NASA's leading human spaceflight centers in Florida, Texas and Alabama will have responsibility for new heavy-lift rocket, space exploration and commercial crew programs, the agency announced Tuesday.

An Orion ground test article was shipped in February from a Lockheed Martin factory in New Orleans to test and integration facilities in Denver for tests to ensure it can survive the harsh environments of a deep space mission. Credit: NASA

As announced last year, Kennedy Space Center in Florida will lead the management of commercial human spaceflight programs designed to ferry astronauts to and from low Earth orbit. NASA and private partners plan to have commercial crew transportation services running by 2015.

The Florida launch site will be the starting point for all of NASA's commercial crew missions to orbit. Companies competing for NASA funding would launch on Atlas, Falcon or Liberty rockets from KSC or neighboring Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 and SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets are already flying, and solid rocket motor builder ATK unveiled its own commercial rocket concept called Liberty last month.

NASA officials say the rise of commercial rocket and spacecraft operators will give the space agency flexibility to focus on exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit.

That's the objective of a heavy-lift rocket and multi-purpose crew vehicle still early in the design stage. Both systems were initiated after the passage of the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, legislation which serves as a blueprint for the agency's activities for the next three years.

The massive heavy-lift booster, called the Space Launch System for now, will lift between 70 and 100 metric tons to low Earth orbit. An upper stage could be added later to supply more lift capability.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center will host the SLS program office in Huntsville, Ala.

Congress mandated the Space Launch System be flying by the end of 2016, but a preliminary report released by NASA in January said that goal was not achievable under the agency's budget projections.

NASA is working with a baseline design of the SLS that recycles much of the work accomplished on the cancelled Ares rocket and the space shuttle program.

This drawing shows the reference design for NASA's heavy-lift rocket concept. It includes technology recycled from the space shuttle and Ares rocket programs. Credit: NASA
 
The first stage would be the same diameter as the shuttle's external fuel tank and would be powered by five of the shuttle's hydrogen-fueled main engines. Two five-segment solid rocket boosters like the motor designed for the Ares 1 rocket would help propel the massive launcher into orbit.

But the agency is still studying other alternatives and several different designs based on NASA's experience with the space shuttle and the Ares rocket. NASA expects to officially unveil a rocket architecture this summer.

The 335-foot-tall heavy-lift rocket will have the ability to haul the multi-purpose crew vehicle and various other payloads into space.

The multi-purpose crew vehicle is being designed as NASA's piloted capsule for missions to asteroids, Mars, the moon and other destinations beyond low Earth orbit.

Its development will be managed by the Johnson Space Center in Houston, home of NASA's mission control and headquarters for the International Space Station and space shuttle programs.

The Orion spacecraft, a survivor of the termination of the Constellation moon program, is the basis for the multi-purpose crew vehicle.