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NASA Facing Mid-life Crisis

Posted on: Monday, 29 September 2008, 16:20 CDT

NASA’s plans to retire space shuttle flights by 2010 are causing the agency to struggle with its identity and future.

Since 1981, the shuttle has circled the Earth 18,449 times. For much of that time, NASA's mission has been to build the International Space Station, a place to do research and to learn how to live in space.

But the NASA of the future is looking to retire the shuttle in 2010 and build new space vehicles to return astronauts to the moon and, someday, to travel to Mars.

However, a clean break from the shuttle program has created a combination of pressures - political, economic, engineering and diplomatic - making it difficult, costly and some say unwise to ditch the shuttle as soon as planned. While NASA publicly talks about shuttle retirement, it's also quietly making sure it could postpone those plans.

Ending the shuttle program would mean five years without an American way to get into space, forcing astronauts to hitch a ride with the Russians to the multibillion-dollar space station that U.S. taxpayers funded.

Many are unhappy about that, including the two presidential nominees and many in Congress who say they want to keep the shuttle flying past the 2010 retirement date mandated by the Bush administration.

But given the current financial meltdown, doing so would be costly and big spending on NASA in the future doesn't seem likely.

"My own view is about as pessimistic as it is possible to be," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in e-mail, referring to the shuttle program and the future. He said the White House science and budget offices were on a "jihad" to retire the shuttle.

Griffin publicly supports the Bush administration's plan to retire the shuttle in two years. But people close to him say he is troubled with that timetable, and his e-mail reflects that. Also, NASA has undertaken a study on how to keep its three shuttles flying longer.

But NASA would rather focus on the future.

The Russian Soyuz would be the sole way to get to space if the shuttle program is shelved after space station construction ends. After the 2004 Columbia disaster, NASA did rely on the Russians for trips to the space station for 2 1/2 years while shuttles were grounded for safety improvements.

But top NASA officials have called the idea of depending on the Russians "unseemly" after Russia's invasion of the republic of Georgia.

The notion that Americans would pay the bulk of the cost for the space station and then either abandon it to the Russians or depend on them for transportation doesn't make sense, according to Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell.

"If we're going to build it, then we better use it," Lovell said. "If the shuttles are in good condition, keep them flying."

Sharing similar space policies, John McCain and Barack Obama both want to shorten the gap in spaceflight that follows the end of the shuttle program. Experts said they support the general idea of going back to the moon, but whoever wins the election will probably re-examine current plans.

Meanwhile, NASA leaders must contend with a dissident team of employees and contractors who have so little faith in the chosen design for the new moon rocket that they are working on their own time on a cheaper alternative.

The space agency's own quasi-independent safety panel warned this summer of an unusual sense of anxiety among workers.

NASA announced Monday that its high-profile mission in October to repair the Hubble Space Telescope was delayed until next year because of an unexpected glitch in the orbiting telescope.

On top of all that, a new moon race could happen in the near future, as China is becoming a new space competitor. Chinese astronauts took a spacewalk on Saturday, and the head of the Chinese space agency said he plans to send astronauts to the moon "in the near future."

Syracuse University public policy professor Henry Lambright said NASA has a lot of problems at middle age.

“It's being asked to do too much,” he said. "It's unrealistic to expect you to carry on this burden of the past, the shuttle and the space station, while you do something new without more money. You can't do it."

Hans Mark, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Texas who was a NASA administrator during the Reagan administration, suggested NASA is having a mere midlife crisis and is sugarcoating the situation.

"It's not a midlife crisis. It's a disaster," Mark said. "We can't possibly give up on the shuttle and let Russians be the only ones get to the space station. We don't have a higher-tech replacement for the shuttle, and we screwed up the space station" by putting it in an orbit that prevents it from being useful for missions to the moon or Mars.

"We are at a crossroads," said NASA's deputy associate administrator, Wayne Hale, noting the future could be viewed as dangerous or an opportunity.

"If we had done things the way we wish we could have, we wouldn't be here," Hale said. "But here we are... It's a shame we got in this situation."

"NASA at 50 is still suffering from a decision made when it was 12." Said John Logsdon, a space policy expert at the National Air and Space Museum.

NASA got special treatment during the race to the moon, essentially getting a blank check during the Kennedy space race era. In 1970, President Nixon ruled it would be treated like all other federal agencies, and "NASA has been in the midst of a perpetual crisis ever since," Logsdon said.

These days a new attitude is called for from an agency that began taking risks during the Russian space race.

“NASA must become more mature,” Hale said.

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On the Net:

• NASA Shuttle/ISS Programs

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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