ASAP Sees Little To Worry About During COVID-19
The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel meeting was supposed to go for 75 minutes. It lasted 31 minutes. There does not seem to be a lot of worrying by this panel about safety at #NASA during the whole #COVID19 thing.
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) April 23, 2020
Keith’s note: You would think that there would be more in terms of safety for the ASAP to discuss in a pubic meeting during a period when NASA is getting ready to launch the first crew from American soil in nearly a decade – and a billion dollar Mars rover in July – given that virtually the entire agency is working from home and will be for many weeks – perhaps months – to come. Apparently not.
Highlights: On the ground Artemis planning continues while anything having to do with hardware is on hold. The human lander solicitation choices will be announced soon. SpaceX is more or less ready to go for its crewed flight while Boeing still has another un-crewed (re)flight and lots of work to do. Orion parachute tests are moving ahead. There are only 3 people on ISS right now. This means half the crew time and limited EVA capabilities (so EVAs are on hold). Crew size will eventually increase to 6 once commercial crew flights start up. Due to scheduling issues there may be a U.S. seat on Soyuz flights and a Russian seat on U.S. commercial flights. ISS lifetime operation plans until 2028 may be affected by aging systems so ASAP wants NASA to identify whatever systems might pose a failure risk prior to 2028 and offer up a plan to replace or repair these systems.
As noted below there was some discussion about de-orbiting the ISS. ASAP credits itself with getting NASA to talk about their plans. Oddly, the program has had a requirement to de-orbit the ISS since the program began back in the 1990s – and before that in the Space Station Freedom program. Indeed we posted an overview of that plan back in 1999. As such it is a little weird that NASA would say that they have no plan to de-orbit ISS – especially given all of the various lifetime discussions that have been going on.
Rather than de-orbit it, it might be safer and far cheaper to boost it into a higher storage orbit as has been discussed on NASA Watch before. Remember the current orbit was selected because of the limitations of the Space Shuttle. Dragon2, Soyuz, and possibly Starliner, are able to reach much higher orbits.
Alternatively they could just hire SpaceX to disassemble it using the Starship when it’s available. ?
That would be something…put the Unity module on display at the National Air and Space museum? They’d probably have to jettison the solar arrays and radiators (doubt they were designed to be easily folded back up once in orbit). Of course the paperwork would also be a challenge, unless Elon goes full Blofeld on us.
https://youtu.be/KZX1YCmzHE…
It surprises me that they did not discuss the implications of the COVID-19 crisis. They may have considered the medical issues and NASA’s response to by outside their charter, so I can understand their skipping that discussion. But there are astronauts on ISS, and the Crew Dragon is being prepared for flight. That’s happening with a limited on-site workforce due to the stay at home or work from home orders. I’m sure NASA is doing all it can to make that work, and work safely. But the ASAP charter would cover to ask what those measures, how sure is NASA about them providing acceptable assurance of safe operations, and what alternatives NASA has considered (e.g. delaying flights.) Part of their job is to ask those questions, to make sure everyone’s thought things through as carefully as they ought. So I think COVID-19 should have been discussed in that context.
As far as ISS deorbit is concerned, I’m not sure if the 1999 plans are still valid. They referenced slides are about using a US Propulsion module for the deorbit. Although planned at some point, no such module exists, nor (I think) is one even under design. It would also have been launched on the Shuttle, which isn’t an option anymore. Perhaps that’s what NASA meant about not having any plans for deorbit; the old plan won’t work anymore and they don’t have a new one. They are supposed to, since that’s a high level requirement, but that doesn’t mean the actually do have a currently viable plan.
Just going from the twitter relay of the meeting, it seems ASAP didn’t have time to meet with Commercial Crew people, that’s why they didn’t comment much on the Commercial Crew status. They’ll have another meeting next month after they get more information for Commercial Crew.
I’m still concerned. With the Falcon 9/Crew Dragon launch schedules for May 27th, I’m not sure what another meeting next month will accomplish. There won’t be enough time to respond to any issues or concerns the ASAP expresses at that meeting. Unless NASA delays the launch. Their input might have been more helpful if they could have found a way to keep that on this month’s meeting agenda.