NASA: SLS Can Stay on Schedule if Funding Remains Constant

摘要

The director of the Marshall Space Flight Center said NASA will be able to build the Space Launch System {SLS) on schedule, provided that Congress continues to fund development of the heavy-lift rocket and its companion crew capsule at roughly $3 billion annually. "If we can sustain the budget, we'll be able to do this," Marshall Director Robert Lightfoot said Oct. 12. "The development risk is pretty low," he said, because SLS relies heavily on shuttle-derived hardware. Lightfoot spoke at a Capitol Hill breakfast hosted by the Space Transportation Association, an aerospace advocacy group in University Park, Md. NASA estimates that getting the first SLS flight off the ground for an unmanned mission in 2017 is going to cost about $3 billion a year, including the cost of the rocket's companion crew capsule and supporting ground infrastructure. Keeping within that budget means the agency will have to avoid chasing the perfect design at the expense of the design that is good enough, Lightfoot said. In the past, NASA has had a tendency to "spend 80 percent of the funding to get that last 20 percent of performance," Lightfoot said. "That's something we can't do anymore."