NASA officials confirmed Friday that they are exploring the feasibility of putting astronauts on the first flight of the Orion spacecraft, the agencys successor to the space shuttle program.If NASA does make the move, it wont come without risk, as Orion and its rocket system will need serious upgrades to make them capable of safely carrying astronauts and the agency may only have a year or two to make all the necessary changes.

This request appears to have come from the Trump administration, though NASA officialsin a Friday press call left unclear the White Houses motivationsandwhether itis seriously prepared to provide the funding necessary tomake Orions first flight a crewed mission.

NASA Watch, alongstanding agency watchdog news site, reported the details of what it described as a hastily-arranged 30 minute media briefing to discuss this potential change of plans. Agency officials Bill Gerstenmaier and Bill Hill stressed this was purely an exploratory study, and they had no opinion yet on whether this was a goodor plausible idea the basic tenor of the call appears to have been that NASA is just asking questions, and concrete answers about the missions future wont be possible until the study is completed later in the spring.

That the call was barely announced andheld on a Friday afternoon suggests NASA may not have wanted the announcement to get much attention, particularly when just two days before the agency captured the public imagination with a major exoplanet discovery.

The Orion spacecraftand its accompanying rocket, the Space Launch System, are designed to let NASA pursue human space exploration beyond low-Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo program. The current plan calls for the first uncrewed mission in September 2018, with a three-week circuit around the moon. The next flight would carry astronauts for a similar lunar flyby sometime between 2021 and 2023, potentially marking the first such journey sinceApollo 17 in 1972. While an uncrewed dress rehearsal isnt always necessary the first orbitalspace shuttle flight, for instance, carried two astronauts such a major pivot in plans so soon before the planned launch date would leave NASA with precious little time to ensure the crews safety.

The potential plan under discussion would send two astronauts on an eight- or nine-day mission. The addition oflife support, emergency abort systems, and other significant upgrades to the SLS rocketneeded to make the mission capable of carrying humans would likely be both extensive and costly. The officials said the White House had at least indicated a willingness to push back the launch date if the results of the feasibility study were positive.

While this news initially appears to track with the Trump administrations previously reported preference to scrap NASAs scientific research in favor of a greater emphasis on space exploration and human space exploration in particular an earlier analysisby NASA Watch founder and former agency scientist Keith Cowing calls that into question. In his view,the priority of Trumps top space advisers like former congressmen Newt Gingrich and Robert Walker is actually on commercial space exploration.

Orion and SLS are a top priority not for them, but for a group centeredat the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, where the spacecraft are being built, who favor the more traditional, government-backed approach that Orion represents. As Cowing suggests, bumping up the timeline for the first crewed mission could be an effort by the Marshall contingent to make Orion more appealing to the new administration, increasing the odds of its survival.

NASAs acting administrator Robert Lightfoot, who announced the feasibility study, is himself a former director of Marshall. Trump has yet to nominate a permanent NASA administrator. Until then, the future of space exploration under Trump remains uncertain. At least with Orion, more clarity should come with the release of the study later this spring.

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Why Does NASA Suddenly Want Humans On New Spacecraft's First Flight? - Vocativ