High-flying observatory faces years of tests

By Brian Berger

Space.com staff writer

updated 6:43 p.m. ET Oct. 18, 2006

After a brush with cancellation early this year, the U.S.-German SOFIA flying astronomical observatory has a new lease on life and a fresh paint job. But before the telescope-equipped jetliner can begin initial science operations, NASA says it must first undergo several years of intensive flight testing.

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), in development for the past decade, is slated to take to the skies for the first time this winter. The modified Boeing 747 is due to make a series of brief checkout flights over Waco, Texas, before departing by late February for its new home at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center north of Los Angeles.

NASA intends to spend at least three years putting the SOFIA aircraft through its paces before allowing researchers to use the flying observatory’s German-supplied infrared telescope for the first time. Observation time, however, is expected to be limited until NASA completes another two years of flight testing and declares SOFIA operational.

Ray Taylor, the NASA program executive for SOFIA, said full-fledged science operations could begin as soon as 2012 assuming the final two years of shakedown flights go well.

“The science phase comes later now,” Taylor said in an Oct. 12 interview. “In front of it is going to be more development time and more development funding.”

NASA has spent roughly $485 million on SOFIA since awarding the prime contract for the project to Columbia, Md.-based Universities Space Research Association (USRA) in December 1996. Taylor said NASA expects to spend another $250 million to $350 million on SOFIA before declaring it operational sometime early in the next decade.

Universities Space Research Association President David Black, who fought hard to save SOFIA from cancellation earlier this year, said he was disappointed with how NASA restructured the program.

“We are disappointed that the solution NASA has come up with is going to add extra cost and delay,” said Black. “We are going to continue to work with NASA to see if we can help find ways to pull that back.”

Black said estimates put forward by the program late last year pegged the cost to complete SOFIA at $150 million with the first science flight slated for mid-2008.

NASA officials, however, doubted those estimates and called for an independent program review in April 2006 to sort out what it would take to finish and fly SOFIA, which was already over budget and several years behind schedule.

In February, well before that review had even begun, NASA sent Congress a 2007 budget request that included no money for SOFIA. The move, widely seen as a de facto cancellation, shocked astronomers and angered NASA’s German partners. NASA came under immediate fire from SOFIA backers and their allies in Congress. NASA officials said they would hold off making a final decision about SOFIA until getting the results of the independent review.

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