NASA's Love Affair with SOFIA

Though in February it was red-lighted by NASA, the recent announcement from officials as of June 15 was that the SOFIA project is back on schedule. Earlier this year, SOFIA had fallen into a funding snafu destined to suspend the program indefinitely. Due to unresolved issues with SOFIA’s technology and strains on NASA’s already over-extended budget, it was feared that the program would eventually be sidelined or worse, scrapped, wasting countless hours and budged dollars in the supersized space dream. But since recent concerns were analyzed, re-scrutinized and re-reviewed by top officials, the SOFIA project has enjoyed a new burst of momentum.

The SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) project was conceptualized by NASA in 1996. Basically, the program entailed fitting a special 2.7 meter, 50,000-pound infrared telescope to a suped-up Boeing 747; a breakthrough in space observation which includes flying the enormous, heavily-modified passenger airplane over the cloud/vapor layer of the atmosphere to get a clearer view of space. (A vapor layer in the atmosphere leaves ground-observatory images slightly distorted.) Although it has not yet been fully completed, SOFIA has been notorious for going over NASA budget constraints, which has been a stumbling block and concern for project engineers.

So what is the history behind the SOFIA concept? Flying over the vapor layer is not a new technology. The KAO Kuiper Airborne Observatory, a previously executed airborne observatory, was basically an identical setup but on a much smaller scale. NASA’s highly-successful Kuiper program used the flying power of a well-suited C-141, nowhere near the size of SOFIA and with limited capabilities for staff capacity and housing the telescope and equipment itself. SOFIA by comparison is massive—with massive resource demands and massive expectations. It has also experienced its share of massive problems, mostly including NASA funding, structural, and scheduling issues.