Posted on 01/10/2004 12:37:16 PM PST by RightWhale
Officials Confirm Details of Bush's Plan for Sending Humans Back to the Moon, on to Mars
By Lon Rains and Brian Berger, Space News Staff Writers
And Leonard David, Senior Space Writer
posted: 12:30 am ET, 10 January 2004
WASHINGTON – U.S. President George Bush on Wednesday will unveil a bold new plan for the future of NASA that will give the agency the green light to start developing the hardware required to return to the Moon and eventually journey on to Mars, government officials told SPACE.com Friday.
This ambitious new plan will require Congress to approve billions of dollars in new spending and the elimination of other NASA programs, they said. Bush will ask Congress for an additional $800 million for NASA in the 2005 budget request he will submit this month, they said. The plan also calls for 5 percent annual increases in NASA’s budget beyond 2005.
This new direction for the space agency’s human spaceflight program will lead to major changes in NASA’s current priorities, the officials confirmed.
Those changes include retiring the shuttle fleet at the end of the decade and replacing it with a new vehicle, which is now called the Orbital Space Plane (OSP). The OSP soon will be renamed the Crew Exploration Vehicle -- the building block of the spacecraft that will be needed to transport crews to and from the moon early in the next decade.
The Crew Exploration Vehicle would be launched aboard existing expendable rockets such as the Boeing Delta 4 or Lockheed Martin Atlas 5.
Another existing NASA program, Project Prometheus, would continue to be focused on developing nuclear propulsion for interplanetary spacecraft and new long-lasting power sources for future bases.
The primary focus of research on the International Space Station (ISS) will be studies related to the new human spaceflight priorities.
In addition, the ISS partners will be asked to provide additional expendable rockets to deliver astronauts and supplies to the orbiting laboratory as the space shuttle is phased out after delivering the remaining hardware to be assembled as part of the space station.
The officials said this would likely not involve the United States making payments to Russia for Soyuz rockets or Europe for Ariane rockets, but would instead be handled as contributions to the program from the partners.
White House spokesman Allen Abney said that Bush will make a space policy announcement Jan. 14 in Washington, but offered no details about either the substance of the speech or the precise venue.
Details about the venue for the announcement should be available early next week, he said. Abney would not say what that space policy announcement would entail, nor would he confirm reports that Bush signed a new space policy directive in December.
White House confirmation that a space policy announcement was imminent ended months of speculation about the results of an interagency review of space exploration policy begun last year in the wake of the February 2003 loss of shuttle Columbia and her crew.
House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) said in a statement that he is “eager to hear the President's vision for a revived human space flight program” and looks forward to getting the details Jan. 14. “I applaud the President for focusing on this issue at a critical time in the history of the American space program.”
Boehlert said he is convinced the United States needs a new vision for human space flight, but cautioned that budget issues will be of paramount concern to members of his committee and the entire Congress.
Those issues concern Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), a senior member of the Senate appropriations panel that helps set NASA’s budget each year.
In a statement, Mikulski applauded Bush for embracing a bold agenda for space, but cautioned there are many questions to be answered in the months ahead, including what will the initiative cost and is it the best investment in science the nation can make.
Rep. Bart Gordon, (D-Tenn.), who has been nominated to serve as ranking minority member of the House Science Committee once Congress returns Jan. 20, said in a statement that he supports a return to the moon. He hailed the anticipated announcement as “a welcome direction for a program that has drifted in the decades since Apollo last visited the moon.”
News of the announcement was also greeted with enthusiasm by at least two former U.S. government officials closely involved in the first President George Bush’s proposed space exploration initiative.
Michael Griffin, who served as NASA’s associate administrator for exploration under the first President Bush, called word of the announcement “tremendously welcome news.”
“The next thing that has to happen is there has to be budgetary support in 2005 — substantial budget support,” he said. “The initial indications are there is, but that’s ultimately a matter for the Congress to decide.”
Griffin said bipartisan support is critical. “The biggest pitfall the last time around was a lack of bi-partisan consensus,” he said. “We need to get that this time and we need to not fall into the $400 billion cost trap again.”
Griffin said the new policy direction is momentous in that it would establish the U.S. as a true spacefaring nation much in the same way that the U.S. decided long ago to become a seafaring nation. “We don’t debate every year whether we should have a navy,” he said.
Courtney Stadd, a White House space policy advisor during the first Bush administration and, until recently, NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe’s chief of staff, said he was very pleased to hear that a bold new direction if forthcoming.
“I’m very proud of this president and very proud of this pending announcement to send humans to the moon and Mars,” said Stadd, who left NASA in 2003 to return to industry. Stadd said those goals will not be achieved without substantial changes inside NASA.
“Organizations that try to be everything to everybody fail,” he said. “The big challenge [for the White House and NASA] is to accommodate the competing political interests while at the same time keeping themselves laser-focused on carrying out what’s going to be a very resource intensive program.”
While the decisions confronting the nation will be anything but easy, the payoff, he said, will be rich.
“The great news in all this is we’ve got a potentially reinvigorated human space flight program,” he said. “At same time, no one should kid themselves that the investment and resources are going to come without attention to what programs can be altered or perhaps in some instances even eliminated.”
NASA’s largest aerospace contractors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, also responded favorably to the news, even though it could entail substantial changes for the space shuttle program and the competition to build the Orbital Space Plane.
As UPI reported, under the new initiative, NASA would move up the timetable for retiring the space shuttle, putting the system out to pasture as soon as the space station no longer needs its services. At the same time, the Orbital Space Plane program, now in competition with Boeing and Lockheed Martin vying to build the multi-billion dollar system, would morph into a commercially-launched Crew Exploration Vehicle.
Ed Meme, a spokesman for Boeing NASA Systems in Houston, said the work the company has done to date on the Orbital Space Plane would not be all for naught, even if NASA does change directions somewhat.
“Our approach with OSP has been to designing a system that cannot only service the station but can go beyond low Earth orbit,” Meme said.
Meme also pointed out that an Orbital Space Plane request for proposal due out late last year still has not been released. He said Boeing anticipates that any changes to the program would be reflected in the forthcoming solicitation.
Michael Coats, vice president of Advanced Space Transportation at the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co., Denver, agreed that work done so far on Orbital Space Plane would apply to any lunar transport system NASA might want.
Coats, a former shuttle commander, was ecstatic that a bold new direction appears to be in the offing, calling it “a big morale boost” even in light of the successful Jan. 3 landing of the Spirit Mars rover the company helped build.
“For the first time in 30 years the president is expected to say, ‘here’s where we want you to go and oh by the way, we are going to put some money behind it’,” Coats said.
A lack of vision for NASA was cited as a contributing cause of the Feb. 1, 2003 loss of shuttle Columbia. With no rudder to steer the space agency's course in the long term, certain cultural deficiencies crept in and set up the conditions that allowed the shuttle tragedy to take place.
It was soon after the accident that Bush, under the leadership of Vice President Dick Cheney, assembled a team to look at the nation's space policy and provide a roadmap that will lead to the sweeping changes expected to be announced next week. Details of the plan were first reported by UPI Jan. 8.
Senior Producer Jim Banke contributed to this story from the Cape Canaveral Bureau
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No, not Mars. Those people need to be the first pioneers to attempt a solar landing.
No, not Mars. Those people need to be the first pioneers to attempt a solar landing.
And it will be easy to get them to agree. Tell them they'll be making a night landing!
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