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Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Enterprise is key in space exploration
Space travel as depicted in TV's "Star Trek" reruns might be more likely to occur one day with President Obama's plans to let private industry take the lead in U.S. manned-flight efforts.

 

President Obama’s decision not to spend any more money on a rocket program to return Americans to the moon isn’t a stab to the heart of all those who crave the day when space travel as depicted in Star Trek reruns becomes reality.
 
The course Obama is plotting could still take us there. It’s just that Obama, ever the pragmatist, has decided there is a better, less expensive way. In this economy, that would be wise. But it will be hard to convince lawmakers who fear the new direction will cost their constituents jobs.
 
Obama has decided to shut down the over-budget Constellation program, which began after President George W. Bush set a goal six years ago to return to the moon by 2020 and later put a man on Mars. From the beginning, the cost was daunting. More than $9 billion has been spent, but the project keeps getting further and further behind schedule.
 
An advisory panel of experts appointed by Obama last year has recommended scrapping America’s traditional model for space exploration. Instead, NASA would contract with private companies to develop vehicles and conduct missions with the space agency providing oversight.
 
In addition to Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, some new companies are ready to take advantage of the new model, including Blue Origin, a space tourism company founded by Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos; Space Exploration Technologies, headed by PayPal founder Elon Musk; and Sierra Nevada Corp., which designs and makes spacecraft components.
 
To get there from here, Obama wants to shut down Constellation, which will mean spending $2.5 million to pay off the companies building the Ares I and Ares V rockets. He also wants to increase NASA’s current annual budget of nearly $19 billion by $6 billion over five years, which would allow the private contracts.
 
But significant savings would be achieved by ending the expensive Constellation program and proceeding with plans to mothball the 29-year-old space-shuttle fleet this year. That should be done; each launch of an ancient shuttle has engineers, not to mention crew members’ families, holding their breath in worry.
 
The plan five years ago was for a next-generation vehicle to be available soon after the shuttles were retired. Without shuttles, Americans will have to hitch a ride with the Russians to the International Space Station. But there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, the ISS is supposed to foster international cooperation.
 
In fact, one wonders why Obama, who has made improved foreign relations one of his signature goals, didn’t take an international, rather that entrepreneurial, approach to building an advanced spacecraft. China and Japan, with fledgling space programs, might have enlisted.
 
And it might not be any worse for the president to sell that idea to Congress than it will be to get it to go along with his privatization plans. Congressmen in Florida, Alabama, and Texas vow to fight the loss of thousands of jobs in those states related to NASA’s current manned-flight programs.
 
Maybe it’s Mission Impossible reruns, rather than Star Trek, that Obama will need to watch for inspiration in this fight.
Posted by Inquirer Editorial Board @ 4:00 AM  Permalink | Post a comment
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