A White House panel charged with
reviewing NASA's exploration plans has dropped any hope of sending
astronauts directly to Mars and found the space agency's budget too slim to accomplish its goal of returning humans to the moon by 2020.
After more than six hours of public
deliberation on Wednesday, the 10-member committee overseeing the Review for U.S. Human
Space Flight Plans decided not to include a plan to send astronauts straight
to Mars - called Mars Direct - on its list of options to be considered by
President Barack Obama because of its daunting challenges and cost.
"We think Mars Direct is a mission
that we're really not prepared to take on technically or financially, and it
would likely not succeed," said the committee's chairman
Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO, late Wednesday after the
televised meeting in Washington, D.C. "I really want to emphasize that we're
not giving up on Mars at all."
A manned Mars mission is the
ultimate goal, but shifting all of NASA's focus on getting there as soon as
possible is not feasible, he added.
The committee is expected to present
its initial report to NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden and White House science
adviser John Holdren on Friday and file a final
version for President Obama's review by the end of the month.
Funding woes
Augustine's committee is reviewing
NASA's plan to retire its aging space shuttle fleet and replace it with a
capsule-based Orion spacecraft as part of a larger effort to return
astronauts to the moon by 2020. But NASA's current budget for human
spaceflight through 2020 is not enough to cover the costs of achieving its
baseline lunar goal, let alone other alternative options, the committee found.
"This budget is just simply not friendly to exploration," said committee member
Sally Ride, a former astronaut and the first American woman in space. "It's
very difficult to find an exploration scenario that actually fits within this
very restrictive budget guidance that we've been given."
NASA has a budget of about $80
billion for human spaceflight through 2020, about $28 billion less than
projected when it first chose the Orion
spacecraft and its Ares rockets to succeed the space shuttle fleet. Orion
spacecraft are not expected to begin operational flights until 2015, the
committee said.
Augustine said that NASA's
exploration budget has been cut repeatedly since announcing the new space
exploration plan in 2005, hindering its progress. Technical and other delays
have also led to the current shortfall, he added. Still he and his committee
were surprised none of their options fit in NASA's current budget.
"I did think that one of the current
options would fit under the present funding budget," he said. "I thought it
might be quite a while before you really got into space and do those exciting
things that we were talking about ... I guess I should have realized that it
wasn't possible."
Narrowing options
Last week, the committee culled a
list of 3,000 options for human spaceflight down to about seven
different scenarios.
On Wednesday, committee members
refined that list down to four general scenarios that include more funding. They include building Orion
spacecraft for eventual manned mission to the moon, as well as options for
sending astronauts farther out into deep space to visit near-Earth asteroids or
the stable Lagrange points around Earth by the mid- to late-2020s or 2030.
"We very much like the deep space
option," Augustine said, adding that his committee is not endorsing one option
over another. "It's a doable, viable option."
Only one of the four scenarios
includes NASA's planned Ares I rocket, the booster designed to launch Orion
capsules into space. Some included extending the International Space Station's
lifetime beyond 2016 to 2020.
The committee strongly favored
encouraging commercial vehicles for launching astronauts into orbit and
suggested setting $2.5 billion aside between 2011 and 2014 to spur development
in those spacecraft. It also included options that included spacecraft more
heavily derived from current space shuttles, as well as current unmanned
heavy-lift rockets like the Delta 4 Heavy and variants of NASA's giant Ares V
rocket envisioned to launch lunar landers into orbit.
The potential for in-orbit refueling
was cited as a key technological goal for some committee members. But adequate
funding is key if NASA is to tackle an innovative,
inspiring program that can capture the attention of the American public,
committee members said.
"Our view is that it will be
difficult with the current budget to do anything that's terribly inspiring in
the human spaceflight area," Augustine said.
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