Subscription Center
Aug 14, 2009 01:35 PM | 30
Less than a month after the U.S. celebrated the 40th anniversary of its first moon landing, the country's space agency faces the dour possibility that it lacks the funds needed to be able to return there by 2020, a goal established by the Bush Administration in 2004.
The conclusion of the 10-member Augustine panel—formed in June and headed by Norman Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, to evaluate the direction of NASA's human spaceflight program—is that the space agency has some tough budgetary decisions to make if it wants to meet the 2020 deadline. This includes whether it should continue to provide funding for the International Space Station (ISS) or divert more money to its moon-bound Constellation program.
Under that budgetary scenario (which includes the ISS), according to the panel's just-completed analysis, NASA's current budget would not permit the launch of a new heavy-boost moon rocket, the Ares V, until 2028—and that doesn't include money for building "key lunar-base components," The Washington Post reports. The panel has proposed an alternative "Deep Space" option that would send astronauts to near-Earth asteroids and to "gravitationally significant" points in space, known as Lagrange points, that are beyond Earth's protective magnetosphere, according to the Post.
The panel, which presents its initial report today to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and White House science adviser John Holdren, is highly skeptical of landing astronauts on Mars anytime soon due to financial and technological limitations. Instead, it proposes sending astronauts on flybys as far away as Mars. Under that plan, according to former astronaut Sally Ride, there could be missions every other year in the 2020s past asteroids and Mars, and even a landing on the Moon by 2029 or 2030, The New York Times reports.
Whatever NASA decides, it will have a deep impact on the engineers, scientists, technicians and others employed by or contracted with the agency. The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) reminded the Augustine panel of this earlier this week with a letter recommending a $22 billion* budget for NASA beginning in 2011, a workforce hiring budget of about $100 million over the next five years, and a reining in of work outsourced to contractors.
Image of a 1963 model depicting an early Apollo lunar lander concept © NASA
* Correction (08/18/09): Thanks to the watchful eye of a reader this figure was amended from the $22 million originally reported.
Tags:
NASA,
Apollo,
Augustine
More News Blog:
Next: The 2009 hurricane season heats up: Ana, Claudette and Bill
Previous: ExxonMobil guilty in deaths of migratory birds in five states
See what we're tweeting about
Deadline: Jul 14 2013
Reward: $1,000,000 USD
This is a Reduction-to-Practice Challenge that requires written documentation and&
Deadline: Jul 25 2013
Reward: Varies
This challenge provides an opportunity for Solvers to build a web-based or mobile “app” to explore data relationships in scholarly conte
Powered By: 
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
30 Comments
Add CommentToo Bad... But here's my suggestion (too late), and you engineers can give me some feedback at your leisure... How about we send the space shuttle fleet to a block upgrade program (kind of like the B-52G) and use them to go to the moon? You can upgrade and modify the fleet to be able to mate in space with a smaller booster rocket and/or smaller version of the main fuel tank which can be launched by Delta rockets. The primary dangers for the space shuttle fleet, which are launches and recoveries, could be greatly reduced if you kept them on orbit until needed. We can launch crew, mission resupply essentials, and a mission specific package to rendezvous with shuttle whenever we'd like, and only bring them back to earth when they need more upgrades for future missions. The country is already sold on shuttles, NASA's culture is the shuttle, the astronauts know how to fly it, and the engineers know how to keep it running... Why change? Use your strengths.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe you mean billion with a B, not million with an M, when you write "The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) reminded the Augustine panel of this earlier this week with a letter recommending a $22 million budget for NASA beginning in 2011, "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNASA'a 2010 budget proposal is $18-19 billion.
50 years ago mankind began crawling out of it's hole, courageously going out to explore, but since then we have decided it's too expensive, too dangerous and have slunk back into our hole...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"50 years ago mankind began crawling out of its whole, courageously going out to explore"...? 50 years ago? I'd say it started more than 100,000 years ago. Some say several million years ago and we didn't crawl out of a hole nor is anyone slinking back into any hole.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne of the legacies of ISS is that it is possible for many countries to unite around a common goal of scientific discovery and space exploration. Use this success as a platform to spread the cost of such endeavors. They raise the profile of science and spark the imaginations of people worldwide. Together we will succeed, and that alone would be a testimony to the progress of our species.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll our eggs, in one fragile basket. Smart.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSimple.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust call it the "Lunar Infrastructure Project".
Then Demcrats will vote it a few trillion dollars, no problem.
The ideas expressed in the article all sound good, but it seems to have that "a shot here, and a shot over there" feel, to me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe, as a species, need to branch out and off of our little rock.
I like the idea of flights to asteroids, and other objects further away then the moon, specifically because this would expand our knowledge of interplanetary travel, which is essential to exploration of our solar system, which is essential to our colonozation and exploitation of same.
Someone mentioned eggs in baskets,... right now, they're all here, on the third rock from the sun.
Is anything really even gained by going to the moon. Even from a "humans need more space" philosophy, the moon cannot support life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo other nearby planet can either. Others may, but are too far away.
Personally, I think 100% of the moon budget should be dropped.
I think you were dropped 100% on your head.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNothing can ever be gained by staying here on Earth.
Unfortunately the route to the moon has been derailed by the economic and military policies of the republican administrations. It will probably be the Chinese, Indians, or Europeans that go to the moon and beyond.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSomeone needs to convince congress to take funds away from the hugely bloated "Defense" budget (in 2008 the U.S. spent $711 Billion or 48% of the total amount spent by the World) and give the money to something that may actually improve or enrich lives.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe best option here is to do away with NASA,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's been run by politicians and bureaucrats for the past 30 years,
and like congress, no real work gets down anymore.
I'm with "dayoldbeer": just what war are we planning for right now? How many aircraft carriers and nuclear subs do we need? I suggest we could safely reduce annual defence expenditure by 20% which would go to NASA. We've lost the Yankee "can do" attitude and have become a nation of whining Nancies (as the Brits would say). A reinvigorated space exploration effort might just be the shot in the arm that this nation needs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was in NACA when it turned into NASA. Then, the agency was filled with smart people who told their management what was needed and what to do. Now the agency lacks those smart people. So the management hires contractors to tell them what is needed and how to fill those needs (by using more contractors). NASA needs to develop in-house smarts again and stop hiring every one off the street. The money saved could then be used to carry out productive work and missions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think that all the works in the ISS is for sure something important for the space conquest. Man has already a space base and does'nt need another in the Moon. If you want to go to mars or some other small planets you can use the ISS. Its not necessary establish a base in the moon.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Is anything really even gained by going to the moon." I suggest you do a web search on Helium-3. The chinese have announced that they plan to mine it on the moon. And I guess we should be grateful that the chinese are there to push onward into space on behalf of mankind, if the americans are not up the task.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAfter a monumental effort on the part of thousands of people, we developed the necessary technology to land on the moon. Then our brilliant national leadership cut the funding, and shut the program down prematurely (How quintessentially american; we have never been very good at long range thinking). So now, forty years later, we no longer have that hard-won technology, and cannot mount a mission to the moon before 2028. That's almost criminal.
What a waste of forty years; we should already have established bases and mining operations on the moon, and been in the process of establishing a presence on Mars. Instead, we have the chinese preparing to "soar with the eagles", while we "roost with the turkeys".
I say that humans are not made for travel in space. Probably will do it in the future but today man has to do small moves. ISS is near home and some kind of a door to go to whatever you want to go. You can go to the moon, mine precious materials and send it to mother earth and the same with hundreds of other planetoids. The problem is the crew. The crews has to be relieved quickly. I say that the ISS has to grow or America has to build more ISS's.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"America has to build more ISS's"?? There's something inherently wrong with that statement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyway, I'm of the opinion that realistically, humans becoming a space-faring race is an inevitibility, however long a timeline it may require. It is absolutely vital that our generation does it's part to get to that point. Will we ever end up in a "Star Trek" or "Battlestar Galactica" environment? Assuming we don't kill ourselves off first, absolutely.
We are in the infancy of this evolution of technology (still in the womb, probably more accurate) and if we don't create a permanent lunar base and send a manned mission to Mars in my lifetime (I'm 30), I think we will be letting down, and doing a disservice to, future generations.
If we're smart enough to get to the moon, we ought to be smart enough to realize that removing mass from the moon for relocation on earth is completely idiotic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut no, you're right. Humans have not developed with space travel in mind. They're used to gravity. A station on the moon would at least provide some gravity to allow for a more normalized, long-term, livable environment.
If we could get even one ISS working before its end-of-service date, I'd be impressed.
But odds are not great of human life surviving itself on this planet. We'd better get a move on.
The fantastic Galaxy Empires described by Asimov, Blish, and others, reside in the asumption that in that time man has controlled "antigravity", a "faster and económic than light drive" and can live 400 or 500 earth years. Today is more important the lives of the astronauts than the conquest of others planets. Is more important to design a very safe spaceship that do not wreck for just a bad seal or the heat covers or small things like that. Man today has to go step by step first .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe the ISS has cost about $100 Billion so far. What has it achieved and what is it intended to achieve.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems to me to be like the Appolo program, which was for political reasons and not scientific ones.
The greatest human endeavor ever....the exploration of space...and the U.S. can't or won't fund it properly; but we can waste a trillion dollars on an idiotic war on the other side of the globe, destroying a country (Iraq) that had absolutely nothing to with 9/11. What sheer, utter folly!!! Forty years since we successfully landed on the moon six times, and we are still confined to near Earth activity, with little technological abililty to go further, in the near term. Outrageous!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe ISS, is not really one fragile basket,. Yes the hardware is, but the bulk of the expense for the ISS came from having to create prototypes for every phase of the operation, acquiring knowledge that is. Like the shuttle, it should only take a fraction of the original cost to build an even better version of the original should that begin to fail in some way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately, however, the real enemy is economic, namely the insane worldwide inflation that has already hit since the original ISS, plus the wave that's yet to come. That's probably going to sandbag this initiative for some time to come.
That's a pity, maybe even tragic, because few beyond the arcane science of astronomy and the geosciences understand the fragility of our biosphere on the skin of the earth's geosphere. It is possible that the knowledge spinoff from this venture could one day divert a disaster that could imperil the very existence of man on this planet. The tragic irony would be if we could have avoided such a disaster by expending less than the bailout of Wall Street to develop the skill set needed to avoid such a disaster. Let's hope we are more hardy, and prepared, than the dinosaurs when the next extraterrestrial strikes, hopefully not too soon. Apophis anyone?
Space exploration is a worthy goal. We all agree on that. But the simple reality is that it doesn't come cheap and every dollar NASA spends is a dollar we are borrowing from China and that our children and grand children will someday have to pay back. Our national debt is currently about half our annual gross domestic product. If we don't cut our spending back, in a few years the entire discretionary portion of the Federal budget will go to pay interest on the debt. Let's be real about this. Sure space exploration is a noble enterprise. And yes, there are lots of other things the government should also cut. But we don't have the money right now for an ambitious and expensive space project. And if we don't cut back on our discretionary spending where we can, our future in this country is going to be a lot more grim than you can imagine. That will be our final frontier.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have to stop thinking of space exploration in terms of "Westward Ho," The Conquest of the West, or "Space, the final frontier." What space exploration is, is risk management. Any accountant can do the cost benefit analysis in terms of risk. Every 20 years or so a visitor from outer space touches down on Earth with detectable impact.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere's an extract taken from an article in Wikipedia: "NEOs have become of increased interest since the 1980s because of increased awareness of the potential danger some of the asteroids or comets pose to the Earth, and active mitigations are being researched. A study showed that the United States and China are the nations most vulnerable to a meteor strike.
... Objects with diameters of 5-10m impact the Earth's atmosphere approximately once per year, with as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, approximately 15 kilotonnes of TNT. These ordinarily explode in the upper atmosphere, and most or all of the solids are vaporized. ... Objects of diameters of the order of 50 meters strike the Earth approximately once every thousand years, producing explosions comparable to the one observed at Tunguska in 1908.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object) Bear in mind that even though these contributions come from all over, they are self-policing, since no scientist worth his salt is going to let erroneous material in his field stand unchallenged.
The point is that, for the most part, the relatively smaller Near Earth Objects are so small and come in so fast that at the present stage of our technology we cannot detect them in time to do anything about them. Fortunately most of them explode harmlessly in the atmosphere. The last one that didn't was as recently as 1908, only a century ago, when more than a thousand people alive today were already born.
It's a sliding scale, these objects come in all sizes. It doesn't take one the size of the Tunguska 1908 NEO to land in the ocean and inundate the whole Eastern or Western seaboard. So here is the equation. The smaller they are the (relatively) less damage they do but the more they are of them, although the easier it would be to destroy or divert them, but unfortunately the harder they are to detect early enough to do anything about them. That's where the need for space exploration and technological development comes in. That's why it is important to include some measure of it into every presidential budget. It's like flood insurance, (maybe quite literally). You're never sure it's needed until it's too late.
Actually approximately 450, 000 people now alive were born before 1908, when the last big meteorite, no asteroid, hit earth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"At around 7:15 AM, Tungus natives and Russian settlers in the hills northwest of Lake Baikal observed a huge fireball moving across the sky, nearly as bright as the Sun. A few minutes later, there was a flash that lit up half of the sky, followed by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows up to 650 km (400 mi) away. The explosion registered on seismic stations across Eurasia, and produced fluctuations in atmospheric pressure strong enough to be detected by the recently invented barographs in Britain. Over the next few weeks, night skies over Europe and western Russia glowed brightly enough for people to read by. In the United States, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Mount Wilson Observatory observed a decrease in atmospheric transparency that lasted for several months.
Had the object responsible for the explosion hit the Earth a few hours later, it would have exploded over Europe (most probably Scandinavia) instead of the sparsely-populated Tunguska region, producing massive loss of human life and changing the course of human history."
Statistically, these kind of impacts are dispersed to once every thousand years, but we all know that's not how stats work. We're like three men bailing water with their hats in a boat filled almost up to the gunwales. The next medium sized swell will swamp the boat, and there's that perfect storm swell out there that could swamp an ocean liner whatever they do, but the more water they get out of the boat the greater their chances of surviving the next wave. They have no way of knowing when the weather will change against them or how much, they only know that the better prepared they are when it comes, the better their chances of surviving the next big one.
Still have the niggling feeling that I haven't put the Tunguska asteroid threat in proper statistical perspective. I'm no statistician so correct me if I am wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe statistical threat of Earth being hit by such an asteroid being like once every thousand years, doesn't sound like much threat, right? This means that the probability of one landing on Earth next year, is 0.1%! That how stats work, probability doesn't determine timing.
That's greater than your chance of getting Aids from unprotected sex, or of your plane crashing after take-off, of being hit by lightning whilst walking in a thunderstorm, or even of being killed in a car accident if you drive for 100 miles without wearing your seat belt! Space technology anyone! O.K. I'm done!
I read the article and it doesn't sound like NASA will ever be the same.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is an understement on my part to say that it is really sad that the Space Program
could not and hasn't been supported over the years and when I think about it -
what comes to my mind is that it is a crying shame that so much money has
been wasted on pointless and endless battles and wars that will never be won
and the military side of things instead of being directed at more important things.
I think all of that money - as you mentions 40 cents from the tax dollar that the military recieve today
as apposed to the leaa than one penny NASA recieves - would instead
be better spent on the 'Good' and 'Collossal' things that mankind has managed to conquer and achieve
over the years - like NASA's incredible ground breaking and phenominal persuits and break throughs in
science and space developments
The Historical significance of humans putting men into space - touching the final frontier and putting a man on the moon.
All of miriad of major scientific discoveries and developments of products that has helped mankind on all levels
including the new products made with spaceage technologies which were brought about you when you were there.
I know you designed so many ground breaking things and invented so many things yourself!
The question that comes up to me is 'How is mankind - ever going to progress and
evolve further if everything now and in the future revolves around money and politics.
It is losing and letting go of all that history ....
In architecture and real estate throughout the world... any building which was designed and have historical
significance is protected by a Heritage Order. It is protected and can not be changed or altered in any way
because it is seen to be a valuable piece of human history in building and design to be preserved for future
generations and held in a respectful way.
NASA and the Space program is more important than any building because of what it has done for mankind from a historical standpoint
and yet - The government are quite happy to sell it all off like to the highest bidder to make money from it!
With no regard for it's major role in the advancement of human discovery and Space development.
This leads to me yet - another line of thinking ...
It is yet another testament to the fact that human beings are slow at evolving and progressing in so many ways because they hold
the power of the 'dollar' higher than that of their Spiritual growth. They do not understand that s
STAIRWAY TO THE HEAVENS?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"How about we send the space shuttle fleet to a block upgrade program (kind of like the B-52G) and use them to go to the moon? You can upgrade and modify the fleet to be able to mate in space with a smaller booster rocket and/or smaller version of the main fuel tank which can be launched by Delta rockets." (LID)
If you're saying what I think you're saying, this sounds like the best suggestion I've heards so far; stroke of genius, actually.
I'm not sure what the term "block upgrade program" means, but this paints a picture (don't care if it's the wrong one) in my mind of a number of shuttles or better yet space stations placed like a string of beads between Earth and the Moon. They'd operate in moon-synchronous orbit, so that a single failure anywhere along the line wouldn't have to be a disaster. We've already made the most difficult step (power and engineering wise) Earth orbit, and possibly the most expensive one ... in real terms, corrected for inflation. We could take our time about building each step in our stairway to the moon whilst getting the techology, financing and logistics right. In this scenario the present space station would be a vital and essential part of the program, which could take as long as required, decades if necessary. (The Cubans are still operating cars that existed since before the American 1960's embargo....1941 Desoto according to Google")