NASA's Orion Launch Delayed a Year

NASA managers have announced that the internal date of the first manned launch of the Orion space craft has slipped a year from September, 2013 to September 2014. The official date of Orion's first manned launch is still March, 2015.

NASA's Jeff Hanley, manager of the Constellation program which includes the Orion, and Doug Cook, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems, made the announcement at a media teleconference. Hanley and Cook cited the need to realign the schedule to available funding and the need to allow for unplanned challenges in the development process of the Orion and the Ares 1 launch vehicle. Neither Hanley nor Cook was able to address the implications of Congress not providing enough funding or, for that matter, providing more funding.

In the meantime, Hanley and Cook suggested that NASA engineers were leaning toward the installation of springs or mass absorbers to mitigate the thrust oscillation problem that has been a problem in the development of the Ares 1. Thrust oscillation is a phenomenon that occurs in the operation of solid rockets that causes intense vibrations as the solid propellant burns out. Since the Ares 1's first stage is a five segment solid rocket engine, this vibration could threaten the health and operational functionality of the crew on the Orion space craft the Ares is suppose to launch.

The Orion is a space craft under development by NASA that is designed to be a successor for the space shuttle. The Orion is a capsule, like Apollo, that will take astronauts to and from the International Space Station, later back to the Moon, and eventually to Mars and other destinations in the Solar System. The development of the Orion was mandated as part of President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration.

The role of Orion as a transport to and from the International Space Station has taken on some importance due to the chilling of relations between Russia and the West due, in part, to Russia's invasion of Georgia. Between the retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 and the first launch of the Orion, officially scheduled for 2015, the only way to send people and cargo to and from the ISS is on Russian space craft, barring the development of a commercial space vehicle as part of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems (COTS) program.

The future of the Vision for Space Exploration had seemed to be in doubt, mainly because of the change in administration to take place after the 2008 elections. But candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, seem to have endorsed the Vision as part of a comprehensive space program.

Source: Constellation confirm IOC slip to Orion schedule, Chris Bergen, NASA Spaceflight.Com, August 11th, 2008
Narrowing the Space Flight Gap, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, December 7th, 2007
The First Great Deep Space Expedition: Sending the Orion to an Asteroid, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, November 29th, 2006
Orion to the Moon, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, September 14th, 2006