Space and The Obama Budget

Dateline Washington, February 2. From the Washington Post News Service:

Obama nixes back-to-the-moon program

The Obama administration is killing Constellation, NASA’s ambitious back-to-the-moon program. …Instead…the administration wants to invest $6 billion over five years in a commercial space taxi to carry astronauts into low Earth orbit…

Well, as far as I’m concerned, that’s good news and bad news… and more good news and more bad news. Here’s what I’m talking about.

Good News: We won’t be continuing the work on a new rocket, Ares 1, and a new crew capsule, Orion.

Bad News: We’ve already spent $9 billion on Ares and Orion. To make matters worse, Obama’s budget includes another $2.5 billion to shut the project down!

Good News: Without the new rocket and crew capsule, there’s no way for us to get to the International Space Station (ISS), which is another spectacularly bottomless money pit. The shuttle fleet is being decommissioned and disposed of through a gigantic yard sale, so nobody will be using that to get to the ISS either.

Bad News: In yet another example of backward thinking, the $6 billion commercial space taxi will be good only to do exactly what the shuttle fleet had done: give rides back and forth to low Earth orbit, i.e. the ISS.

The Worst News: There is not a thin dime in the budget for exploration. $17 billion wasted, to go nowhere but to the Hubble and the ISS. Not a single dramatic piece of science has been done in the ISS, the Hubble is on its last legs, and there won’t be any more Mars rovers, unmanned visits to the rest of our solar system, or colonists on the moon or Mars.

Unmanned exploration is the best thing we can do right now. It’s cost-effective, relatively quick, and completely safe. But that won't happen. Clearly, though, our government is on a different page. It seems to me that we’ve somehow decided that our destiny lies here on Earth and nowhere else, and that’s sad. I had hoped for more.