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.