NASA is considering the possibility of extending the current space shuttle program until Constellation is ready to take over. It appears that the agency is determined to find a way to make up for the five year gap that would limit USA’s access to space, if the space shuttle will indeed retire in 2010, as originally planned.

In an internal e-mail signed by John Coggeshall, manifest and schedules manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, covering the gap of US vehicles traveling to the International Space Station has become one of NASA’s focus points.

“The [shuttle] program in conjunction with [Constellation] and [space station] have been asked by the administrator to put together some manifest options to assess extending shuttle flights to 2015,” Coggeshall wrote in the e-mail. “We want to focus on helping bridge the gap of U.S. vehicles traveling to the [space station] as efficiently as possible.”

While it is too early to say whether the space shuttle retirement will indeed be delayed, it appears that the plan wouldn’t exactly please NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, if we take into consideration what he told a Senate panel in April this year regarding crew safety if the shuttle is to take additional flights.

“The shuttle is an inherently risky design. We currently assess the per-mission risk as about one in 75 of having a fatal accident,’ Griffin said at the time. “If one were to do, as some have suggested, fly the shuttle for an additional five years, say two missions a year, the risk would be about one in 12 that we would lose another crew,” which he added would be hard to accept on behalf of the astronauts.

NASA has yet to finish a risk evaluation analysis, and as NASA’s spokesman John Yembrick said, it is still premature to say whether the goal of extending the shuttle mission until 2015 are viable. “Our plan is still, of course, to retire the shuttle in 2010.”

Washington is becoming more concerned with NASA’s Space Exploration Program as the political connections with Russia begin to deteriorate. It is no secret that NASA is depending on Russia’s Soyuz vehicle to reach the International Space Station once the space shuttle retires in 2010. If the collaboration between the American and Russian space programs comes to an end, the U.S. will not be able to reach the ISS.

The Constellation program, which is meant to take over the space shuttle’s mission, will not be able to operate until March 2015, as NASA revealed just last month. According to the agency, they remain confident that the Constellation program will make its first flight to the ISS on or before that date, however they needed to realign their schedule with the existing funding in order to address any unplanned challenges that may arise.

Last month, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised there will be more involvement in the Space Exploration Program, adding that there will be $2 billion of additional funding for NASA in order to close the space gap that would arise from the space shuttle retirement in 2010. Obama expressed his support for at least one additional space flight, which he admitted would be a difficult task.

All in all, making additional shuttle flights would require significant funding, and one of the problems that derive from that is that it might limit the development of the Constellation program, which is unacceptable. The situation will remain unclear, and we won’t know more until NASA makes a full assessment on the pros and cons of delaying the space shuttle retirement.

Update: Until further notice, Constellation remains NASA’s primary mission. Although initial plans pointed to an earlier launch date for the program, it appears that due to some technical and financial difficulties, the program had to be delayed until 2015.
Until then NASA will be taking into consideration all its alternatives for filling the 5-year gap in space exploration, hopefully by not putting the astronauts’ lives at risk for the sake of success.