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Bush-Era Plans to Reach Moon and Beyond Still Alive Under Obama
- By Alexis Madrigal
NASA’s long-term plans to return humans to the moon and then push on to Mars remain a possibility.
All week, we heard rumblings that the Human Spaceflight Plans Committee created by the Obama White House to evaluate our manned exploration program might kill off the new Ares rocket program. The committee’s head denied that any such decision had been made in a press conference Friday.
“As far as our committee is concerned, it would be completely wrong to say that Ares is dead in the water,” said Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, and head of the review.
With the Apollo 11 40th anniversary looming, all kinds of attention has been focused on whether NASA would return to the moon. The plans that are currently under review were born in 2004, when President George W. Bush announced his Vision for Space Exploration, which included returning to the moon, building a base, then heading for Mars.
That may have sounded great, but it put NASA in a tough spot. First, the agency had trumpeted its success with less expensive robotic missions, not manned flight, and Bush’s priorities seemed likely to defund robotic missions. Second, the Space Shuttle program has been slated to come to an end, leaving the United States without a national option to get up to the International Space Station or into low Earth orbit at all. So, NASA had to design a program that would get humans to orbit, to the Moon and to Mars.
Working with those issues, NASA came up with the Constellation program. The plan goes like this: First, a slim rocket, Ares I, would send people in the Orion space capsule into orbit some time during the next decade, then back to the moon, and finally to Mars. A separate, larger rocket, the Ares V, would carry cargo.
The program has come under fire from many parties. Some say NASA should focus on robotic science missions instead of human exploration. Others say NASA needs more sharply defined priorities. The best architecture for getting to low earth orbit probably isn’t the best way to get to the moon, which again probably isn’t the best path to Mars. Even Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, has come out against NASA returning humans there.
In the battle to steer NASA policy one way or the other, all kinds of technical details are being marshaled by parties on all sides.
“Some of these rather subtle technical issues get to be very important in whether options make sense,” Augustine said.
But the basic problem is that NASA doesn’t have enough money to do everything that’s being asked of the agency.
“Congress and the White House should reduce the ‘too much with too little’ pressure that has led to disaster in the past and that characterizes NASA’s predicament today,” argued MIT’s Space, Policy, and Society Research Group in a whitepaper released last December.
The job of the Human Spaceflight Plans Committee is to figure out which pieces of the “too much” should go. They’ve asked NASA to provide several alternative plans for the Ares I, which they’ll mark up and present to the White House by the end of August. It’s unclear what they’ll recommend, but the sheer profusion of alternatives suggests that changes are likely to be made.
One thing that must be said about the Committee: It has shown a persistent dedication to openness in its proceedings. While they aren’t tipping their hand about specific suggestions, Augustine and the committee are actively maintaining an excellent website where they answer questions and provide easy access to documentation. They are also holding a series of public meetings later this month in space centers in Houston, Huntsville, Coco Beach, and Washington, D.C.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/humanspaceflight/