Not since Richard Nixon sat in the Oval Office has the United States faced a more difficult decision about what to do with its space program. Last week, the chair of a presidential panel on human space flight told two congressional panels that NASA doesn’t have enough money to carry out the current plan to build a big rocket to take humans back to the moon and that the United States should consider other destinations and launchers.
Many lawmakers oppose any major deviation from the plan, laid out by President George W. Bush in 2004, to build a base on the moon using a new launcher system called Constellation. But the White House, eager to put its own stamp on a long-term exploration effort, is drawn to other options described in the panel’s executive summary released earlier this month (www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/home/index.html). For President Barack Obama, who is expected to announce his space vision this fall, the challenge is to find a politically acceptable answer to the question of where NASA should send humans—and how.
The status quo is not a viable option, says Norman Augustine, the retired aerospace chief who chairs the committee set up this spring by the White House. The United States could “continue the present program until, frankly, it falls off a cliff due to lack of money,” he warned members of the House Science and Technology Committee during its hearing on 15 September. Staying the course, he explained, would require at least $3 billion more a year, although a lunar landing would be delayed far beyond the original target of 2020.
The Augustine panel—which is still working on its final report—has offered the Administration a series of choices rather than a single recommendation. They range from adding more money to the current Constellation program—a family of launchers that eventually could take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit—to a rocket derived from space shuttle technology. NASA could also contract with private companies to provide rides into orbit. As for where to go, the moon could remain the destination, or NASA could shoot for a more flexible approach that might allow humans to orbit an asteroid or martian moon before eventually landing on Mars.
There is tentative agreement on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue that NASA should stick with the current plan to retire the three aging space shuttles by 2011 but prolong the life of the space station in orbit from 2016 to 2020. To service the station during that interim, NASA would initially buy Russian Soyuz vehicles and then use either commercially developed launchers or a new NASA rocket.
A coalition of aerospace companies, labor unions, former NASA officials, and Republican and Democratic politicians say that there’s nothing wrong with the Bush Administration’s space vision that more money couldn’t fix. Any alterations, they fear, would jeopardize the precarious support NASA now enjoys in Congress, they say, as well as thousands of skilled jobs. “There needs to be a compelling reason to scrap what we’ve invested our time and money in over the years,” said Representative Bart Gordon (D–TN), chair of the House science committee.
Legislators fear that building a different launcher and picking a new destination might eventually cost more than the current plan, which has been in the works for several years. “I have no interest in buying a pig in a poke,” says Gordon. So far, NASA has spent some $8 billion on Constellation, and the space agency plans its first prototype test at the end of October. Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, who also testified before the House, came down strongly in favor of maintaining the Constellation-to-the-moon plan.
Sources close to NASA say that the new NASA administrator, Charles Bolden Jr., also favors the current plan. A former astronaut, Bolden was originally scheduled to testify as well but was dropped from the witness list because the Administration has yet to formulate a response to the Augustine options.
Bolden’s stance could put him at odds with White House officials hoping for a more exciting destination than the moon, which Americans reached 40 years ago. Administration officials are also worried that Constellation’s technical and financial troubles will grow in coming years.
Although Augustine refused to take sides despite pointed questioning at the hearings, he repeatedly cited the possibility of using commercial launchers and choosing a different destination. “The flexible path options are particularly interesting to me,” Augustine told the Senate commerce and science committee on 16 September.
Rather than landing on the moon, which requires an expensive lander system, astronauts could rendezvous with an asteroid to test how to move such a body out of harm’s way if it threatens Earth. Or humans on the asteroid-sized moons of Mars could teleoperate rovers on the martian surface. Those moons and asteroids exert only a fraction of the gravitational pull of a planet or Earth’s moon and therefore require far less fuel to land on and leave. That’s a key consideration in estimating costs.
The ultimate goal—not likely for 15 to 20 years—would be landing people on Mars. “There’s great merit to having some interim milestones along the way to Mars, where you can point to significant scientific and technological accomplishments,” Augustine noted. Although Bush’s vision included a string of interim steps, the committee in its public hearings found limited enthusiasm for an Apollo redux.
However, adding $3 billion a year to NASA’s $18 billion annual budget to carry out such missions—whether to the moon or elsewhere—doesn’t sit well with a lot of law-makers. “This is no longer the era of Apollo and the Cold War, where the payoffs for advancing the space and moon agenda are entirely clear,” said Senator Jay Rockefeller (D–WV), who chairs the Senate science panel. “Our country does not necessarily have the resources to do everything we want to do.”
The debate was not supposed to begin in earnest until after the Augustine panel submitted its final report. But Augustine, to the irritation of Administration officials, insisted upon satisfying the panel’s mandated 90-day study period and released an executive summary in early September.
White House officials say they need to digest the full report before drawing up a 5-year budget plan. That task falls to the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget, now hard at work. Their recommendation will then go to Obama, who is expected to announce a new policy by November.
“The president really has a major decision here,” said Senator Bill Nelson (D–FL), who flew on the space shuttle in 1985 and who played a key role in Obama’s selection of Bolden. “I believe [he] will make a bold stroke not unlike President Kennedy,” said Nelson, referring to Kennedy’s 1961 pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
That announcement is expected to kick off a contentious debate next year in Congress. And Obama will need all of his political skills to convince both space supporters and deficit hawks that he’s on the right trajectory.
Science-2009-Lawler-Obama_Facing_Tough_Decision_on_Whether_to_Keep_Aiming_for_the_Moon-1606-7.pdf