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NASA will always have fans, and they'll always be rabid -- folks who love the machines, swoon over the history and long to see Americans back on the moon and flying on toward Mars. For this space-happy group, here's some good news: even in hard economic times, President Obama would actually increase NASA's budget -- to more than $100 billion -- over the next five years. But space junkies had better be satisfied with that positive development, because it's just about the only one.
On Monday, NASA administrator Charlie Bolden unveiled both Obama's proposed space budget through 2015 and the Administration's plans for how that money should be spent. And though Bolden filled his prepared remarks with all the usual promises to "blaze a new trail," answer a "bold challenge," "spur innovation" and, of course, inspire young people, the fact of the matter is that the new plans will keep America on the ground for most of the next decade or longer. And whenever U.S. astronauts finally do return to space, they won't be going very far.
The initiative, for now at least, is more about what NASA plans to cancel than what it plans to pursue. The six-year-old Constellation program, which had been focused on developing new boosters, Apollo-like orbiters and a 21st century lunar lander, all with the goal of making long-term stays on the moon possible, will be scrapped, after $9 billion and a single flight of the Ares 1 booster last October. The longer-term goal of venturing out to Mars is being tabled along with it.
In place of that program, NASA will tackle a grab bag of other projects: extending the life of the so-far unfinished International Space Station (ISS) until 2020, and spending $4.9 billion to develop better robotics, $7.8 billion to develop new flight techniques such as in-orbit fuel depots and closed-loop life-support systems, and $3 billion to develop new unmanned ships. There are no entirely unworthy objectives in that list (with the possible exception of the ISS), but there's also no clear way of getting humans back into space after 2010, once the shuttles are mothballed. What's more, there's not a thing in the plan that would get your heart to race. Building spaceships just for the public thrill of it may seem like a luxury we can't afford, but the new direction has even deeper problems. Here's why.
The International Space Station is one of the only major stakes NASA has left in the manned space game, and postshuttle it will be the only one. For a while the U.S. won't even have a way to go back and forth between the ISS and earth without hitching a ride on a Russian ship. The station was proposed in 1984 and has been under construction since 1998, and so far not a lick of truly valuable science has come from it. Its intended mission has changed and changed and changed again over the years, from materials manufacturing to zero-g experiments to astronomic observations to studying human adaptation to space flight. And what were the new ideas Bolden cited on Monday? "A broad array of biologic, materials and combustion research," the administrator said, in addition to addressing "practical medical questions about astronaut bone density and the effects of radiation." In other words, more of the same.
More problematic is NASA's planned abdication of its role as a developer of manned boosters and spacecraft. Instead, it will become a shopper, and leave the designing and metal-cutting to the private sector. To an extent, this has always been the case. The first Americans to orbit the earth blasted off aboard Atlas and Titan rockets -- both built by commercial companies as missile launchers and later adapted to human flight. The Saturn moon rockets were the first designed and built exclusively for humans, but even those were contracted out. Still, it was NASA minds that drove the designs and the result was what might have been the finest boosters ever built.
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I read somewhere that NASA decided to do a manned mission to Mars by August, 1982, but the fact that the Viet Nam war was so costly. Such type of mission could have been a drop within the fiscal bucket, compared to the military spending in those days. Comparing the value of a manned mission to Mars to that of slugging it out in Southeast Asia, I vote Mars, all the way. We lost Viet Nam; what a waste. We lost our early trip to Mars; what a waste. Now, we have financial woes and budget cuts. Once more, Mars usually takes the back seat just to fall out of the vehicle. What can we do to prevent strike three?