NASA in the Dark on Cost of Moon-Mars Mission, Administrator Says

Jan. 22–WASHINGTON — How much will President Bush’s grand plan to send astronauts to the moon and then Mars cost? NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe said Wednesday that his agency doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know just yet.

Coming up with a cost for the mission or even a date for sending humans to Mars would “start to close off options,” O’Keefe said. When pressed by reporters Wednesday for a ballpark overall price tag, he responded, “Let’s not presume that somehow we’ve got an answer to it now.”

Critics, liberal and conservative, challenged what they called the agency’s blank-check approach.

“There’s no other program of this magnitude that Congress has ever endorsed where they didn’t have at least an estimate for the price tag,” said former Rep. Dick Zimmer, R-N.J., a fiscal conservative who often challenged NASA while in Congress. “It’s bad management; it’s probably bad politics. I don’t think they’re going to get away with it.”

Jill Lancelot, president of the liberal Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington budget watchdog group, said the administration “ought to be down-to-earth with the American public instead of putting out these pie-in-the-sky plans. . . . In this time of record budget deficits, we certainly don’t want to start a project when we don’t know what the costs are.”

Lancelot said NASA’s approach is the equivalent of buying a house or car without knowing the bottom-line costs. O’Keefe said that’s an unfair comparison because NASA hasn’t designed the mission so it doesn’t know what the house will look like.

O’Keefe, a former deputy budget director and self-professed “bean counter,” said this approach is part of a new kind of NASA thinking that’s outside conventional limits and assumptions.

NASA has come up with 25 to 30 different possibilities for the mission in recent months and some look better than others, O’Keefe said. Though he declined to offer a cost estimate, he said figures of $500 billion or $1 trillion were “preposterous.”

O’Keefe also wouldn’t say when NASA would know more about the total costs or what the mission will look like. Between now and 2009, O’Keefe said, his agency will get $12 billion for the moon-Mars mission. That’s $1 billion in new spending, he said, and $11 billion from reductions elsewhere in the NASA budget and the eventual elimination of the space shuttle program in 2010. He promised there would be no “big balloon note” of spending after that.

A NASA budget chart suggested that Bush’s “exploration missions” and accompanying programs would cost between $125 billion and $170 billion by 2020 — and that’s before any talk of landing people on Mars.

Coming up with those totals is “overthinking it,” O’Keefe said. He said there will be “off ramps” or speed-ups that can be taken in the plan as time goes on. Congressional oversight, he added, will keep NASA from being in a position of saying “trust me.”

Howard McCurdy, a public policy professor at American University in Washington who specializes in the space program, said O’Keefe’s no-price strategy might help him avoid the low-balling and overestimates that have plagued NASA in the past. He also noted that a similar moon-Mars exploration plan proposed by the first President Bush flopped when its $400 billion price tag was revealed.

ON THE WEB:

–For NASA’s one-page “budget chart” on the moon-Mars mission, go to: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/54873main_budget_chart_14jan04.pdf

–For NASA’s Web page on the president’s space vision, go to: http://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/explore_main.html

–For Taxpayers For Common Sense’s space policy page, go to:

http://www.taxpayer.net/space/index.htm

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(c) 2004, Knight Ridder. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.