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Posted on 04/21/2010 9:00:46 AM PDT by anymouse
In a speech to political allies gathered at Cape Canaveral last week, President Obama laid out his vision for America's space program. Under the Obama plan, NASA will spend $100 billion on human spaceflight over the next 10 years in order to accomplish nothing.
Of course, that's not how Mr. Obama phrased it. But beneath the President's flowery rhetoric, that's how things add up.
Here's the background. In 2004, the Bush administration launched a program called Constellation to develop a set of flight systems, including the Orion crew capsule and the Ares 1 and Ares 5 medium and heavy lift boosters, that together would allow astronauts to return to the Moon by 2020, and then fly to destinations beyond.
Under the plan announced by Obama, almost all of this will be scrapped. The only thing preserved out of the past six years and $9 billion worth of effort will be a version of the Orion capsule - but one so purposely stripped down that it will only be useful as a lifeboat for bringing astronauts down from the space station, not as a craft capable of providing a ride up to orbit.
With the Space Shuttle program set to sunset in the near future, what this means is that the only way Americans will be able even to reach low Earth orbit will be as passengers on Russian launchers, with tickets priced at the Kremlin's discretion. In other words, instead of flying astronauts from the Earth to the Moon, our human spaceflight program will become a vehicle for transporting cash from Washington to Moscow.
The most amazing thing about Obama's speech, however, was its cognitive dissonance. The President desperately tried to spin the abandonment of the Moon program not as a retreat, but as a daring advance. We've been to the Moon before, he declared, and so we have. There's a lot more of space to explore; we should set our sights on points beyond, to the near Earth asteroids, and reach for Mars. Indeed, we can and should.
But the President's plan makes no provision for actually doing so. Instead, he proposes to simply stall.
So, for example, as the first milestone in his allegedly daring program of exploration, Obama called for sending a crew to a near Earth asteroid by 2025.
Such a flight is certainly achievable. To do an asteroid mission, all that is required is a launch vehicle such as the Ares 5, a crew capsule (such as the Orion), and a habitation module similar to that employed on the space station. Had Obama not canceled the Ares 5, we could have used it to perform an asteroid mission by 2016. But the President, while calling for such a flight, actually is terminating the programs that would make it possible.
The same holds true with the question of reaching Mars. From a technical point of view, we are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send men to the moon in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy made his speech committing us to that goal - and we were there eight years later. With Kennedy-like commitment, we could have astronauts on the Red Planet within a decade. Yet Obama chose to set that goal for the 2040s, a timeline so hazy as to not require him to actually do anything to realize it.
The bottom line: Under the Obama plan, NASA will be able to send astronauts anywhere it likes, provided that its effort to do so begins after he leaves office. The President's science adviser, John Holdren, attempts to justify this expensive ($10 billion per year) stalling game by claiming that the pause in flight programs will allow us to develop more advanced technologies that will make everything much more achievable later.
This is false to the core. We already know how to build heavy-lift boosters - we flew our first, the Saturn 5, in 1967. With current in-space propulsion technology, we can do a round-trip mission to a near-Earth asteroid or a one-way transit to Mars in six months - a time no greater than a standard crew shift on the space station.
Holdren claims that he wants to develop a new electrically powered space thruster to speed up such trips. But without gigantic space nuclear power reactors to provide them with juice, such thrusters are useless, and the administration has no intention of developing such reactors. So far from enabling a quick trip to Mars, the unnecessary futuristic electric thruster concept simply provides an excuse for not flying anywhere at all.
The American people want and deserve a space program that really is going somewhere. To offer that, Obama needs to stop the fakery. That means a program whose effort will commence not in some future administration, but in his own; one whose goal is not Mars in our dreams, but Mars in our time.
Zubrin, an aerospace engineer, is president of the Mars Society and author of "The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must."
Kevin, you can attest to Dr. Zubrin’s credibility. How about a ping for the space list.
Obama misses the Chicago bath houses? hah!
Nothing comes out of 0bama’s mouth except lies and obfuscation.
The creep hates American achievement.
Zubrin down, George Noory equivocal, next shoe to drop will be Richard Hoagland’s multi-dimensional physics.
Zero is a one termer.
NASA is nothing more than a tool for perpetuating union make work jobs and anti-capitalist environmental dimwits.
Its a crying shame that ALL Future US astronauts has to hitch a ride from the commie Russians is a TOTAL NATIONAL DISGRACE and should be an impeachable offense!!
Defund NASA?
Uh...
NO.
In the strongest terms.
Why?
The nations that lead on the frontiers, dictate the course of human history.
Restore NASA in full to what it’s mission is.
Bump what you said
Just the title is awesome though.
Zubrin is eccentric but he knows this stuff.
Restore NASA in full to what it’s mission is.You mean was.
The nations that lead on the frontiers, dictate the course of human history.
LOL! Oh. frontiers like man made global warming, man made holes in the ozone, greenhouse gas emissions?...Do you even know that was all a product of NASA? NASA is the birthplace of the global warming hysteria
We don't have the money to piss away at some frigg'n "international space station" with nothing to show for it except to be told how evil we are for driving SUVs.
Defund NASA and defund it NOW!
Your seriously ignorant of the big picture of what NASA accomplishes for this nation.
Hint...
Jim Hansen and climate studies do not define the agency.
The astronauts still do, exploration of the solar system still does, and that human presence beyond earth still does. Many of them are US military pilots by the way.
Nations that shrink from the frontiers.. stagnate and die.
Also your battle cry of “defund” is never going to happen. Never. THere is no political reality to that cause. It won’t happen. The fight is to keep NASA in the human exploration game.
By the way, we could stop spending all NASA funds tomorrow.
It wouldn’t make much of an impact... It’s one half of one penny on federal discretionary spending.
So small it wouldn’t matter at all or be noticed.
One half of one penny.
So your view of NASA is terribly incorrect, and your cry to “defund now” is useless rhetoric in the big picture even if it were to happen.
Some people are anti-science or humans achieving things. AQ types, the left, and some on the far right. They range from dangerous to kooks.
Zubrin nails it.
Not only that, but after spending $100 billion, there’ll be a basis for some political imbecile in the future to claim “we gave them the money, they took us nowhere. Time to call space a failure and climb back into the womb, where there are so many important problems to solve.”
There is no limit to the amount of money that can be wasted to produce no result. Space development’s past is testimony to that. NLS/ALS (80s and 90s Saturn-class launch systems), Shuttle C (cargo shuttle), X-30/NASP (National Aerospace Plane), Orbital Space Plane, to name a few.
The problem isn’t technology, it’s organization. When a course is chosen, and supported with the money it takes to actually make it work, the impossible becomes possible. Apollo was a lot cheaper than the Mission to Nowhere that Zero is proposing.
If the money Pres. Zilch is promising were spent properly, we could put a base on the Moon _and_ build the infrastructure to support it (data relay satellites around the Moon, in-situ resource utilization, etc.) Coincidentally, we’d be preparing ourselves for the missions he’s talking about, but kicked down the road beyond any point of accountability for himself.
I know.
Sometimes there are things that transcend politics.
A bigger picture. I think it is easy for people to paint themselves into a corner eventually arguing to extremes. The views can become myopic and thinking can becoming utterly inflexible to any further information.
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