NASA invests in science, not human spaceflight

The troubled Constellation program —which involved developing a replacement for the space shuttle as well as new heavy-lift unmanned vehicle, and a craft to take astronauts to the Moon—has been eliminated in the NASA budget .

The White House said that program was late, over budget, and unlikely to meet its deadline of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. In fact, even if the White House increased the human spaceflight program substantially it would still take NASA until 2030 to reach the Moon, said White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag and White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer in a telephone press conference yesterday. The US could not afford that level of investment they said. So far NASA has spent $9.1 billion on the Constellation program, and it may cost $2.5 billion to cancel it.

Although science did relatively well in the new budget, the Obama administration is currently implementing a three-year freeze on most nondefense discretionary spending.

This spending freeze impacted NASA’s 10-year strategic vision which forecasted increases for the agency above inflation until the end of the decade in order to build equipment and vehicles to return to the Moon.

A private hope

Instead of relying on the Constellation program the Obama administration proposes expanding the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program . Designed to help commercial companies develop launch vehicles to supply the International Space Station when the space shuttle retires at the end of the year, COTS will also develop vehicles that could be used for exploration outside of Earth orbit. Under this program, which will cost $6 billion over five years, NASA would rent the spacecraft developed.

The first major test under the COTS program of one of these launch vehicles—a Falcon 9 rocket made by by Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX)—is scheduled provisionally for March.

The trigger for canceling the Constellation program was the Augustine committee report from last fall that said the current human spaceflight program would require an additional $3 billion a year to remain on track.

Bretton Alexander , president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation , hailed the change calling it “a win-win decision” that would create thousands of high-tech jobs in the US.

A boost for science

NASA’s budget will be up slightly, at $18.7 billion, from last year, but the biggest surprise may be increased funds for unmanned robotic space and Earth observation missions.

Orszag said that in addition to research and development, NASA’s proposal invests in “advance robotics and other steps that will help to inspire Americans and not just return a man or a woman to the Moon but undertake the longer range research that could succeed in human spaceflight to Mars.”

Although Congress is expected to come under intensive lobbying to reverse the administration’s proposal, Pfeiffer said the White House is determined to fight special interests attempting to do so.

US Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), ranking member of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, today issued a statement sharply criticizing the Obama administration’s proposal. “Congress cannot and will not sit back and watch the reckless abandonment of sound principles, a proven track record, a steady path to success, and the destruction of our human space flight program,” he said.

The opposition wasn’t a surprise. “We don’t expect that this is going to be easy,” Pfeiffer said. “There was a lot of opposition to some of the cuts that we proposed last year. And we had I think a historically very successful rate about 60 percent of the cuts we proposed were actually enacted into the law.”

“I think this is a dramatic shift in the way we’ve gone about particularly human spaceflight over the past almost 50 years,” said John M. Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University to the New York Times .

“It is a somewhat risky proposition,” Logsdon said, “but we’ve been kind of stuck using the technologies we’ve developed in the ‘50s and ‘60s.”

A complete summary of the 2011 budget, which includes increases for every science agency, can be found on the White House web site .

Paul Guinnessy