NASA worries about spaceflight gap

Money changes everything
Griffin recently called the gap "unseemly," but he has few options with the budgets NASA has been given by the White House and Congress since President Bush first announced plans to return to the moon three years ago. NASA has put the cost of returning to the moon at $104 billion, although the General Accounting Office puts it at $122 billion through 2018.

"Space is not only not a high priority, it's hard to keep it on the radar screen for the White House right now," Lambright said.

NASA had hoped to have the first piloted Orion flight as early as 2012. That would be a low-orbit test flight. But that goal was pushed back to 2014 when NASA had to raid the Orion development fund to fill in a $3 billion shortfall for finishing space station construction and ending the shuttle program. Repairs to NASA buildings damaged by Hurricane Katrina also siphoned off money.

Space agency officials said the 2007 budget would remove more than $500 million from what NASA had budgeted for developing the new spacecraft, pushing the first manned flight of Orion into March 2015. A moon landing is scheduled for no later than 2020.

Betting on entrepreneurs
NASA is encouraging the development of private-sector spacecraft as one option for closing the gap. The agency has allocated almost $500 million between now and 2010 to support California-based SpaceX and Oklahoma-based Rocketplane Kistler as they develop new spacecraft that could bring supplies and crews to the space station. The agency recently said the two companies were on schedule for their first flights by 2010.

Two other companies, Virginia-based Transformational Space and the Canadian-American Planetspace venture, are getting free advice from NASA on their own spaceship development efforts.

NASA's Griffin has characterized the program as a gamble on the viability of the space industry's rising entrepreneurial sector. "If it doesn’t work, I’ve frankly made the wrong bet … with a good amount of money that we could have used for other purposes if the entrepreneurial sector is, in fact, not able to step up," he told Space.com last August.

Lawmakers seek more funding
U.S. Sens. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, this month proposed increasing NASA's funding by $1 billion. Mikulski also called for a space summit between Congress and the White House to raise the profile of NASA's budget needs.

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Nelson said the gap could be narrowed to three years if NASA were to get an extra $400 million above the 2008 budget request and an extra $800 million each in 2009 and 2010. NASA's budget request for 2008 is $17.3 billion.

During the last gap in spaceflight, which ended in 1981, the agency had a brain drain in which experienced engineers and technicians left for other opportunities and "essentially, the manned space program went off the radar screen," Lambright said.

"When you don't fly for four or more years, people become stale," Griffin said recently. "Very good people often move into other enterprises where there is more action. Facilities degrade. It's not a good thing."

This report was supplemented by MSNBC.com.

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