Spacemens Luck

 

Where Tom Corbett, Captain Video, CMDR Corry and Other Spacemen Still Live

This Picture of a Classic Rocketship of the 1950s helped give me a dream of manned space travel.

If you haven’t heard already NASA’s mission is no longer manned space travel. With the decision to cancel the Constellation program there is no longer a plan for manned space flight for the United States.

NASA’s Project Constellation, was a plan to send human explorers back to the Moon by 2020, and then onward to Mars and other destinations in the Solar System.

Canceling NASA’s Moon-bound Constellation program is expected to cost the U.S. space agency $2.5 billion in contract termination liability and other closeout costs over the next two years. Add to that the $9 billion already spent developing the Orion crew vehicle and Ares rockets the total cost for a program that will never be completed is over $11.5 billion. All for nothing.

Where is a JFK when you need one?

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon… (interrupted by applause) we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.”

The closest to a vision we’ve had in the decades since John F. Kennedy is when President Bush announced his tepid vision in 1994 a new space exploration plan that called for replacing the shuttle and returning to the Moon. NASA’s plan was to retire its shuttle fleet in 2010 and build a replacement system that was to be based on existing technology and designed to launch crew and cargo separately. This program was scheduled to send up it’s first manned mission in 2015 at the earliest.

This lack of a dedicated vision for manned space flight was already over a decade late. A full Fifteen years before the Shuttle program was to make it’s last launch, at the end of its program life, NASA should have been planning and putting into place the next generation of manned space ship.

Instead NASA studied the idea. In 2003 when NASA finally got around to putting a plan together, namely the Constellation program with the Orion crew vehicle and Ares rockets, they were already years behind the ball. With a gap of several years between the Shuttle’s last flight (late 2010) and the first availability of the Orion crew vehicle and Ares rockets (2015 at the earliest) we would have been forced to rely on other countries for getting our astrounauts into orbit.

Now after today’s release of the nations budget for 2011 we learn that the only plan for a manned space flight program has been scrapped with no new vision. The only announcement of concern to manned space flight was a plan to fund the outsourcing to private industry to launch our astronauts for us to the ISS International Space Station. Of course this could take years before a fledgling space industry could get itself ready to take a man or woman into space. In the meantime we will be depending on the Russians to do the heavy manned lifting for us.

I do agree with encouraging commercialization of space travel, but to kill our only manned outer space program with the same stroke of a pen is tragic .

Today’s budget release did have a vision, of sorts, See for yourself:

“NASA will embark on a new agency wide technology development and test program aimed at increasing the capabilities and reducing the cost of future NASA, other government, and commercial space activities. NASA will increase its support for trans-formative research that can enable a broad range of NASA missions. This program, which will involve work at NASA, in private industry, and at all levels of academia, will also generate spin-off technologies and potentially entire new industries.”

A little more specifically the President’s proposed budget plans to devote some of NASA’s budget toward developing new spaceflight technologies:

Faster space propulsion: Develop new spaceflight technologies, including innovative methods of space propulsion. Specifically, develop faster ways of traveling through space.

Commercial Spaceships: encourage private companies to develop this technology. NASA would then rely on commercial spaceships to ferry astronauts to the space station and low-Earth orbit.

Space gas stations: Orbital fuel stations which would allow spacecraft to launch to low-Earth orbit, then rendezvous with a fuel container and load up on the extra fuel needed for further travel.

Inflatable space houses: Inflatable habitats to provide a flexible and useful framework for building rooms, both in orbit and on the moon or other planets.

Space tourism and colonization: Space hotels, space vacations and moon hotels.

Green aviation: Environmentally friendly modes of air and space travel. (This ought to get us on the moon at the very least!)

Our nation no longer has a clear vision forward in to space. In the budget released today I see only a re-definition of NASA. NASA should be re-branded as NESA or National Earth Sciences Administration, with manned space travel a lowly side business. The new focus is now on developing technology that may be useful for future space travel but No focus is on an actual space travel goal. In leadership terms to have No goals means you have nothing to strive for, no vision. NASA will very soon become an agency with astronauts and no space ships. Once the shuttle lands for the last time, later this year or early 2011, unmanned missions are all that are on the horizon.

I had hoped I would see a man on Mars in my life time. That dream is probably now gone, possibly for my son’s life time too. Unless we can find another JFK who has the manned space exploration dream and the leadership skills to put a plan into action my fears will become reality. I guess I will have to be content with men on Mars like Gary Sinise and Val Kimmer.