Death sentence or do-over for NASA's moon ambitions? (News Feature)

By Anne K Walters Feb 2, 2010, 2:42 GMT

Washington - Has President Barack Obama just shot down NASA's moon ambitions, or given the agency a much-need do-over by killing an unsustainable programme?

In his 2011 budget request released Monday, Obama proposed eliminating NASA's efforts to build the next generation spacecraft to carry astronauts back to the moon.

The so-called Constellation programme of spacecraft and rockets would be a throwback to the Apollo programme of the 1960s and were intended to return NASA to its glory days of manned spaceflight, but faced huge funding shortfalls and likely years of delay.

Top NASA officials welcomed Obama's move, stressing that the vision of human space exploration has not died, only an unsustainable programme that prevented the space agency from focussing on long-term goals.

'The truth is that we were not on a path to get back to the moon's surface,' said NASA administrator Charlie Bolden. 'And as we focused so much of our effort and funding on just getting to the moon, we were neglecting investments in the key technologies that would be required to go beyond.'

But Obama's space policy looks poised to spark a galactic showdown with Congress. Lawmakers representing states with NASA facilities will likely lead a charge against the budget proposal.

Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from the Gulf Coast state of Alabama, which is home to one of NASA's centres, blasted the idea as 'the death march for the future of human space flight.'

He said it would allow emerging space programmes in India and China to overtake US dominance in the field.

'With this administration's nonsensical NASA budget request, the US will still be working on launching people on rockets that do not exist while Russia, China and India are actually doing it,' he said. 'If this budget is enacted, NASA will no longer be an agency of innovation and hard science; it will be the agency of pipe dreams and fairy tales.'

Florida Senator Bill Nelson, himself a former astronaut, lambasted the idea, saying that NASA was replacing lost shuttle jobs at Florida's Kennedy Space Centre too slowly, risking US leadership in space to China and Russia and relying too heavily on unproven commercial companies.

'We need a plan that provides America with uninterrupted access to space while also funding exploration to expand the boundaries of our knowledge,' he said.

But enlisting aerospace companies to provide commercial spaceflight options, will also likely sway other members of Congress looking for more jobs in their districts.

NASA has already poured 9 billion dollars into the Constellation programme since former president George W Bush in 2004 announced his intention of returning to the moon.

In October, NASA conducted the first 445-million-dollar test flight of the Ares I rocket, designed to carry astronauts into low- Earth orbit on new Orion spacecraft. The agency's science team had even crashed a rocket into the moon to determine if water hidden its craters could serve a potential lunar base.

But Jim Kohlenberger of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy insisted that killing the programme is not a waste money.

'The fact that we poured 9 billion dollars into an unexecutable programme isn't an excuse to pour another 50 billion (dollars) into a still unexecutable system,' he told reporters. 'We're cancelling Constellation. We're not cancelling our ambitions to explore further and farther into space.

'This isn't a step backwards. I think the step backwards was trying to recreate the moon landings of 40 years ago largely using some of yesterday's technologies instead of developing new technologies that can take us further into space.'

The programme had been shrouded in uncertainty for much of the last year, as Obama ordered an independent review panel to examine every aspect of human space flight, including whether to return to the moon at all or set some other goal.

Ultimately, the panel chaired by former aerospace executive Norm Augustine decided the current plans were impossible without significantly more money.

'The US human spaceflight programme appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory,' the panel said in a summary of its findings. 'It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.'

Though the panel did not recommend a specific course of action, Augustine on Monday welcomed the shift in priorities and said it would allow NASA to 'lay the foundation for travel beyond low-Earth orbit, including destinations such as the asteroids, the Lagrangian points, Mars' moons and Mars itself, as well as revisits to our own moon.'