Press reports suggest that the Obama administration intends to scrap the space exploration program started six years ago by President George W. Bush. NASA will be tasked with devising alternatives based on options from the Augustine Report.
The Orlando Sentinel is reporting that there will be no money in the NASA FY2011 budget for the space exploration program intended to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020.
"When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.
"There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all."
Instead, NASA will be asked to conduct a multi-month study of an alternative exploration program, based upon options offered in the Augustine Committee Report, likely focusing on deep space missions to asteroids, the moons of Mars, and various other destinations in space without actually landing on a surface of another world.
According to the New York Times:
"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is preparing for a major evaluation of its human spaceflight program, even as many who will conduct the survey have yet to be informed of the agency's revised mission.
"The expansive, multi-month technical study, still in the preliminary stages, might be similar to the Exploration Systems Architecture Study that in 2005 settled on the design of the agency's program to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020."
As of this writing, there is no word about how much money if any would be allocated to this alternate exploration program in the FY 2011 NASA budget. How much the program will cost, where astronaut explorers will go, and when they will go are also unknown.
There seem to be two possible outcomes to this policy change should it actually be implemented. The first possibility is that the effort and money expended for the past few years to develop the hardware to send human explorers beyond low Earth orbit will have been wasted and that any new effort will start from square one. The new program would be years getting off the ground, delaying any prospect of humans voyaging beyond low Earth orbit for the foreseeable future. This is especially true since the proposed Obama budget freeze will hit NASA hard for the next few years. The Augustine Committee was explicate in stating that NASA needed $3 billion extra per year to conduct a meaningful space exploration program.
The other alternative is that any new program will never get beyond the view graph stage and that the prospect for an American human space exploration program is dead, likely for a generation. Indeed, the Constellation program, which while suffering budget and technical difficulties, was actually in the process of building real hardware. It will be replaced by a study that may or may not be implemented as a real program. The NASA study would then join various other studies for human space exploration, dating back decades, gathering dust.
The second possible outcome suggests the end of publicly funded space flight with the conclusion of the shuttle program this year. The Obama administration plans a commercial space flight venture that is designed to create private space craft to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But the ISS is slated to be scrapped no later than 2020. What NASA would do beyond that year, if anything, is uncertain. It is also uncertain what purely private space companies can do absent NASA as a paying customer or lucrative private markets, beyond perhaps tourist trips to low Earth orbit and perhaps servicing private space stations. Private expeditions to the Moon and beyond would lay decades in the future.
The attempt to cancel the space exploration program is certain to enrage members of Congress. Last year, the Congress inserted a provision that forbade the Obama administration from canceling the space exploration program or radically change it without expressed approval from the Congress.
If the cancellation of the space exploration program goes through, NASA employees and aerospace contractors face massive job losses and economic hardship on top of what is scheduled to occur with the end of the shuttle program. Choosing not to go to the Moon in favor of a vaguely defined program to fly in deep space that may or may not become reality will be seen as abrogating American leadership in space. The opportunities for science and commerce that human space exploration would bring would be unrealized.
The dream of human space exploration is in danger of dying for the third time in American history. The first time occurred in the early 1970s when the last three Apollo missions were canceled and proposals for lunar bases and Mars expeditions were scrapped. The second time was the stillbirth of President George W. Bush's Space Exploration Initiative, never seriously funded, and canceled by President Bill Clinton.
Therefore it is no wonder that President Obama will not make an announcement of his new space policy either in his State of the Union speech or in a stand-alone address. "We choose not to go to the Moon," does not have a stirring ring to it.
Sources: Obama Aims to Ax Moon Mission, Robert Block and Mark K. Matthews, Orlando Sentinel, January 27th, 2010
NASA to Review Human Space Flight, Kenneth Chang, New York Times, January 26th, 2010
Report - Obama to Propose NASA Budget with Smaller Than Expected Increase, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, January 23rd, 2010
NASA to Propose Commercial Space Initiative, Mark R. Whittington, Associated Content, January 25th, 2010
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