WASHINGTON — NASA’s plan to scrap the Constellation program took another round of criticism and questioning in a House committee hearing Wednesday, this time from a skeptical set of congressmen, as well as former astronauts Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan, who were there to testify about NASA’s 2011 budget.
Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, made it clear he does not support NASA’s plan,which will put direct oversight of human spaceflight into the hands of private industry.
“We (Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and I) have come to the unanimous conclusion that this budget proposal presents no challenges, has no focus and in fact is a blueprint for a mission to ‘nowhere,’” Cernan said in his written testimony before the House Committee on Science and Technology.
Committee Chairman Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., told NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Jr., who was on hand to testify about the viability of the proposed budget, that the “burden of proof” rested on NASA to show that terminating Constellation is the best course of action.
“It does no good to cancel a program that the administration characterizes as ‘unexecutable,’ if that program is simply replaced with a new plan that can’t be executed either,” he said.
Critics abounded from both parties, making clear their hesitance to trust industry with the future of human spaceflight, as well as their desire to see a revised budget plan sooner rather than later.
“It has now been nearly four months since the administration proposed radical changes to NASA’s human spaceflight and exploration programs,” said Ralph Hall, R-Tex., the ranking member of the committee. “From the very beginning it was clear that NASA’s proposal lacked the sufficient detail that Congress would need to determine whether it was a credible plan. Yet, in spite of our best efforts to obtain more information from NASA this situation has not improved.”
Bolden acknowledged the pending budget revisions were behind schedule, but said he wants to make sure the budget is feasible before submitting it.
“I admit we are late, and we started out late, but we are trying to catch up,” Bolden said. Quoting his NASA predecessor Michael D. Griffin, Bolden said, “late is ugly until you launch. Wrong is ugly forever.”
Bolden defended his position that private industry will be able to handle the workload that NASA wants to off-load.
“I have 18,000 civil servants in NASA and hundreds of thousands of employees for whom I am responsible but I don’t write their check. They work for Boeing, Lockheed, ATK, Orbital, Sierra Nevada. All these companies that say they can continue to do what they have been doing for us for 50 years, I’m just asking them to do it and not make me buy the vehicle. Let me lease it from them,” he said.
Bolden said commercial providers have told him it would take three years to create a vehicle with acceptable human ratings standards after a contract is signed.
A. Thomas Young, a former Lockheed Martin executive and retired director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, testified that the administration should not abandon the “proven methodology” that NASA has used over the years to advance space exploration.
“My judgment is that implementation of the proposed human spaceflight program will be devastating to NASA, human spaceflight and the U.S. space program,” he said.
Young said the Ares I rocket and the Orion crew vehicle that were being developed within Constellation were the most “appropriate option” to replace the Space Shuttle program, which will be retired later this year after two more launches.
American astronauts are expected to hitch future rides to the International Space Station with the Russians on their Soyuz rockets, which will cost approximately $50-57 million per seat.
NASA has already put $10.3 billion into the Constellation program, and will likely have to pay $2.5 billion to close out the project.
Bolden said NASA will continue to fund Constellation throughout FY 2010.