American human spaceflight is at a turning point, and its future looks a bit shaky. The space shuttle is soon to retire, the replacement moon- and Mars-bound Constellation is yet to get off the ground, and the next president could drastically redefine the plan for NASA.
A new report released today by the Space, Policy and Society Research Group at MIT, based on a two-year independent review, offers recommendations for the future of this country's human spaceflight program. Though the review panel has some sharp criticisms of NASA's current direction, it also found cause for hope.
"Our major recommendation is that the Obama administration should rethink the Bush plan," said MIT technology historian David Mindell, who led the review. "The problem with the current plan is that it's overambitious and underfunded and not really thought through. Our recommendation is that the Obama team issue a new policy."
The review team, made up of historians, engineers, policy analysts, and even a former astronaut, recently met with members of Obama's transition team and politicians on Capitol Hill. In general, the politicians expressed uncertainty about how to carry the space program forward, but definite enthusiasm for its future, Mindell said.
NASA's current plan, outlined by President Bush in 2004 under his "Vision for Space Exploration," is to get humans back to the moon and then on to Mars with the Constellation program, and to complete the International Space Station and retire the space shuttle by 2010.
These goals are unattainable with NASA's current budget, the review team concluded.
"The catch phrase has been 'too much with too little' – that's from the Columbia accident report," Mindell told Wired.com. "The Bush plan has never been funded with the degree it was supposed to. We’re not trying to make a case that NASA’s budget needs to be doubled, because that's just not viable in this environment. But going on the path they're going on is going to kill people, simple as that."
Either NASA must get more money, the agency's goals must be scaled down, or serious safety risks will be inevitable, the review team found.
The team also recommended more international collaboration, especially with nations such as China and India whose human space programs are ramping up.
"The current plan is very much the U.S. goes it all by itself," Mindell said. "We'll meet you on the moon. But we stress that not just international cooperation, but U.S. leadership, in the sense of really being a country that brings other countries along, is much more suited to U.S. interests."
And in the spirit of cooperation, the United States shouldn't pull out of the space station in 2010, six years ahead of the original planned end date, before the station is fully completed or has had a chance to be used for all the research it was designed for, the report says. Other countries that have invested significantly in the space station program would be left in the lurch, and international partnerships could be jeopardized.
The team also advocates a better balance between manned and robotic missions. There are some situations where sending a human is best, both scientifically and for the purpose of exploration and national pride. But there are other times when robots can accomplish the same thing more safely and cheaply.
"I think that the human programs right now are 100 percent human programs," Mindell said. "They should be mixes of human and robotic. For example, if you look at the current programs, the space shuttle can’t fly automated. That’s ridiculous. If it could, we could be sending heavy cargoes up with the shuttle and sending people on a safer system."
All this criticism can sound a bit dire. Plus, the public's love affair with the space program seems to have waned since the glory days of Apollo. But Mindell insists the future is still bright for NASA.
"I think there's a lot of new interest in space," he said. "NASA's building new hardware for the first time in a generation. Students are going into aerospace engineering in a way they weren't five years ago. There is a kind of new space age coming, and it's all very exciting."
See Also:
- Obama Delivers Space Policy Speech in Florida
- House Democrats Plan Attack on NASA's Mars Mission
- Obama Pits Human Space Exploration Against Education
- Americans Find Out NASA Is Going Back to the Moon
Image: NASA
