Nasa steps up space station communications "Not only are we getting global coverage 100 per cent of the time, we are getting it in real time," said Badri Younes, Nasa's deputy associate administrator for space communications. "Without such support, we'd have to live with coverage around the 10 to 15 per cent," he said. No human space flight program can be supported at this data rate. And even our ability to respond real time to emergency would diminish drastically. So that's why the TDRS has been declared as a national asset. According to Charles Bolden, Nasa's administrator, the TDRS fleet will not only aid missions observing earth but also explorations into deep space, including the Orion crew module. This test will see Orion travel farther into space than any human spacecraft has gone in more than 40 years.