Sigh.
Ok, first off, the administration official who uttered the last sentence should be filed away next to Mr. Left of the Left and Ms. Pajamas as people who should no longer speak for the White House in any capacity whatsoever. Full stop, end of story. Putting my speechwriter cap on for a second: In most any political situation, ridiculing the dreams of an entire generation does not make for particularly good messaging.
Anyway, anonymous WH official aside, NASA administrator Charles Bolden sounded a better note about all this: “We’re not abandoning anything. We’re probably on a new course but human space flight is in our DNA. We are not abandoning human space flight by any stretch of the imagination. We have companies telling us they’re excited to get humans off this planet and into orbit. I think we’re going to get there and perhaps quicker than we would have done before.“
And, to be clear, the administration’s NASA budget increases the agency’s funding by $6 billion over the next five years. The new budget ups research and development spending into cheaper heavy launch mechanisms, emphasizes more robotic exploration missions and observational experiments into climate change, extends the life of the ISS (although, with only five more shuttle missions remaining, other nations will have to help service it), and works to promote the various commercial space enterprises moving along right now.
All of this is well and good, but it would be nice to see some recognition of the civic importance of manned space flight by this administration. In their words, NASA is scrapping Constellation on account of it being “over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation due to a failure to invest in critical new technologies.” And, given that we still had a lot of the expenditures before us, I suppose now was as good a time as any to kill the program if it’s not the right direction to go in.
That being said, how many more times are we going to do this? We keep stopping and starting and stopping and starting our post-Shuttle plans for space, so that now, after five final shuttle missions this coming year, we will longer have the capability anymore as a nation to send men and women into orbit. “If implemented, the NASA a few years from now would be fundamentally different from NASA today. The space agency would no longer operate its own spacecraft, but essentially buy tickets for its astronauts.” Forty-one years after we first reached the moon, that’s just plain sad.
Ultimately, the central finding of the Augustine commission’s final report, released this past October after extensive study of NASA’s current situation, is a sound one: “The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.” In other words, we’ve been trying to talk the talk without walking the walk. If we’re going to get serious about manned space flight, we need to stop piecemealing NASA and start making manned exploration a funding priority.
In total, the agency is slated to get $100 billion over the next five years. To put that number in perspective, that’s less than a fifth of our defense budget for 2011 alone, and that’s going by the most conservative numbers around — NASA’s five-year budget could be closer to a tenth of next year’s defense spending. (For its part, the Augustine commission set a price tag of $3 billion a year to get serious about manned exploration.)
If we had put anywhere near that kind of money into exploration and R&D over the years, would we now be in this position, where we face the Hobson’s choice of replicating expensive 50-year-old launch tech or being completely grounded as a nation? The lack of thinking about our long-term priorities sometimes is staggering to me. I’ve said this before, but I still believe it holds true: Short of possibly genomic research and advances in AI, nothing we do right now will matter more centuries or millennia hence than establishing a presence off-world…if we even have that long. Not to get all Jor-El up in here, but we really have to start getting serious about this.
This could be our “Greek Civil War Moment”.
In 1947 there was a civil war in Greece with Great Britain supporting the government against a communist insurgency. Britain had been there for a couple of years and by 47 she could no longer afford the financial burden, so the United States stepped in.
A lot of people point to the Suez Crisis as the time Britain ceased to be a world class power, but others argue that the real moment was 11 years earlier.
Which is a long winded way of saying that ten or twenty years down the road people may look back on the gutting of the space program as the moment when it was over for the United States, even though we’ll toddle on for a bit longer.
Other things aside, I am encouraged by the new sprit of cooperation with the private sector in the area of space flight, I think the time has come for that. It is admittedly stretching an analogy, I know, but no one worries today that the government is not designing the next school bus or passenger airliner. Profit-driven companies design and build them for less, then the government buys one if necessary. I am less upset that the government has to buy a ticket to get an astronaut into space than I am elated by the fact that a private citizen (with enough money) can. Relieving the government from the burden of “re-inventing the wheel” in the area of manned delivery vehicles, allows it to focus its resources on what it does best: explore new areas of research that have too much financial risk involved for private companies to conduct. In a similar vein, we shouldn’t worry about NASA taking the moon off the table for the immediate future, because it was only put back on the table by Bush as a distraction. Until we have a scientifically sound reason for going, and a plausible (and realistically funded) plan for doing it, we really shouldn’t go back. Goin
Funnily enough, Eric, James Cameron — yep, the King of the World — argued very similarly in today’s WP: “[T]he president and NASA have crafted a bold plan that truly makes possible this nation’s dreams for space. Their plan calls for the full embrace of commercial solutions for transporting astronauts to low Earth orbit after the space shuttle is retired this year. This frees NASA to do what it does best: deep space exploration, both robotic and human. By selecting commercial solutions for transportation to the international space station, NASA is empowering American free enterprise to do what it does best: develop technology quickly and efficiently in a competitive environment.“
Thanks for this discussion, Kevin. I had not had/made the time to track down what was not readily available in the short-attention span news cycle. You’ve helped me feel a little better about this.
Well, Kevin beat me to citing the James Cameron op-ed on the Administration’s NASA strategy. Still, it would be encouraging to hear these points coming out of the mouth of POTUS, with some kind of commitment to really push the private sector to promote low-earth orbit spaceflight.
The manner of spaceflight promotion is less important than having someone with some authority use a bully pulpit to push space exploration as a unifying force for the nation and the world. With all due respect to Cameron (and his engineering skill and background), most people other than fanboys/girls and technogeeks will read the op-ed and yawn as if Barnum were selling tickets to Pandora.