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Doubts dim Moon, Mars missions ; Immense costs are an obstacle, space exploration panel is told

Posted on: Friday, 13 February 2004, 06:00 CST

An aerospace executive had warned a presidential commission that NASA does not have enough money - or bright young stars - to achieve President Bush's goal of returning astronauts to the Moon and flying from there to Mars.

"It would be a grave mistake to undertake a major new space objective on the cheap. To do so, in my opinion, would be an invitation to disaster," said Norman Augustine, retired chairman of Lockheed Martin Corp. and head of a panel that examined the future of the space program for the first President George Bush.

Augustine was among five aerospace experts who addressed the first public hearing of the current President Bush's space exploration commission, held this week in Washington.

Commission member Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist who is director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, asked Augustine whether $15 billion a year for 10 years would be enough to set NASA on course to fulfill the Moon-and-Mars vision put forth by Bush a month ago. The space agency's annual budget has been around $15 billion in recent years.

Augustine pointed out that during the next decade, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will still have the enormous cost of running all its centers, the space shuttle fleet, and the international space station, not to mention conducting research. He said the nation traditionally has underestimated the cost of big programs.

Tyson pressed Augustine, asking: "Are you suggesting $150 billion over the next 10 years would not be enough if it all went to that mission?"

Augustine replied that he had not done enough analysis to give an answer, "but I guess if I had to bet, I'd bet that it wouldn't be enough."

Neither Bush nor NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has put a price tag on the plan to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020, let alone sending them on to Mars a decade or more later. The president has proposed an extra $1 billion for NASA over the next five years for the initiative, and has directed the space agency to reallocate $11 billion within its budgets over the next five years to cover startup costs.

Retired Air Force Gen. Lester Lyles, another commission member, noted that this is a national program, not a NASA program, and that the budgets and technologies of other government agencies could be tapped.

The commission's chairman, Edward "Pete" Aldridge, a retired Pentagon official, said both the White House and NASA believe the new space initiative is affordable with small budget increases and reallocations, at least for the foreseeable future.

Virtually everyone at the hearing supported the idea of a national space council or some other type of clearinghouse to oversee the effort, and stressed the need for strong White House support and also youth appeal.

Augustine, for one, said he is worried about NASA's graying workforce. Back during the Apollo program, when NASA was sending men to the Moon, the control center was filled with "a bunch of kids," he said.

"They looked like Silicon Valley did a few years ago: young, innovative, imaginative, creative people. They weren't people of my generation, for sure," the 68-year-old Augustine said, tapping his chest. "One can argue whether that's good or whether it's bad, but it sure served Apollo well."

Mark Bitterman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's space enterprise council told commission members that they should take advantage of the high interest in the two NASA rovers now roaming Mars.

"We should be trying to tie them today, as best we can, to what we're trying to do later," he said. "We need to strike while the iron's hot."

Bitterman also suggested that Hollywood could help plug the new space exploration policy.

"After all, we're talking about doing things here about which movies were made not too long ago. We're talking about landing humans on Mars within the next few decades," Bitterman said.

"They weren't good movies, though," said one of the commissioners, drawing a big laugh.

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