Artist concept of NASA's new rocket, called the Space Launch System. Credit: NASA

Today NASA unveiled the design of a new rocket to help the agency meet a challenge from President Obama: send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars by the mid-2030s. Called the Space Launch System (SLS), the new heavy-lift launch vehicle will cost $18 billion, with its first test flight planned for 2017. It will be designed to carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle for transport of crew and cargo.

The much anticipated announcement comes on the heels of the July retirement of the space shuttles, and is part of a plan laid out by the White House--the NASA Authorization Act of 2010--developed after Congress canceled a moon program, called Constellation, for the agency to focus on a vehicle to take astronauts to places like the moon and Mars while commercial companies focus on a rocket to transport crew to low Earth orbit.

The new rocket will include technology from the Space Shuttles and the Constellation program, which was building two rockets, Ares I and Ares V, and it will share a resemblance to the Saturn V, the first rocket to travel to the moon. "But it is difficult to compare rockets from one generation to the other" because of constant upgrades in technology and manufacturing techniques, said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, at today's press conference in Washington.

The SLS will use a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propulsion system, which will allow NASA to reduce costs and leverage experience and existing technology, said NASA administrator Charles Bolden. The rocket will use five solid rocket boosters attached on either side of its core for the initial development flights, but NASA will hold a competition to replace these side-strapped boosters for more advanced designs. Gerstenmaier estimated the SLS thrust to be between 10 percent and 20 percent greater than that of the Saturn V.

Credit: NASA

A scale model of Russia's next-generation spacecraft was demonstrated at the Paris Air and Space Show in June. Credit: Anatoly Zak

With the U.S. manned space program grounded following the last mission of the space shuttle, the Russian Soyuz spacecraft is the only avenue into space for NASA astronauts. And, in an unprecedented arrangement for NASA, U.S. taxpayers will now provide the Russian government with the extra cash it needs to build a new-generation manned vehicle to replace the 40-year-old Soyuz.

Just as in 1993, when the Russian space agency suddenly found itself in the driver's seat of the stalled U.S.-led space station program by providing crucial elements of the outpost from their own stillborn Mir-2 project, Moscow space officials can again hardly believe their luck. The retirement of the U.S. space shuttle before its replacement is ready means a lucrative deal for Russia to transport all crews to the International Space Station in the next several years.

However, as the Russian space agency's officials are celebrating this windfall, the leaders of the Russian space industry are far from resting on their laurels—they are pushing ahead with plans for a new spacecraft and launcher. However, behind the scenes, RKK Energia, the nation's chief manned spaceflight contractor, has embarked on a collision course with its parent agency—Roskosmos—over the future strategy.

"We've got an unfortunate situation with our next-generation spacecraft," says Aleksandr Derechin, deputy designer general at RKK Energia. "Roskosmos wants a large 23-ton spacecraft [to replace Soyuz], which would also need a new powerful rocket and the new launch site on the far-eastern fringes of the country." But for more than four years, this ambitious plan has become a heavy burden for the Russian space program, Derechin argues.

While the official schedule calls for the first launch of the brand-new Rus-M rocket from the yet-to-be built Vostochny Cosmodrome in 2015, and the first manned mission from this site in 2018, many industry experts consider this timeline wildly unrealistic. In a run-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics, the country may have to choose between multibillion-dollar investments in Sochi Olympic facilities or in the new space center. These experts believe that the current Russian strategy could push back the birth date of the Soyuz replacement by years, if not a decade. Critics point to the ongoing development of the Angara family of rockets, which was initiated at the beginning of the 1990s and has perpetually remained several years away from its maiden mission.

In the meantime, RKK Energia has watched nervously as several modestly priced commercial ventures for carrying astronauts into space have been fostered by NASA. Seeing the emergence of these "private" spacecraft as competition, RKK Energia has come up with its own fast-track strategy, one that would bypass the Russian space agency's grand space plan. The company has proposed to fly a streamlined 12-ton version of the new-generation manned spacecraft onboard an off-the-shelf Zenit rocket, from an existing launchpad in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

Roskosmos has so far rejected this cheaper, faster approach, preferring to stick to the original plan insisted upon by the government. Despite this setback, RKK Energia's alternative launch vehicle based on the Zenit reappeared last month at the Paris Air and Space Show.

The Zenit, first introduced in 1985, is a two-stage rocket that uses liquid oxygen and kerosene and is capable of delivering up to 13 tons of payload into low-Earth orbit. The Zenit still remains a critical part of the Russian space fleet, and RKK Energia based many of its manned spacecraft designs on the capabilities of the Zenit-based rockets.

Anatoly Zak is a freelance writer and illustrator specializing in space exploration. He is the publisher of RussianSpaceWeb.com, ­ a resource on the history of and the latest developments in the former USSR space program.

Under the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 the Obama administration ordered the agency to build a heavy-lift launch vehicle (HLV), dubbed the "Space Launch System" or SLS. The goal is an initial capability of putting 70-100 tons in low Earth orbit (LEO), increased to 130 tons by the end of 2016. NASA was allotted $6.9 billion from 2011 to 2013 for development, and given 90 days from the date the legislation was enacted to provide a detailed report of the vehicle design. At the end of January NASA presented its report to the U.S. Congress, telling them their demands aren't possible and that the agency needs more money and time.

The report states:

Guidance from the Administrator has established three principles for development of any future systems for exploration. These systems must be affordable, sustainable, and realistic. To date, trade studies performed by the Agency have yet to identify heavy-lift and capsule architectures that would both meet all SLS requirements and these goals. For example, a 2016 first flight of the SLS does not appear to be possible within projected FY 2011 and out year funding levels.

Currently, our SLS studies have shown that while cost is not a major discriminator among the design options studied, none of the design options studied thus far appeared to be affordable in our present fiscal conditions, based upon existing cost models, historical data, and traditional acquisition approaches.

The report summary did not gone down well with Congress. In response, Senate Commerce Committee members released a statement reminding NASA that the requirements put forth in the authorization act were not optional. "We appreciate NASA's report and look forward to the additional material that was required but not submitted. In the meantime, the production of a heavy-lift rocket and capsule is not optional. It's the law. NASA must use its decades of space know-how and billions of dollars in previous investments to come up with a concept that works. We believe it can be done affordably and efficiently - and, it must be a priority."

Jeff Foust, editor and publisher of The Space Review reports,

The senators argued in their report that NASA should focus on existing, shuttle-derived technologies and focus more energies in refining the techniques they use to manage the program, rather than study new technologies—as NASA is currently doing with a series of trade studies awarded late last year to 13 companies.

The shuttle-derived technology that many believe NASA can build is called a Shuttle Side-Mount (SSM), which places the payload and the main engines on the side of the vehicle similar to how the space shuttle is mounted on the side of the external tank. This design would replace NASA's original concept being built under the Constellation program, Ares V; the program was canceled by the Obama administration. Paul D. Spudis, a senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, writes on the website of Air & Space magazine,

It resurrects an old concept of replacing the Shuttle orbiter on the existing stack with a payload fairing and engine pod. This configuration, called Shuttle Side-Mount (updated from the old "Shuttle-C" concept) was not considered by the HEFT study team, but meets the specific language of the new authorization. The advantage of SSM is that, as it is a minimal modification of the existing stack, it uses all of NASA's existing launch and processing infrastructure - launch pads, mobile crawlers, scaffolding in the VAB and fabrication facilities in Michoud and Utah. SSM initially carries about 80 metric tons (70 (63.3 metric) to 100 (90.7 metric) tons) and can be stretched to meet the 130 ton (118 metric tons) legal requirement with minimal modification (for example, adding 5-segment (instead of 4-segment) Solid Rocket Boosters, 4 Shuttle Main Engines, extended External Tank). So in fact, SSM meets all the technical, budgetary, safety and schedule requirements set out in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010.

Yet, a larger issue that Spudis points out is that it's a "fool's errand to design architectures and new space vehicles if you do not know what your mission is." He writes, "You can design and build a space system without an objective but as it must satisfy many different purposes, it tends to not satisfy any of them particularly well."