[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On the new directions of the American space program

[rfmcdonald]

The official site for NASA's Constellation manned spaceflight program seems forlorn in light of that program's impending cancellation.

A plan to return US astronauts to the moon "is dead," a White House advisor on space issues said Friday, confirming reports that NASA will instead focus on developing commercial space transport.

"Constellation is dead," the advisor told AFP on condition of anonymity, referring to a program that envisioned returning to the moon by 2020 and using Earth's nearest neighbour as a base for manned expeditions to Mars.

Florida Today newspaper first reported the demise of the program Thursday, saying the plan was doomed by financial constraints in the 2011 budget which President Barack Obama is to present to Congress on Monday.

Reports added that the US space agency will work on finding a commercial solution to ferrying US astronauts to the International Space Station after the scheduled end of NASA's shuttle program in September 2010.

Only five more shuttle flights, including a mission by the Endeavour set for a February 7 launch, are planned.

Astronauts will be able to hitch rides aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, but the United States will need a commercial alternative if Congress approves White House plans to scrap development of a successor to the shuttle program.

The administration reportedly plans to hike NASA's budget by 5.9 billion dollars over five years to boost commercial development, with the goal of a first commercial flight to the ISS launching by 2015, the source said.

I'd certainly have liked a NASA program for manned lunar exploration, but if the program was overbudget and behind schedule I've no particular objections to Constellation's cancellation. Manned space travel is very expensive, and while it might be relatively affordable for the world's leading economies now that technology has become cheaper and economies larger, manned space travel has to compete with any number of other budgetary priorities, especially manned space travel to relatively uninteresting and economically unattractive targets like the Moon. In this current economic climate, manned spaceflight isn't going to be very important for the United States. China may well continue with its own manned program, even sending its own lunar expeditions in a conscious imitation of Apollo. The United States, in the meantime, may finally have happened upon a viable program for commercial spaceflight.

[I]n this proposed budget, which must be approved by Congress, NASA will provide funds for commercial space companies to build vehicles to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS. With the space shuttle program ending this year, NASA had agreed to pay Russia $50 million a seat. Commercial space companies could likely provide the seats for less money, but their vehicles are not yet human rated or tested.

It is true that the Constellation program was "over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation due to a failure to invest in critical new technologies." But $9 billion has already been spent on developing the Ares rockets and the Orion crew capsule, and $2.5 billion is in the budget proposal to close out Constellation.

Proponents of Obama's budget proposal say moving towards using private commercial space companies will create more jobs per dollar because the government's investment would be leveraged by millions of dollars in private investments.

"NASA investment in the commercial spaceflight industry is a win-win decision," said Bret Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, in a statement released last week. "Commercial crew will create thousands of high-tech jobs in the United States, especially in Florida, while reducing the spaceflight gap and preventing us from sending billions to Russia.'

NASA already has contracts with SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. to bring cargo to the station, and . SpaceX is also developing vehicles to bring astronauts to orbit and back.

Besides. So we wont have Ares rockets. Who cares, when the fleets of robotic space probes are proving so productive? News like this (via james_nicoll) makes me feel hopeful about space programs.

NASA will extend the international Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn and its moons to 2017. The agency's fiscal year 2011 budget provides a $60 million per year extension for continued study of the ringed planet.

"This is a mission that never stops providing us surprising scientific results and showing us eye popping new vistas," said Jim Green, director of NASA's planetary science division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The historic traveler's stunning discoveries and images have revolutionized our knowledge of Saturn and its moons."

Cassini launched in October 1997 with the European Space Agency's Huygens probe. The spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004. The probe was equipped with six instruments to study Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Cassini's 12 instruments have returned a daily stream of data from Saturn's system for nearly six years. The project was scheduled to end in 2008, but the mission received a 27-month extension to Sept. 2010.

[. . .

This extension], called the Cassini Solstice Mission, enables scientists to study seasonal and other long-term weather changes on the planet and its moons. Cassini arrived just after Saturn's northern winter solstice, and this extension continues until a few months past northern summer solstice in May 2017. The northern summer solstice marks the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern hemisphere.

A complete seasonal period on Saturn has never been studied at this level of detail. The Solstice mission schedule calls for an additional 155 orbits around the planet, 54 flybys of Titan and 11 flybys of the icy moon Enceladus.

Send more unmanned probes, everyone! Wait another couple of decades for technology and economics to make manned spaceflight beyond Earth's orbit more potentially productive, but in the meantime we should really chart the neighbourhood.