REVIVAL OF THE CREW RETURN VEHICLE

The suggestion that NASA might reconsider developing ISS beyond Core Complete, including the CRV, came as no surprise to many inside the Administration. In 2002, an internal JSC report suggested that NASA could not expect to increase the Expedi­tion crew beyond three people before 2008. The report included a statement that a seven-person CRV (X-38?) should be included in the plans for increased operations. The report stated, “Succeeding with the CRV is key to our long term vision for NASA… Maintaining our ability to design, build, test, and fly a spacecraft like the CRV is key. This is recognised by every senior manager at JSC, and elsewhere in NASA.” The X-38 CRV had been officially subject to cancellation since the Bush Senior Administration’s attempt to bring the ISS budget under control.

Despite the X-38 programme’s alleged cancellation in mid-2001, Congress had instructed that funding for the programme should be reinstated in November of the same year. In 2002, Aerojet delivered the De-orbit Propulsion Stage (DPS) for the X-38, for use on CRV-201, which had been built for the “ironbird” flight, the return from orbit after delivery into space in the payload bay of the Shuttle Columbia. The eight-thruster DPS would fire to slow the X-38 down, allowing gravitational attraction to pull it back into the atmosphere.

In June 2002, NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe cancelled the rejuvenated X-38 programme, in advance of a new change in direction: the Integrated Space Trans­portation Plan (ISTP) and the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) Crew Transfer Vehicle (CTV). The term Crew Return Vehicle was slowly being dropped from NASA’s vocabulary, just as the X-38 was being dropped from ISS. Even as the X-38 was finally cancelled, NASA was criticised for not including the budgetary effects of that cancellation in their reports. Rather, some politicians felt that the cancellation announcement had been made in such a way as to suggest that the only reason for the cancellation was so that NASA could present their plans for the new OSP in a better light, in that OSP could perform both the CTV and CRV roles, while X-38 was more narrowly focused on the CRV role.