NASA Has Plan B to Launch U.S. to Moon

June 24, 2009 -- NASA has a backup plan to launch crew and cargo to the moon, reduce the gap between shuttle retirement and a replacement ship's debut, and save taxpayers billions of dollars.

They call it the side-mount shuttle. It's basically the space shuttle system without the winged orbiters.

Preliminary NASA studies show that using the existing shuttle's solid rocket boosters, fuel tank and main engines as a launch system, with some minor modifications, could be the foundation of an alternative launch system to the planned Ares rocket program currently under development.

NASA plans to retire the shuttle fleet after the International Space Station construction is finished, currently targeted for September 2010. Engineers have been working on a new system that not only could transport astronauts to the station, which orbits about 225 miles above Earth, but also travel in deep space for visits to the moon and other destinations.

Ares remains on track for a 2015 debut flight to the space station, at a cost of about $35 billion, program manager Jeff Hanley explained last week before a presidential panel reviewing the country's human space program.

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For somewhere in the neighborhood of about $6.6 billion, NASA can develop a rocket for the moon.

Shuttle program manager John Shannon, who presented an overview of the side-mount shuttle launch vehicle to the same committee, cautioned that the cost is very preliminary, though it is the same figure derived by a NASA-commissioned team that studied a similar vehicle design three years ago.

Shannon says the shuttle-based heavy lifter is not as capable as Ares 5, the rocket currently earmarked for a revived lunar exploration initiative that is intended to land astronauts on the moon by 2020. The side-mount shuttle's lunar lander would have to shrink from the planned 48 metric tons to about 28 metric tons.

"That's still pretty good because the Apollo lunar lander was 16 metric tons," shuttle program manager John Shannon said in an interview with Discovery News.