The Augustine Panel, tasked by President Obama to thoroughly review NASA’s programs and mission, issued its final report last week and, as Space News reported, no punches were pulled. Yet the discussion pushed the open door to private space travel a lot wider, since that will be the only option in the United States. Who knows if the free marketeers weren’t behind this one.
In a nutshell: The Constellation manned space flight program, designed to be the successor to the Space Shuttle program that shuts down next year, isn’t sustainable under the current budget and plan.
What does that mean, exactly? That the panel, composed of independent experts on space flight and technology, doesn’t think NASA will have Constellation ready for manned flights until 2017 — which might be after the International Space Station is decommissioned, unless its budget is extended. And even if that happens, the Constellation program would subsequently be delayed two more years because it would lose funding in favor of the ISS.
So, is that it? Is manned space flight over for another generation, or longer? Not necessarily.
The option is to throw the gauntlet down to private enterprise — a “private option,” in contrast with Washington’s current debate over a “public option” — and allow non-governmental entities to service the ISS (along with the ongoing Russian Soyuz program) while NASA works toward a long-term goal of putting people back on the Moon and going to Mars. It’s part of a so-called “flexible path,” one of the options the panel presented to NASA.
There’s a price tag even if part of NASA’s mission is surrendered to private contractors, of course. The panel recommended plumping NASA’s budget by $3 billion per year to help meet even the scaled-back goals its members saw as realistic. In their vision, the space agency would also pick alternate targets that might make for easier landings, such as the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, or large asteroids like Ceres.
However blunt and rational their assessments, it’s clear that the Augustine panel — named for chairman Norman Augustine, a former Under Secretary of the Army and an aerospace businessman — is optimistic that America’s future does include some kind of manned space program, as evinced by the title of their final report: “Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation.”
The full text of the report can be downloaded here.