Two halves of NASA merging at half-century

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

As NASA marks 50 years of space exploration on Wednesday, it’s also looking for bold new ways to get humans and robots working together for the next 50 years on the final frontier.

Over the past half-century, robotic and human exploration have been put in separate pigeonholes — one for moonwalkers, another for Mars landers. But if NASA’s vision for the future pans out, your children won’t be able to think about how astronauts do their work without remembering their trusty robotic sidekicks as well.

NASA's plans to fix the Hubble Space Telescope, finish the international space station and eventually return to the moon provide prime examples of the challenges facing NASA 50 years after its founding — as well as the strategies to meet them in the next half-century.

Right now, NASA's most pressing problem is figuring out how to bridge the gap between the space shuttle fleet's scheduled retirement in 2010 and the expected debut of a new spaceship for human spaceflight by 2015. The current plan calls for the space agency to rely on other countries and private companies for space station resupply during the five-year gap, although the next president may want NASA to delay the shuttles' retirement instead.

If you broaden the focus from five years to 50 years, the issues shift to the bigger picture: Will NASA be a scientific agency, sending out robotic probes to unlock the secrets of the solar system and beyond? Or will it devote more of its resources to exploration, following a step-by-step campaign to station humans on the moon?

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin argues that the agency has to continue to do both.

"Our robotic science program is about scientific discovery," he told msnbc.com in a July interview. "That's crucially important, and you'll never get me to say otherwise. But human spaceflight is about expanding the range of human interaction, and I think that also is crucially important. They are not the same thing. ... NASA has to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time."

Robots vs. humans?
To this day, scientists and policy experts debate which side of NASA — robots or humans — has provided the most bang for the buck. Roughly 60 percent of NASA's $17.3 billion budget went to manned exploration this year, with another 30 percent going to space science and the rest divvied up between aeronautics, education and other categories.

Griffin noted that the budget has broken down that way for four decades.

"That represents, if you will, a long-term consensus of what policymakers believe is the relative priority. And I think that's about right," he told msnbc.com during a July interview.

However, the line between the human spaceflight program and the space science program is getting fuzzier: The Hubble repair mission, for example, was added to the shuttle flight schedule after the public and lawmakers protested NASA's plans to just let the telescope fade away. This week, the mission was delayed until early next year, due to a new Hubble glitch that will require a fresh round of mission planning.

Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate, said NASA's decision to send the space shuttle on a service call was a godsend. "This is one last gift from the space shuttle program to Hubble," Weiler told reporters last month at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

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