’s ambitious space goals last year, promised the industry gigantic investments, possible savings of a couple of billion dollars would not hurt.

Vladimir DZAGUTO