An Unsure Future
Last Monday, February 1st, the White House unveiled their 2010-2011 budget request to Congress. Within that request, were some very major changes in NASA’s mission and direction. Among these changes: cancellation of the Constellation Program leaving the United States with no successor to the Space Shuttle after its retirement this year, directing NASA to use commercially built and operated rockets to reach Low Earth Orbit, directing NASA to pursue “new technologies” to be used on a future heavy lift rocket yet to be defined, and extending use of the International Space Station until 2020 – the only one of these changes I’m in full support of.
When I first heard news of this budget, I was devastated. How can the government just cancel the Constellation Program (which had a very successful first flight just a few months ago) and leave our country with no manned space flight capability after the retirement of the Space Shuttle? Yes, they are going to use commercial companies to get to the ISS (which I do support), but with nothing else really in the works, what do we do after that? How do we get back to the Moon? How do we get to Mars? Yes, the plan seems to be that NASA will research and slowly develop some new heavy lift rocket (though not Ares V as the Constellation Program envisioned), but why start over? What’s so wrong with Constellation? We’re just going to throw it all away and set everything back another decade? Ridiculous!
The space program gives us a national prowess, it gives us national pride. This is something that I don’t think we’ll get with just using commercial companies. Don’t get me wrong, I love SpaceX and other companies like them, and I encourage their use for getting cargo and crew to and from the ISS. But NASA still should be working on a new spacecraft in the mean time to take us beyond Low Earth Orbit – to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. They claim that this is still going to happen, but that is nowhere near certain in this budget. I just don’t see the need to completely cancel Constellation and start over. I think this is bad policy and will only serve to set back the US space program for decades. We will be sitting on the sidelines while China, Russia, and others spread out into the cosmos without us.
I may be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But the current future of NASA and our US space program that I can see is a bleak one. And this leaves me very, very depressed.
Saturday, February 6th, 2010
