NASA Pioneer Says Space Exploration Will Not End with the Shuttle

The eyes of the world will be watching July 8, when the shuttle Atlantis is slated for its final lift off into space. Could this be the beginning of the end for NASA and the start of job cuts at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD?

A model railroad enthusiast and manager in NASA Goddard’s Space Servicing Capabilities Office, Frank Cepollina, thinks the sky is still the limit.

He well remembers the death knell many were sounding for NASA in 1972, when Apollo 17 took the final manned space flight to the moon. Many said it was all over, Cepollina recalled, pointing out the naysayers have been wrong before.

Though nearing countdown for the Atlantis' (STS-135) lift off and final adventure, NASA engineer and inventor of 48 years, “Cepi,” as his colleagues call him in hallway greetings, shared ideas that are anything but retiring.

He is looking to the future, but to the one that lies beyond the closing of NASA's space shuttle era. He admitted our country's predicament is not ideal, saying we’ve lost the momentum when people around the world build more spacecraft than the United States, which invented them.

But it’s only the end for those with limited imagination, according to Cepollina. Tucked aboard the Atlantis lies his dream for a whole new era in space, the Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM), formerly Robotic Refueling Dexterous Demonstration (R2D2) — a name that marketing scrapped. Though the name has changed, its mission remains.

Cepollina is principal investigator for RRM, which he hopes will accomplish the previously unthinkable. It will team up with Dextre, the space station’s twin-armed Canadian robotic “handyman,” to work out techniques for refueling or repairing satellites that were never designed to live beyond the life of their fuel supply.

Cepollina has a good track record for doing the unthinkable. He has lead teams that have successfully repaired and serviced the Hubble Space Telescope, which Lemelson-MIT and others in the scientific and technological community have hailed as the most difficult on-orbit satellite repair mission ever attempted.

Hubble can now see within 600 million years of the Big Bang, Cepollina is proud to report. That's 13.7 billion years of seeing back before you get to within 600 million.

How exactly can the RRM save the day? It comes down to cost. Producing and launching a satellite has a price tag in the hundreds of millions — a roadblock to many potential investors. But if NASA Goddard's RRM tools are successful, satellites stand to gain a tremendous boost in life expectancy, one that could seriously reduce their costs and attract more commercial investors.

Cepollina pointed to escalating cell phone usage as an obvious force for driving more satellites into space, particularly if RRM can bring the cost for satellites down.

Heavy commercial involvement in the satellite industry didn’t appear to concern Cepollina, who said the space agency wasn’t there to preempt private industry. Instead, he said, they were there to give private industry the technology to take the next step.

It's been done before he pointed out, referencing how NASA's Echo 1 and Relay 1 satellites gave AT&T the confidence to launch its Telstar satellites. They lead the way for the commercial satellite communications industry to start sending phone calls and television signals through space. It was NASA's work that gave AT&T the confidence that this could be achieved, Cepollina said.

The commercial industry may indeed pick up after Atlantis. Nonetheless, NASA does not seem poised to sit back and watch.

At a Tuesday demonstration of RRM in Greenbelt, project manager Justin Cassidy explained that the flight of the last shuttle would not spell the end of NASA Goddard sending its technology into space. Instead, he said, Goddard could potentially transport its next version of a robotic refueling instrument aboard a Russian or commercial spacecraft.

Cassidy seemed to share Cepollina's viewpoint that NASA is adjusting not ending.

The largest manufacturer of horse-drawn carriages in 1889 was bankrupt by 1910, and this happened because they couldn’t transform, Cepollina said. By contrast, he pointed out that the inventor of the Cadillac adapted transportation by putting an internal combustion engine inside a converted horse drawn carriage.

In the spacecraft industry, you’ll have the horse drawn-carriage advocates who can’t handle change, and there will be a fallout, Cepollina said. But there will also be spacecraft visionaries who will continue to innovate, he added.

Cepollina believes the RRM could be the key to the United States regaining the innovation and momentum in space.

It’s the horse drawn carriage versus the automobile all over again, Cepollina said, “And that’s the mark of American innovation.”