Langley Research Center’s Role in Orion
NASA Langley Research Center here will play a vital role in sending humans back to the moon and on to Mars while continuing its more traditional research role in support of Earth-bound aircraft, the head of NASA said Tuesday.
Even so, Michael Griffin, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, offered no guarantees of job security for the center’s roughly 3,600 civil service and private contractor employees.
Some jobs, he said, may be shifted as the Bush administration and Congress focus more of NASA’s budget on space exploration.
“It’s not a problem that can be solved once and for all,” Griffin said at a news conference. “We’re doing new, bold, aggressive things, and that’s what the nation’s taxpayers pay us to do. They don’t pay us to provide guaranteed jobs for civil servants.”
Griffin, on his second visit to the research center since his April 2005 appointment, also addressed several hundred NASA Langley workers and delivered remarks Tuesday night at the Virginia Air & Space Center in downtown Hampton.
While Griffin was noncommittal on jobs, Lesa Roe, NASA Langley’s director, was upbeat in her outlook for the center’s work force. Faced with tight budgets, the center has shed about 600 civil service and private-sector jobs during the past few years, Roe said in a later interview.
A year and a half ago, the center was threatened with the loss of as many as 1,000 additional employees, nearly a third of its force. “We’re not talking about that today,” Roe said.
“I see relative stability over the next couple of years,” she said. “We have no unfunded work force, and we have significant roles in space exploration and aeronautics.”
Not so long ago, for example, the center had considered closing its gantry, a huge steel platform used in experiments, but “right now it’s up and running.” The gantry is being used to test a landing system for the new lunar spaceship - known as a crew exploration vehicle - that will be built by Lockheed Martin Corp.
The center is using the gantry now to test two types of air bags to cushion a 6,375-pound, 16-1/2 -foot-diameter module that represents the crew exploration vehicle. Plans call for the new spaceship, the Orion, to land on the ground instead of the sea landings employed in past missions to outer space.
Langley has the lead in developing a launch-abort system, which will sit atop the crew exploration vehicle. It will be designed to separate the spaceship from its launch rocket and safely return the crew of as many as six astronauts to Earth if a malfunction happened.
The research center has various other supporting roles in the space program, including testing the aerodynamic characteristics of the launch vehicle that will propel the spaceship into orbit.
“The things we’ve done in the past on aeronautics, we can apply to space work,” said Charles Cockrell Jr., manager of Langley’s Crew Launch Vehicle Project Implementation Office.
The Bush administration’s goal is to send people back to the moon no later than 2020. NASA hopes to construct a lunar outpost, where people could live and conduct research, and that could serve as a platform for moving on to Mars.
During his visit, Griffin compared the U.S. effort to resurrect its lunar program - more than 30 years since the Apollo moon landings - to the Lewis and Clark expedition during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency.
Those early explorers, Griffin said, made discoveries about the country’s western frontier, while advancing national security and its economic interests at a time when Spain, France and England all had interests in the territory. NASA’s reasons for returning to the moon are similar, he said.
Griffin predicted that the nation’s push back into space could attract more young people to careers in science, math and engineering, much as the Apollo program did. That could address a growing shortage of U.S. scientists and help the nation remain competitive globally, he said.
The United States made a mistake, he said, by neglecting to build on its space exploration program after Apollo, and the country is essentially rebuilding the capacity it once had.
Creating a human presence in space, with the potential for unlimited new discoveries, “is the most important thing we’ll do as a nation in the 21st century,” Griffin said.
