Budget Problems Could Hurt Future Space Trips
Budgetary constraints continue to slow U.S. ambitions to send astronauts back to the moon as a prelude to future missions to Mars, AFP reported.
Former president George W. Bush decided to phase out the shuttle flights after the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003 in order to set a more ambitious mandate for American space exploration.
The Constellation program, which was launched in 2004, will be an effort to take Americans back to the moon by 2020, wherein the moon will someday be used as a launch pad for manned voyages to Mars.
President Barack Obama has named a commission of experts to review the U.S. manned space flight program and make recommendations by the end of the summer.
Since 1981, NASA has used the space shuttles to transport crews of astronauts into space, but they are now conceived as reusable vehicles to transport heavy, bulky equipment into Earth’s orbit, primarily for the construction of the International Space Station.
But Michael Griffin, the former NASA chief who championed the Constellation program, argues that the shuttle has kept the United States stuck in a low orbit for too long at a time when other countries like China are emerging as space rivals.
He suggests the U.S. must first return to the moon because it’s the next step and it’s only a few days from home.
“Mars is only a few months from Earth,” he said in comparison.
“The single overarching goal of human space flight is the human settlement of the solar system, and eventually beyond,” Griffin said during the presentation of the Constellation program to Congress in 2004.
He said in an interview with AFP last year that human populations, in the long run, must diversify if they wish to survive.
But the cost of Constellation’s Orion capsule, a more advanced and spacious version of the Apollo lunar module, and the Ares 1 and Ares V launchers needed to put it in orbit, are too expensive for NASA’s current budget to cover.
Somewhere in the vicinity of 150 billion dollars will be required for Constellation and the Ares 1 estimates jumped from 26 billion dollars in 2006 to 44 billion dollars in 2008.
Senator Bill Nelson of Florida said that with a space exploration budget of six billion dollars in 2009, NASA simply can’t achieve the president’s goal of being on the moon by 2020.
Between 2015 and 2020, the United States will have no way of transporting its astronauts to the ISS except aboard Russian Soyuz space craft, said Nelson, a former astronaut.
However, a group of active and retired NASA engineers, who are critical of the Constellation project, have been developing a parallel project dubbed “˜Jupiter Direct’ in their spare time.
Their project would use the Orion capsule but would replace the Ares launchers with a family of launchers containing common components based on existing shuttle technology.
Jupiter’s cost was estimated at 14 billion dollars””half the original estimate for the Ares 1, according to proposals presented to Obama’s commission on human space flight.
Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin chief executive and the commission chairman, said it comes down to money.
He noted that, with a few exceptions, the U.S. currently has the technology and the knowledge to go to Mars with humans.
“We could put a telescope on the moon if we wanted,” he said. “The technology is by and large there. It boils down to what can we afford?”
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