A 10-member committee formed by President Obama to assess NASA’s plans for its human spaceflight program in the coming years has delivered its verdict. In short: Scale back, or spend more.
The Augustine Commission (so named because it’s led by retired aerospace exec Norman Augustine) delivered an executive summary of its report on Tuesday of this week, and it wasn’t kind to the widely publicized ambitions of sending men back to the Moon and on to Mars in the near future. There are more realistic options for the amount of money NASA plans to spend, the commission declared.
The commission’s full report will be delivered later this month.
Washington Post science writer and blogger Joel Achenbach summed it up this way in the paper’s Wednesday edition:
“Don’t try to put astronauts on Mars yet — too hard, too costly. Go to the Moon — maybe. Or build rockets that could zip around the inner solar system, visiting asteroids, maybe a Martian Moon. Keep the international space station going until 2020 rather than crash it into the Pacific in 2016. Help underwrite commercial spaceflight the same way the United States gave the airline business a boost in the 1920s with airmail.
“And spend more money on space.”
The commission wasn’t against the idea of human space flight, reports Achenbach, but did say that program “appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory.” At the same time, it “clearly endorsed the goal of a robust human spaceflight program and all but pleaded on behalf of” NASA.
However, NASA’s $18 billion annual budget isn’t sufficient to meet the goal of “a space exploration program that will be a source of pride for the nation,” the commission reported, estimating it would take another $3 billion a year to accomplish that, the Post article said.
An article on Wired.com notes that among other assessments, the commission judged the gap between the retirement of the Space Shuttle next year and the implementation of the Constellation Program to return NASA astronauts to space in 2017 was too long — but they couldn’t identify any “credible approach” that could shorten that gap to less than six years.
The commission studied a number of options for moving ahead with manned space flight, the Wired article noted, and the one that received the greatest support by commissioners was what they called the “Flexible Path.” That would put people in space, but landing on the Moon or Mars wouldn’t be goals; instead, astronauts would travel to and explore smaller bodies, such as the asteroids or Phobos and Deimos, the Moons of Mars.
Wired quoted the report as saying: “We would learn how to live and work in space, to visit small bodies, and to work with robotic probes on the planetary surface. It would provide the public and other stakeholders with a series of interesting ‘firsts’ to keep them engaged and supportive. Most important, because the path is flexible, it would allow many different options as exploration progresses, including a return to the Moon’s surface, or a continuation to the surface of Mars.”