CLEVELAND, Ohio — NASA administrator Charles Bolden flew more than 100 combat missions during the Vietnam War, and guided four shuttles into space and back. But during his visit to NASA's Glenn Research Center this week, the veteran pilot and former astronaut learned something new about flight: that high-altitude ice crystals can choke a jet engine.
"Wow!" the space agency's boss said, peering through 3-D glasses at a vivid computer simulation of the process, as frost hardened on a virtual engine's whirling blades. "I didn't even know about this."
Early next year, Glenn engineers will study the real thing. In a refurbished $15 million tunnel the size of a railroad car, they'll fire up an actual jet engine and spray ice crystals into it, to monitor what happens and figure out how it can be prevented.
Research work like that, with direct commercial applications, will allow the Glenn center to remain relatively stable at a time when sharp budget cutbacks are rocking other segments of NASA.
The space agency's proposed $17.7 billion 2013 budget, which Bolden unveiled last week, contains deep cuts in areas such as planetary science, including the cancellation of some high-profile robotic missions to Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa.
Glenn, however, will get a $17 million boost from its $641 million 2012 budget. The money will support projects such as the engine icing research, the center's ongoing share of work on NASA's new heavy-lift rocket and space capsule, and infrastructure upgrades at the Cleveland campus and its Plum Brook testing station near Sandusky.
Congress likely will revise NASA's austere spending plan due to concerns that it jeopardizes America's space leadership. Though Bolden insisted, in a wide-ranging question-and-answer session at Glenn Tuesday, that NASA's exploration plans are still ambitious, he stressed the need to face fiscal realities, and to rein in cost-overruns like those that plagued the agency's now $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2018.
"If we want more money," Bolden said of NASA, "the best way to do in this day and age is to set a plan in place as [Glenn Director] Ray Lugo and his team have done here . . . and work to it so that everything is on time and on cost, over and over again."
In light of the recession-battered economy, NASA is seeking no funding increases for the next five years. Those spending constraints, coupled with the ballooning cost of the Webb telescope – a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, with a price tag eight times its original $1 billion estimate – forced the space agency to make what Bolden described as tough cuts elsewhere.
Among them are two unmanned Mars exploratory missions collectively known as ExoMars that NASA was to undertake with the European Space Agency in 2016 and 2018. The probes were to study the Martian environment and search for signs of present and past life, using an orbiter and rover.
That was to pave the way for a future joint robotic mission to bring Martian soil samples back to Earth. All are precursors for human exploration. President Obama's goal is for NASA to land astronauts on Mars sometime in the 2030s.
Some observers have worried that the cancellations will further erode America's space-faring reputation, and will damage the international partnerships that NASA increasingly relies on to make big-ticket "flagship" exploration missions possible. Reports indicate that European space officials are seeking Russia's cooperation to keep the ExoMars missions alive.
View full sizeNASA/JPL-CaltechNASA's Mars Science Lab rover, shown in this artist's rendering, is scheduled to land on the Red Planet in August. It's about the size of a Mini Cooper.
Bolden said NASA's Mars exploration program is still robust, with the car-sized Mars Science Lab rover en route for an August landing, and an atmospheric probe called MAVEN set to launch in November. Discussions with the European Space Agency about alternatives to ExoMars are underway, he said.
"We want to satisfy our European partners," he said. "They don't think we're backing away from them, contrary to what's been written in the press. They understand the exact fiscal situation we're in. They know we want to work with them to try to accomplish the objectives of ExoMars."
A lower-cost Mars soil sample-return mission might be possible, Bolden said.
"We think we can do it without making it a flagship," the administrator said. "This country has made its role as a leader in exploration by flagship missions. That's something we have to do. But you don't do a flagship mission every year, or every two or three years. We have two underway" – the Mars rover and the Webb telescope – "and that's about all this agency can handle."
NASA's major emphasis also is on continued development of a rocket and crew capsule for deep space exploration, and on nurturing American commercial space transporters to take over re-supply and replacement-crew flights to the International Space Station. NASA handled those transport duties until last year's retirement of the shuttle fleet, which is supposed to free up money for other missions. NASA currently pays Russia to ferry crew and cargo to the space station.
An upstart U.S. aerospace company, Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, is readying a demonstration cargo-carrying flight for an April 20 launch. If successful, the unmanned vehicle would be the first commercial spacecraft to rendezvous with the space station, with regular cargo missions to follow. Bolden said U.S. commercial crew-carrying flights probably will begin between 2015 and 2017.
Their destination, the International Space Station, had been scheduled to cease operations in 2020, but Bolden said the station's U.S., Russian, Canadian, Japanese and European partners are discussing extending its life through 2028.
View full sizePlain Dealer file, Marvin FongThe 12-story tall vacuum chamber at NASA's Plum Brook testing station exposes spacecraft to the airless conditions, heat and cold of space. Other Plum Brook facilities simulate the vibration and shockwaves of rocket launch.
NASA's new deep-space rocket and crew capsule project, called the Space Launch System, is intended to deliver astronauts to an asteroid landing by 2025, and to Mars by the next decade. The Glenn center is overseeing development of some of the rocket's components, and plans to test the crew capsule, Orion, at its Plum Brook facility, where the world's largest space-environment vacuum chamber is located.
NASA already had invested $150 million in improving Plum Brook's testing facilities, and will spend $25 million more for upgrades in 2013, Lugo said. In addition to the Orion tests, Plum Brook may soon host trials of commercial spacecraft from SpaceX and another company, Sierra Nevada Corp., Lugo said, as well as tests of a European Space Agency rocket engine.
Bolden's meeting with Glenn officials this week emphasized applying NASA know-how to aid commercial projects and solve real-world problems, like the engine-icing issue. The risk of ice buildup on airplane wings and tails has been known for decades, with significant contributions from Glenn researchers. But the icing threat to jet engines has gone largely unrecognized.
There are no known crashes, said Glenn project manager Ron Colantonio, but at least 150 instances of engine failure where icing is the likely culprit. "We're trying to be pre-emptive and understand the problem before there's a fatal accident," he said.
View full sizeNASASensors on this modified Gulfstream jet will allow NASA Glenn researchers to collect data about conditions where ice crystals form at altitudes up to 40,000 feet.
A modified jet will gather high-altitude data about ice crystal-forming conditions, which occur near storm systems. That information will help Glenn engineers recreate the icing conditions in the testing tunnel. Jet engine-makers can test ice-damping designs there, and the test results should help the Federal Aviation Administration develop new safety standards.
"This is tangible evidence, the work going on here, that we're really trying to stay out in front of the power curve so we can help the nation," Bolden said.
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