Countdown begins for NASA's uncertain future

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

Is America's space effort due for a major course correction? Or is staying the course and sticking with NASA's five-year-old plan to return to the moon the best strategy?

In the wake of an independent panel's report on future spaceflight, the answers to those big questions about the nation's next giant leap ... or smaller step ... in outer space are now being debated in the White House and on Capitol Hill. And although projecting the outcome is murky business at best, the countdown is ticking down toward multibillion-dollar decisions that need to be made.

In short, the gearheads have had their say. Now it's up to the politicians.

If it were up to the gearheads — that is, the review panel headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine — the space effort would likely be in for an extreme makeover. Although their mission was only to lay out the options for future exploration, rather than recommend which option to take, the way the options were framed in their 155-page report suggested a dramatically different path for NASA:

• The space agency would give more consideration to buying rides into low Earth orbit on other people's spaceships, and give more thought to its own Ares I rocket project, which went through a largely successful test flight last week.
  
  
• The International Space Station and the space shuttle fleet, which a now-departed NASA chief once said were serious mistakes, would be given a reprieve — and the station would remain America's main base in space for the next decade.

• The long-term goal of exploration would shift from a high-tech replay of the Apollo moon effort to an incremental program with different, lower-gravity destinations, such as near-Earth asteroids or Martian moons.

"We have identified, I think, a relatively new approach ... to conducting a spaceflight program somewhat different than what's in the current plan," Augustine told reporters when the final report was released on Oct. 22.

That wasn't necessarily the takeaway for the politicians, however. In Congress, the influential players in space policy tend to come from places where the jobs are. The prevailing view among those player was that $3 billion a year in additional funding would fix what ails the current space program, and that no further course correction was necessary.

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U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson — a Florida Democrat who flew on the space shuttle and helped persuade President Barack Obama to give NASA's top spot to his former mission commander, Charles Bolden — said the president assured him "NASA will get enough money to do what it does best: go explore the heavens."

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — an Arizona Democrat who is married to an astronaut and chairs the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee — said the report confirmed her view that the Ares rocket project and other aspects of NASA's Constellation program were "well-managed" and "executable" as long as enough resources were provided.

Giffords cited last week's Ares I-X prototype test flight as further confirmation that NASA was "on track with its human space exploration program."

So should NASA stay the course, or change course?

'Fertile ground for disagreement'
"If what was wanted out of the Augustine exercise was clarity, we didn't get it," said John Logsdon, a space policy expert at George Washington University. "In the process of arriving at and analyzing the various options, the committee created fertile ground for disagreement."

However, the report did deliver at least three important conclusions that are largely beyond dispute, Logsdon told msnbc.com. The first conclusion? "We got the statement that 'the emperor has no clothes,'" he said. "The program that was being carried out could not be successful with the budget profile that was assigned to it."

NASA currently receives about $18 billion per year, or roughly 0.5 percent of the total federal budget. But the Augustine panel estimated that the space agency's plan to return to the moon by 2020 would cost at least $145 billion, which is $45 billion more than originally projected. At the same time, the amount budgeted for space exploration has actually been below the original projections. That's what led the committee to say NASA was on an "unsustainable trajectory."

Logsdon said the report also made clear that NASA's space shuttles couldn't safely finish up their remaining missions by next October as scheduled, and that the schedule would likely have to be stretched out into 2011. And the third point was that "it makes no sense to shut down the space station after five years of operation," even though NASA's current plan calls for quitting the orbital outpost in 2015.

The key point of disagreement focuses on where NASA goes next, and how it gets there.

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