NASA's moon plan too ambitious, Obama panel says

A panel reviewing NASA's current plans for human space flight will report that there is no realistic way to return to the moon by 2020 –– or even 2028.

BY JOEL ACHENBACH
Washington Post Service
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/1185467.html

WASHINGTON –– NASA doesn't have nearly enough money to meet its goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020 –– and it might be the wrong place to go, anyway. That's one of the harsh messages emerging from a sweeping review of NASA's human space flight program.

The Human Space Flight Plans Committee, appointed by President Barack Obama and headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, has been trying to stitch together some kind of plausible strategy for America's manned space program. The panel has struggled to find options that stay under the current budget and include missions worthy of the cost and effort.

The committee members will meet with administration officials Friday and will report that there is no realistic way to get Americans back on the moon by the target date of 2020, which has been the agency's goal since President George W. Bush signed off on the ``Vision for Space Exploration'' in 2004. Landing on the moon by 2020 would require such drastic budgetary maneuvers as de-orbiting the International Space Station –– crashing it into the South Pacific –– in 2016.

The final list of options being explored by the Augustine group will include some variation of a lunar base down the road. But the committee is most animated by what it calls the ``Deep Space'' option, a strategy that emphasizes getting astronauts far beyond Low Earth Orbit but not necessarily plunking them down on alien worlds.

Instead, the ``Deep Space'' strategy would send them to near-Earth asteroids and to gravitationally significant points in space, known as Lagrange points, that are beyond the Earth's protective magnetosphere. Astronauts might even go all the way to Phobos, a tiny moon of Mars, where the spaceship wouldn't land so much as rendezvous, in the same way that a spacecraft docks at the International Space Station.

The Earth's moon would be a possible ``off-ramp'' of such a strategy but not a central target for exploration. Putting astronauts on the surface of Mars, and then returning them to Earth, would be prohibitively expensive, according to an analysis by the committee, which will send its report to the president by the end of this month.

$50 BILLION GAP

The ``program of record'' –– NASA's current strategy –– has not fared well in the committee's review. Former astronaut Sally Ride, a member of the panel, said the gap between NASA's goals and its current budget totals roughly $50 billion by 2020. If the space station's life is extended for five years, she said, the current budget would allow for the completion of a heavy-boost moon rocket only in 2028, and that would be without spending money on developing the components of a lunar base.

``If you're willing to wait until 2028, you've got a heavy lift vehicle, but you've got nothing to lift,'' she said. ``You cannot do this program on this budget.''

Committee member Jeff Greason, an aerospace executive, was even more eviscerating of the NASA strategy, noting that the fixed costs of the current strategy are sure to bust the budget down the road: ``If Santa Claus brought us this system tomorrow, fully developed, and the budget didn't change, our next action would have to be to cancel it.''

The panel will give the administration a menu of options that include some that require a boost in funding for human space flight, which currently costs about $9 billion a year. Unknown, though, is how the Obama administration feels about human space flight in general. The president, both as a candidate and in the White House, has explicitly endorsed sending humans back to the moon, but his decision to create the Augustine committee is a sign that the status quo strategy, which carries the imprimatur of his predecessor and is endorsed by Congress, is not long for this Earth.

John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, observed the panel's session and said he wasn't sure that the Deep Space option, with its emphasis on ``fly-bys'' rather than landings, would be easy to sell to the public.

``I wonder myself if just flying around and not landing anywhere would be very attractive,'' he said.

OTHER PROGRAMS

The panel is certain to recommend extending the life of the International Space Station. It is also pushing hard for greater commercialization of space, including using private companies to taxi astronauts to Low Earth Orbit.

Some options include pulling the plug on the Ares I rocket that NASA has been building for four years. The Ares I is supposed to replace the space shuttle, the final flight of which is slated for late 2010. Billions have already been spent on the rocket, which is scheduled for an inaugural test flight this month.

Goto the moon?? what! are you crazy???  Do you know how much it will cost to rebuild the set these days?  Hell, look at the price of imported green cheese for starters...

Think of all the celphones we could buy for welfare recipients if we cancelled those programs!

It's a win win!

Yeah right, like Obama and friends know ANYTHING about the term "prohibitvely expensive".

F*** these cowards who would rather spend money on bloated entitlements rather than history making expansions of the human experience.  Shame on this awful waste of human potential that we are currently suffering through right now.

This

Going to the moon is too ambitious, but government run healthcare isn't??

_MaH

well at least china will get back there..

So let's see....

John F. Kennedy led us to the moon in less than 10 years.

Obama says we can't make it in less than 20 years.

Nope, the Democrats haven't changed at all.

/\/\/\ Kennedy was a leader, Obama is just a campaigner and an organizer.



Being 'too ambitious' is the whole goddamn point.

No realistic way to get us back in 9 years? We did it last goddamn time.

Properly fund NASA and this would all be easy. But that doesn't pay people off to get them to vote for you. Fucking cowards. If they don't start funding NASA to do this stuff everybody there should just resign. There's no point.

Also, we might as well send all our technical data to China. They'd actually use it and are going to beat us back anyway now.

Can't reach the Moon by 2020?



Yeah, if there is anybody surprised by this, they just crawled out from under a rock.  

Whoops, double-tapped that one.  

Set your goals at the bottom of your abilities, and you'll hit them every time.

Leaders are supposed to aspire us to achieve great things, not tells us "no, we can't".

Very well said.

What's the RoI for another trip to the moon?

Obama has relocated all of our country's remaining and future resources for this:

Good question.  I was a huge space junky as a kid, followed everything from Mercury on.  But at this point in our civilization, I'm not seeing a good reason to go back to the moon.  Yeah, it would be cool, but I can think of better things to spend our money (or rather the Chinese bond buyers money) than another moon shot.  

Oh, and you can quadruple NASA's cost estimate.  At least quadruple.

Again paint me as not surprised.   anything that:

Adds to our nations prestige;

Enhances our nations technology;

Puts people to work;

Unites people into a common cause and fills them with pride;

Sets us apart from the rest of the world.

You just know the Obama Administration will be against it.

Fixt

Until today, I hadn't made up my mind on whether or not further moon missions were worthwhile or not.  Now that I know Obama doesn't want it, I wholeheartedly support a permanent moon colony.

FBHO

Bush's plan to colonize the moon was...ambitous to say the least.  

Getting there just to get there is pointless IMHO.  If we aren't going to colonize the moon such that future launches can be made from there, I see no point in going in the first place.  We don't need moon rocks do we?  can we drill for oil on the moon?  What about plutonium?  What is the practical reason to go to the moon aside from setting up a base there?

_MaH

Thank God that calculation didn't stop the Europeans after their first few trips to the new world were essentially a bust when they didn't find the ground littered with gold as expected.  This has much more to do with the fundamental human need to expand our knowledge of the universe in order to seek the unforseable benefits than it is to make a cold hard ROI calculation on the benefits we can easily predict.

The moon is a stepping stone to deeper exploration of our solar system.  If we don't do it, the Chinese will, and I'm not willing to say with confidence that they won't find some currently unknown advantage out there to exploit.

Sooooooooo, the Aztec and Incan empires weren't littered with gold?  The Spanish Treasure Fleet disagrees ;-)

I'd more favor sending robots instead.  More can be done with lighter loads (lower cost) and you don't have to worry about sustenance, which adds to the payload.

Dont worry, when the chinese, Indians, Russians, and the EU all have manned missions to the Moon, we will throw some half ass shit together at the last minute.   Nothing like being in last place?


Oh, and the russians are sooo happy to offer us a lift while we shitcan the shuttle and put all our eggs in the orion basket.  Smooth move

With 1960s technology too

Another useless socialist program killed.  Woot!   Let China or private enterprise do it.  Free market rules!

Screw the moon -give away moar free money!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hey, I got an idea - Let's not just kill Bush's legacy, but let's replace it with a program that lacks ambition and historical significance. In 50 years, America will be nothing more than a mere footnote in the story of space exploration!

The only thing Obama wants to send to The Moon is the deficit.

Space travel isn't worth while for us anyways. The liberals are going to turn us back into cavemen, and everyone knows that cavemen don't go to The Moon.

Well they were of course.  My obvious point though was that Columbus didn't acertain that on his first trip.  This is why I specifically said "...after their first few trips...".  My point being that you can't derive the potential benefit of space exploration simply on the results of your first very brief trips.

One of the biggest benefits of the space program was inspiring an entire generation of scientists and engineers who propelled us through the following decades of intense technological development.  We need that kind of inspiration again.

I'll file this one under the "Dumb as Hell" category.

Done and Done (SpaceX program)

“Not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard…”

                                                                    -JFK-

I thought Helium-3 was a reason to go to the moon.

SpaceX?

You do realize that SpaceX's biggest goal is to resupply the ISS right? At the moment they have only succeeded so far in putting one, very small satellite into space.

To put things in simpler terms, SpaceX has gotten to the point that the Russians did in the 1950's when they launched Sputnik and the height of their current ambitions aren't much more than what John Glenn did in 1962.

So hooray for private enterprise, they're only 60 years behind!

NASA under Obama

Ya can't go to moon when we have to establish social justice here on

Earth first.

As soon as I heard they were reviewing NASA I could see the fix was in.



Just another way to reduce prosperity and prestige as a world power.



 

I'm still waiting for a liberal to explain what exactly "social justice" is.  My idea of social justice is people getting what they DESERVE rather than what they can leach off of tax payers.  In some cases it's prosperity, and in some cases you deserve to be poor and miserable because you contribute nothing to society of value.

NASA should propose a project to make Obongo the first black president to set foot on the moon.  He would approve the funding because of his ego.


Send Obongo to the moon, let him have his historical moment, then leave him there.  Fake some technical malfunctions that make it impossible for him to return.

fuck OdumbO

YES WE CAN'T.... his new motto?

There is a low cost alternative to an expensive program

I knew he was going to pull this shit.

Hard? We don't do that any more.

Yes - lets prop up failing business and waste money - rather than spend money that will increase our knowledge and technology.

What I don't understand is, we already went there in a modified pop up camper and with less computing power than a 8 year olds digital watch. Why is it so impossible now?

The Second I heard that Norman Augustine was heading the thing, I knew what conclusions it would come too...

Let's do go to the Moon................in the meantime, "GET YOUR ASS TO MARS"