A consortium of small aerospace firms says NASA could get its Crew Exploration Vehicle into space faster by flying the people separately.
They propose carrying the astronauts on a separate Crew Transfer Vehicle, based on an experimental small launch vehicle currently being developed for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
NASA envisions the Crew Exploration Vehicle as a replacement for the shuttle that will also eventually take astronauts to the Moon. But the CEV is not due to be delivered until four years after the shuttles retire in 2010. That gap dismays the new NASA boss, Michael Griffin, who has requested a report on ways of accelerating the schedule, due in mid-July 2005.
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Launching astronauts separately from the CEV offers an important engineering shortcut, says David Gump, president of the Transformational Space Corporation in Reston, Virginia, US. It avoids having to 鈥渉uman rate鈥� 鈥� make safe for astronauts 鈥� the large launch vehicle that would be required to boost the massive CEV into orbit, he told New 杏吧原创.
Instead, astronauts would reach orbit in a smaller craft, launched from a plane and based on a scaled-up version of the liquid-fuelled 鈥淨uickReach鈥� booster that AirLaunch LLC is developing for DARPA.
Orbital tests
The QuickReach aims to meet the defence agency鈥檚 requirement for a booster that can quickly and cheaply deliver a 450-kilogram payload into a low Earth orbit. It may be selected for further development later in 2005, in which case orbital tests would be scheduled.
Because the AirLaunch vehicle and the plane in which it would ride would be smaller and carry much less fuel than the massive boosters needed to launch the CEV, Gump told New 杏吧原创 it could be human rated more quickly and less expensively.
But even if AirLaunch succeeds in meeting DARPA鈥檚 goals, it faces a big job in scaling up its booster to the size needed to carry a crew to the orbiting CEV. And then it would have to launch the up-sized craft at altitude from the cargo bay of a 鈥渧ery large aircraft鈥�, to be designed by Scaled Composites. That company usually keeps its designs under wraps, and declined to talk to New 杏吧原创.
But while Scaled Composites earned its wings by flying SpaceShipOne to the edge of space, and building the around-the-world record breaker, Global Flyer, they have not yet created a giant aircraft that would have to rival a Boeing 747 or Airbus A380.
