NASA and President Barack Obama’s decision to virtually cancel Nasa’s moon program is widely seen as a great set back by the scientific community and those whose livelihoods depend on it. Obama’s 2011 budget plan, announced on Monday, aborts a symbolic but expensive lunar programme and spends $6 billion over five years to turn over space transportation to commercial companies.
The President’s request for NASA to cut the Constellation Programme effectively cancels a five-year, $9 billion effort to build new Orion spacecraft and Ares rockets. One legislator called the plan a “death march” for human space flight. But some astronauts and other experts have said that the Constellation program, begun under former President George W. Bush to return humans to the moon, was too slow and wasteful.
The space agency’s budget would grow to $19 billion in 2011 under the proposed budget released on Monday, with an emphasis on science and less spent on space exploration. “What this does is open up (space) for more people to be going more places in a way that is not on the back of the taxpayers,” NASA’s deputy administrator, Lori Garver, told reporters. “The president’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of US human space flight,” said Senator Richard Shelby, the senior Republican on the appropriations subcommittee handling NASA funding. “Congress cannot and will not sit back and watch the reckless abandonment of sound principles, a proven track record, a steady path to success, and the destruction of our human space flight program,” said Shelby of Alabama, whose state is home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Florida Senator Bill Nelson has also promised to fight efforts to cut back NASA operations.
NASA chief Charles Bolden too was greatly disappointed. “To people who are working on these programs, this is like a death in the family,” an emotional Bolden told reporters Tuesday, choking up at times. “Everybody needs to understand that and we need to give them time to grieve and then we need to give them time to recover.”
The new budget extends operations at the International Space Station past its planned retirement date of 2016, suggesting such additions as inflatable space habitats. Obama’s proposal hands over more space operations to the commercial sector, saying it will create thousands of new jobs and hold costs down. Bolden said that he and senior White House officials expect to spend the upcoming months crafting a new overarching goal for NASA, one which is focused on developing the technologies and capabilities for sending humans beyond low Earth orbit once more. Under Obama’s proposed budget request, NASA would receive $6 billion a year for five years to support commercial spacecraft development.
Doug Cooke, NASA’s associate administrator for space exploration, said “NASA must remain focused as the Constellation program closes down and shifts into a new phase of human spaceflight.”
President Obama’s decision to scrap NASA’s back-to-the-moon program created an outrage in places like Huntsville, where jobs depend on a return lunar trip. There are 2,500 people working at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville on the $100 billion moon project, dubbed Constellation. Those jobs aren’t in any immediate danger because Congress still must approve Obama’s budget proposal. The Constellation program includes the construction of two types of rockets and a crew capsule. The plan, however, has been criticized for being expensive and based on existing technologies.