ShareThisAnother of President Barack Obama's initiatives may be in trouble. Legislators from states with a heavy NASA presence are beginning to push back against his plan to kill a Bush-era lunar-landing program.
The president's budget proposal for next year calls for pulling the plug on the Constellation program, with its heavy-lift Ares rockets and Orion spacecraft, in which the space agency already has $9 billion invested. The Constellation program to the moon was to be the first step toward an eventual manned mission to Mars.
The loss of the heavy-lift Ares could be especially critical. Although there has been talk of extending its life, the shuttle program is set to expire after four more trips to the space station, leaving us dependent on an increasingly mercurial Russia to get heavy payloads into orbit. Meanwhile, the Chinese have made no secret of their determination to push ahead with an ambitious manned space program.
Obama's budget does include an increase in NASA funding to $19 billion, including $6 billion to encourage the private sector to develop commercial spacecraft and for NASA to pursue new technology.
The private-sector plan depends heavily on whether aerospace businesses can find some sort of profitable justification for manned flight and doing it without NASA's great reservoir of engineering talent. Just hoping a private company will come along and build a moon rocket is more of a hope than a program.
The NASA route depends on technological breakthroughs in exotic areas like new propulsion systems that could cut the trip to Mars from three months to several days. But these breakthroughs may or may not materialize, even though NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, "We're oh-so-close."
This was all too vague for the Senate space subcommittee, which said NASA needs to go somewhere specific -- the moon, Mars, a Martian moon or an asteroid -- and come up, in the absence of the Constellation program, with a plan for doing it relatively soon.
The White House has announced plans for Obama to host a high-level conference in Florida, in the Cape Canaveral area, on the next step in space exploration. The White House says the president will unveil an "ambitious plan" for NASA. One hopes it is considerably more ambitious and visionary than hiring the Russians or Chinese to explore space for us.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
Short sweat and unarguably to
Short sweat and unarguably to the point... God JOB!
Don't cancel Constellation!
Excellent article!
To expand on the statement in the article, "The NASA route depends on technological breakthroughs in exotic areas like new propulsion systems that could cut the trip to Mars from three months to several days.": These propulsion systems are typically very high specific impulse systems, but have relatively low thrust - and are not suitable for launch systems... they still need a launch vehicle to get them out of our atmosphere - and that's why we need the heavy lift capabilities!
I believe in the free market and that private companies are more efficient than that of the government, but they need to have a reason... private industry in space launch is essentially in it's infant stages and there are no real "profit based" motivations to drive them. Until there is, I do not believe that private industry can provide us reliable access to space that is either more cost effective or efficient than that of the Constellation program.
Cancelling the Constellation Program without a sufficiently developed industry base is truly is a "faith based" approach that is going to remove the United States as a dominant force in space.