The Orion capsule at miniature scale. Photo credit: NASA
An elaborate ruse is taking place. Instead of Mars, we’re going to an asteroid. NASA’s budget is supposed to grow a seemingly hefty $6 billion but that’s only a 1.5% increase next year with just cost of living adjustments the four years after. Finally, NASA administrators assured the Johnson Space Center that it would continue to be the home of mission control for human spaceflight—when no flights are planned.
But not all are duped. “[I]t is clear that this is the end of America’s leadership in space,” said Senator Richard Selby from the aerospace-heavy state of Alabama, regarding the Obama administration’s plan for space exploration, announced yesterday.
Back in February, the President cancelled the Ares program to return to the moon and eventually Mars, a decision eliciting very little public consternation. Despite Congressional backlash from the Spacebelt states of Texas, Florida and Alabama, Ares remains cancelled. Also telling, part of the plan allocates $40 million for job retraining to Space Shuttle program employees put out of work by the Shuttle’s scheduled retirement later this year, making for an unexpected but revealing parallel with the Rustbelt.
Cagily, the President is deploying technology and market forces to defer human spaceflight—to infinity and beyond. NASA’s revised budget shifts billions into commercial space flight. Only left-wing socialists would argue against harnessing market forces to get into space. But the real jujitsu came in requiring that future rockets use new technology, not just a retread of the Apollo program. This is brilliant. Enthusiasts for space travel revere technology and so can hardly oppose Obama’s new, higher standard. However, in some respects, rocket technology has been unchanged for nearly a century. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky laid out many of the principles in 1903 in his Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices. Since Apollo forty years ago, no alternatives have been found to very large, multi-stage rockets burning liquid or solid fuel. Today, none are in near prospect. The chances of coming up with something novel by the new deadline of 2015 are very, very low. NASA chief Charles Bolden implored yesterday’s gathering at Cape Canaveral that “This is not for show. We want your ideas. We want your thoughts.” But because there are no ideas, it is for show.
The actual plan is to go nowhere or at least nowhere new. Even the gung-ho, final frontiers readers of Space.com think NASA will not get to Mars by the newly distant date of 2030.
Unless China reprises its 2009 Olympics extravagance in space with a mission to Mars, the Moon might mark the furthest extent of human space travel.
The brave and hopeful era of the Space Age deserves a better send-off than these dissimulations. Economics and myth dictate otherwise, stalling the redirection of noble aspiration toward terrestrial ends where giant leaps for humankind are both needed and possible.
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