EXPLORATION PROGRAM TRANSPARENCY: ENSURING EFFECTIVE ON-RAMPS AND OFF-RAMPS FOR TECHNOLOGIES, COMMERCE, AND INTERNATIONAL PARTICIPATION

摘要

The Vision for Space Exploration has set in motion efforts to redefine various paradigms to ensure versatile, sustainable, affordable, safe, and extensible capabilities are available to support exploration objectives over a decades-long, open-ended and evolvable program. Of particular interest are the transparency of the program and the openness of exploration systems architectures to value-added infusion and effective retirement of technologies over an extended program life-cycle. Also critical to meeting the President's Vision is the effective participation of commerce and the international community. SPACEHAB, through its successful development and operation of modular space systems and commercial services, and by virtue of recent involvement in NASA exploration systems concept exploration and refinement efforts, has developed significant sensitivity to issues addressing not only the technologies, systems, and operations topics that most often dominate such efforts, but also the programmatic aspects that will create, preserve, and apply "on-ramps" and "off-ramps" that enable commercial and international participation as called for in the President's Vision for Space Exploration. This paper presents SPACEHAB's roadmap for an exploration-enabling program architecture embodying technical, commercial and international transparency. The paper describes the effectiveness of modular systems in supporting transparency objectives. Included is a discussion of the important role of standardized, stable, and extensible interface definitions in ensuring an open architecture for technological maturation. Also included are factors enabling commercial and international participation in a manner that adds value while avoiding critical path risk in terms of capabilities, sequencing and scheduling. Limiting the cost of entry, and ensuring ability for participants to realize an appropriate return on their investment, whether in the form of exploration results, science return, or profitable commerce, are important factors in attracting effective and sustainable commercial and international participation. The paper provides examples illustrating how these factors would behave in an operational space exploration environment employing a modular system-of-systems architecture.