NASA: Has the U.S. given up on space?

Now we know “how low President Obama’s horizons truly are,” said Jeffrey Anderson in National Review Online. With his “plans to scrap funding for voyages to the moon and Mars,” he has shattered any hope that the U.S. will lead the way back into space. The new White House budget eliminates NASA’s $100 billion Constellation program, which was supposed to have returned us to the moon by 2020. Instead of this daring undertaking, Obama is proposing that NASA stay close to home, focus on unmanned missions, and rely on private industry to ferry astronauts to the space station and develop new technologies for long-distance space flight. Where’s the ambition? asked Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times. By abandoning NASA’s leadership role, we’re practically inviting India, Japan, or China to beat us back to the moon. Obama’s decision to downgrade NASA “has ‘decline’ written all over it.”

Not at all, said The New York Times in an editorial. Obama hasn’t ruled out “ambitious journeys” to Mars and beyond; he just wants NASA to stop relying on the clumsy, big-rocket technology developed in the 1960s and ’70s. Instead, he proposes that the space agency use its funding to develop advanced new propulsion systems that could enable a mission to reach Mars in weeks instead of months; life-support systems that could operate indefinitely without resupply; and orbiting depots that could refuel rockets outside the Earth’s atmosphere, so they could lift off with less weight and less fuel. That’s where the private sector comes in, said Peter Diamandis in HuffingtonPost.com. Entrepreneurs “routinely take technologies pioneered by the government and turn them into cheap, reliable, and robust industries.” It’s happened with computers, the Internet, and aviation. “It’s time that it happen in space.”

NASA once sent me to the moon, said Buzz Aldrin, also in HuffingtonPost.com, but that era is over. The plan to build a base on the moon—announced by President George W. Bush in 2004—was mostly talk, and was never realistically funded. In this budget-conscious new era, it makes far more sense for NASA to encourage entrepreneurs and commercial interests to find the means, and the money, to extend our reach into the cosmos. It’s the only realistic chance for “you or your children or your grandkids” to someday see the Earth from space.

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