January 22, 2008
"Today’s topic is motivated by the inquiries I’ve had lately, in one forum or
another, concerning various aspects of NASA’s post-Shuttle spaceflight
architecture. None of the questions is new, and all of them were elucidated during
our Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS). The architecture is
essentially as it was coming out of ESAS back in September 2005, and the
architectural trades we made then when considering mission requirements,
operations concepts, performance, risk, reliability, and cost hold true today.
But more than two years have gone by, and the logic behind the choices we
made has receded into the background. People come and go, new questioners
lacking subject matter background appear, and the old questions must be answered
again if there is to be general accord that NASA managers are allocating public
funds in a responsible fashion. And so it seemed to me that the time was right to
review, again, why we are developing the post-Shuttle space architecture in the
way that we are."
For the complete Speech please visit http://www.nasa.gov/news/speeches/admin/index.html and select the January 22, 2008 option.
Working in outerspace to benefit planet Earth
