WASHINGTON – NASA should abandon plans to return to the moon – and it should also halt efforts for human exploration of Mars, a special panel commissioned by the White House said on Thursday.
That’s because the human space flight program is unsustainable without additional funds, said a 10-member committee commissioned by President Barack Obama to review the current program and offer alternatives in its 155-page findings.
“The human space flight program that the United States is currently pursuing is one that is on an unsustainable trajectory,” said Norman Augustine, the review committee’s chairman and a former aerospace executive. “We say that because of a mismatch between the scope of the program and the funds to support the program.”
This is the first major look at the future of the space program since after the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, when former President George W. Bush set a new direction for NASA. Those goals included returning to the moon and sending astronauts to Mars.
Under the 2010 fiscal year budget, though, the report confirms that human exploration beyond the lower-Earth orbit is not viable.
“Meaningful human exploration is possible under a less constrained budget,” the report states, “increasing annual expenditures by approximately $3 billion in real purchasing power above the fiscal year 2010 budget.”
The panel also said it’s worried about the size of the rockets NASA is currently building.
The agency should be concentrating on bigger rockets, the panel members said, because commercial services will soon be available that could be competitively bid out to aerospace companies at a lower cost than could be achieved by government.
The committee advocates that the space program halt production on the Ares I rocket it is developing because it will take too long to build. The Ares primary task is to take astronauts back and forth between Earth and the space station. The projected completion date is 2017; panel members believe private companies could get the job done faster.
Although Augustine said that Mars is the clear goal of the human space flight, safety and financial reasons prevent the committee from recommending going straight to that planet. Additional funds are also required to continue to utilize the international space station by funding science and engineering. The technology program has been neglected and has atrophied in the past few years, Augustine said.
When asked about conveying the importance of science and space exploration to the public, Augustine shared a personal experience and offered benefits that are both tangible and less concrete.
“I remember well the impact that Neil (Armstrong) and Buzz (Aldrin) had when they landed in the midst of the Vietnam War on the moon, it was a great inspiration,” he said. “I talked to so many people who say the reason I am an engineer today, or scientist, is because of the space program. I think there are intangibles.”