Tom Irvine: NASA's vision for collaboration with AEDC

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  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  During the recent Aeronautics Test Facilities Users Meeting at Arnold Engineering Development Center, the deputy associate administer for the aeronautics research missions directorate at NASA headquarters took some time to share his vision for the agency's future.

Tom Irvine, who has been involved with AEDC-related programs for years, said, "NASA's first priority is to fly remaining shuttle flights safely. However, programmatically or strategically, our top priority is to close out the Constellation program."
Irvine said part of getting closure on that program "is to foster this commercial low-Earth orbit launch capability, and not only for cargo, but human-rated [payloads] as well."

"There are a number of companies who are either doing development work now or looking at that seriously, from the small startups like Space Exploration, the Elon Musk owned company, to ULA, United Launch Associates, the Boeing-Lockheed cooperative arrangement that came out of the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program," Irvine said.

"Orbital is involved and there are a couple of others," he added. "So, one component of that is to develop, do research and develop technologies that will get us beyond low-Earth orbit and allow us to return to the Moon, to asteroids, eventually to Mars, and to what are called LaGrange Points.

"This is the area where the gravity is equal between the Earth and Moon or the Earth and the Sun, where NASA hopes to park the James Webb Space Telescope."

Irvine said a lot of work is underway or planned to pave the way for future missions to meet President Obama's space program objectives, including capabilities to take humans to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

In a speech on April 15 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, President Obama said his administration did not advocate doing away with all the research and development from Constellation.

Noting the success of the agency's development of the Orion crew capsule, the president called on NASA to develop a version of the spacecraft that could be launched without a crew to the International Space Station. The spacecraft would be based at the ISS as an emergency craft for astronauts living on the orbiting laboratory.

Irvine, referring to NASA's mission as outlined by the president, said, "We're developing heavy lift launch and propulsion technologies, crew capabilities, the human systems, and then also systems which would allow you to actually go to these places and stay for extended periods of time," he said. "Our hope is that to tie back then to AEDC or NASA test facilities to develop and test these technologies and systems.

These [future test projects] may not be on the same scale as Constellation, but they'll be on technologies or a component, subsystem and even system technologies rather than a specific vehicle development.

He said there may be a decline in the amount of work that has been done recently.

"We think that work will pick back up as we really start to invest heavily in R&D (research and development)," he said.

Irvine said there are proponents, particularly within the companies that were working on CEV and Orion capsule, Boeing and Lockheed, who are advocating leveraging the advances in technology and the test data gleaned from those programs for future projects.

"Some of them are saying, 'hey let's not lose what we've done, if our ultimate goal is to develop technologies that will allow us to go beyond low-Earth orbit. Let's sustain or let's learn from and keep some of the technologies that we developed under Constellation.'"

Irvine also spoke about future partnerships to achieve shared and diverging objectives and goals.

"We are seriously considering international partnerships in the development of these technologies, but those talks are very much in the formative stage," he said. "We are looking at partnering arrangements and asking will those be with the Russians, the European Space Agency or will they be with the what's called JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency - probably all the above and maybe even more.

"I know the current administrator, Charlie Bolden, is very interested in looking at countries that are developing aerospace capabilities, like the BRIC - Brazil, Russia, India and China. Obviously there are a lot of political and national security concerns that I am not even aware of, that we've got to work through as well."