Both the meeting presentations and the opening-day mood of attendees were generally flush with excitement at the prospects for canceling or significantly downsizing NASA's current Ares/Constellation architecture in the post-Space Shuttle period, as envisioned in the Obama Administration's central rationale for the agency's FY2011 budget request.

Obama, in his speech Thursday, elected to keep a scaled-down version of the capsule-based Orion spacecraft and set a goal of sending astronauts to an asteroid and then on to Mars.]

"Is it a risk? You bet it's a risk," said Alan Ladwig, NASA's deputy associate administrator for public outreach, who presented the broad themes of the NASA budget request. "It's also a risk to rely on single rocket like Constellation that was not meeting its budget guidelines or its schedule," said Ladwig, adding that it was important to remember that "legacy companies don't have a divine right to all of the contracts that NASA has, and the 'upstart' companies don't have a divine right to innovation."

Multiple efforts underway

Jeff Patton of United Launch Alliance (ULA) said the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit on a commercial basis in four-and-a-half years, at a cost of roughly $130 million for an Atlas-V class vehicle, after $400 million in launch site facility upgrades.

Patton emphasized that ULA has been investigating aspects of human-rating its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles since NASA study contracts for an Orbital Space Plane awarded in 2002. The company has also learned a lot about current commercial space business considerations working with Bigelow Aerospace as its planned launch supplier. Bigelow's forecasted crew demands in support of its planned launches of inflatable commercial space stations in 2014 and 2016 could drive a dozen launches per year, he said.

The reliability requirements to "human rate" a launch vehicle are not much different than those demanded to launch high-risk payloads such the recent New Horizons mission to Pluto, with its nuclear radioisotope power generators, he stated. ULA will use most of its $6.7 million in NASA funding for commercial crew development to develop an improved Emergency Detection System to identify critical launch situations, and to refine its models of the environments in severe failure modes such as near-pad aborts, Patton said.

After citing other major FY11 budget request themes such as "building a 21^st launch complex" and directly involving the public more via participatory exploration and increased support for science education, NASA's Ladwig said that it would be at least two to three years before it becomes clear what the combination of commercial crew development and the maturation of the suborbital research and tourism markets will germinate.