President Obama scraps plans to go to the Moon

[Mike]

President Obama's plan for America's space program, according to early reports, represents a fundamental shift for human spaceflight, some experts say.

The reports suggest the Obama administration intends to move toward relying on commercially-built spacecraft, rather than NASA's own vehicles, to carry humans to low-Earth orbit. The plan would also involve extending the International Space Station's lifetime and abandoning current plans to send astronauts on moon missions by 2020.

More........  http://www.space.com/news/obama-nasa-space-plan-reactions-100128.html

[Mike]

Very sad......

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8489097.stm

[Rick]

For some reason the media's painting this very bleakly, but it seems the Constellation project (based on the Shuttle solid boosters) wasn't doing too well anyway...

The Program was planning to use an approach similar to Apollo to return astronauts to the Moon some 50 years after that program's triumphs.  The Augustine Committee observed that this path was not sustainable, and the President agrees.  They found that Constellation key milestones were slipping, and that the program would not get us back to the moon in any reasonable time or within any affordable cost.  Far more funding was needed to make our current approach work.   The Augustine Committee estimated that the heavy lift rocket for getting to the moon would not be available until 2028 or 2030, and even then they found "there are insufficient funds to develop the lunar lander and lunar surface systems until well into the 2030s, if ever."  So as much as we would not like it to be the case, and taking nothing away from the hard work and dedication of our team, the truth is that we were not on a path to get back to the moon's surface.  And as we focused so much of our effort and funding on just getting to the Moon, we were neglecting investments in the key technologies that would be required to go beyond.

(From Charlie Bolden's statement (pdf))

[MarkS]

The Augustine Committee estimated that the heavy lift rocket for getting to the moon would not be available until 2028 or 2030

What I find surprising is that Kennedy's era they got to the moon within a decade.  Now, in spite of the benefit of all that experience, they quote timescales of 2 decades.

Am I missing something?

Mark

[Ian]

they're no longer at war.

I'm not sure I disagree with Obama. I think the time to engage commercial enterprises in here. Central government hasn't had the appetite for this sort of thing since Apollo and we've got virtually nowhere since.

It's not that I think the commercial concerns are the best, it's more the fact they're not politicians.

[Mike]

I agree that going out to contractors is better in the long run as it will drive prices down and increase innovation. Hopefully this will mean they will have money in their budgets to do moonshots anyway. There are already several private enterprises working on this as well as the X-Prize.

[Rick]

The bit I find more interesting is this:

And as we focused so much of our effort and funding on just getting to the Moon, we were neglecting investments in the key technologies that would be required to go beyond.

Especially those last three words.

[Rick]

Last October, NASA received a committee report that called existing planning "unsustainable." The agency couldn't even budget the money to deorbit the International Space Station as planned in 2016—itself a waste of the construction costs—and the vehicles needed for its planned return to the moon wouldn't be ready by the 2030s... "if ever," in the committee's words. So today, NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced a new five-year budget plan that significantly changes the nation's spaceflight priorities.

More comment on arstechnica.com

[Rick]

The ambitious space initiative that President Obama unveiled for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Monday calls for sweeping changes in mission and priorities for the 52-year-old agency, yet it omits two major details: where the agency will send its astronauts and a timetable for getting them there.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/space/02nasa.html

[Rick]

Well, we didn't get a shuttle launch on Sunday but we got something almost as interesting this weekend: Nasa chief Charlie Bolden holding forth on the future of human spaceflight.

He called the media to a conference here at the Kennedy Space Center and invited all and any questions. If you haven't seen it, you can catch it here on the Nasa YouTube Channel.

He didn't expound a fully formed vision of how humans could push out beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO). Indeed, he was quite open in saying the solutions that would fill the void left by President Obama's cancellation of the Constellation programme this past week were up for discussion.

We did get some nuggets though on what he thought might be the most productive directions in which to take US policy.

More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/jonathanamos/2010/02/a-big-rocket-is-still-a-us-pri.shtml

[mickw]

President Barack Obama's new plan for NASA has been met with some anger and confusion in the weeks since its announcement, drawing sharp objections from critics who view it as a radical vision change for the space agency that would upset the world leadership of the United States in space.

But similar shifts have occurred throughout NASA's more than 50-year history, and some space experts counter that this new plan — which would use commercial spacecraft to fly astronauts in space instead of government spacecraft — is no more radical than those previous changes.

The new space plan calls for the cancellation of the existing Constellation program, which has been overseeing the construction of new Ares I and Ares V rockets to take humans to low-Earth orbit and back to the moon. Instead, the Obama administration aims to encourage private industry to develop commercial spacecraft to ferry humans to and from the International Space Station, while NASA focuses on research and development to enable future space exploration.

More:   Space.com

[mickw]

 President Barack Obama will present a conference April 15 in Florida on the country's future in space exploration, the White House announced Saturday.

The president, top government officials and other space leaders will discuss the course the White House is charting for NASA and human spaceflight, according to an Obama administration official who asked not to be identified because details of the event are not final.

The conference will come as Congress weighs the White House's 2011 budget proposal, which has been criticized for shutting down the Constellation program that was to replace the soon-to-retire shuttles.

More:   MakeYerMindUp

[Rick]

criticized for shutting down the Constellation program

Hmmm... The more detail I hear about the Constellation programme, the more it looks like a gravy train for the guys who brought us the Challenger Disaster...