We’ll know more when Obama presents his 2011 budget on Monday, but it appears that the Vision for Space Exploration (pdf) is doomed and that NASA’s Constellation program won’t survive intact. That doesn’t mean that the U.S. is done with space exploration or even with manned space exploration, but changes and delays are in store.
You can read aggregations of this news from Knight Science Journalism Tracker, stories from Space.com here and here, or an earlier take by the NYT here. I won’t rehash it all, but most of the news comes from anonymous sources and early versions of the report, so there’s a lot of uncertainty. There seems to be agreement that the plans for a return to the Moon by 2020 are off, that the International Space Station’s life will be extended until around 2020, and that the shuttles will be still be retired, as planned, this year. Everyone seems to agree that some of the new craft design and construction will be handed over to industry – an approach supported, in general, by some of the voices at NASAwatch.com and elsewhere. Loud dissenting voices come from former NASA head Mike Griffin and congressmen and women from Texas and Florida, which house NASA centers.
I’m disappointed about the delay or disappearance of the Moon mission (though, like many, I suspected it would happen). There are many proponents who rightfully point out how much more science you can get for your money through unmanned than through manned exploration. That’s true, but no matter how good the rovers become, there’s no substitute for having a trained scientist conducting fieldwork, and a long-term Moon base would undoubtedly have yielded immense scientific returns. However, as the Augustine Commission (pdf) found, we weren’t achieving what we needed with the money NASA was given, so something had to change. The early news reports suggest that science at NASA as a whole will remain well funded, and may even prosper, under the new budget. I'll revisit this when we have more real information.
0 comments:
Post a Comment