The nine-member commission held its first public hearing Wednesday at the National Transportation Safety Boards auditorium here to hear testimony from several aerospace industry groups and the leaders of past space commissions.
The White House chartered the commission Jan. 30 to make recommendations on implementing Bushs space exploration agenda, which includes sending people back to the Moon by 2020 as a stepping stone to human expeditions to Mars and other compelling destinations.
Aldridge, a former U.S. Air Force Secretary and the Pentagons top acquisition official from 2001- 2003, said it is not the commissions job to question Bushs agenda or seek alternatives, but to recommend a strategy for making the presidents exploration vision reality.
"We are not here to challenge or modify the presidents vision," Aldridge said. "Our role in life is to determine what it would take to successfully implement this vision."
The commission is due to report its recommendations to Bush in early June 120 days from the date of its first meeting, a closed-door affair held Jan. 9 in Arlington, Va. Susan Flowers, a spokeswoman for the commission, said administrative details were the focus of the first meeting.
During the Feb. 11 hearing, the commissioners heard from industry groups pledging their support for the presidents vision, and seasoned aerospace veterans, including Norman Augustine, the former Lockheed Martin chief who chaired a presidential commission established to set new long term goals for NASA in the wake of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger accident.
"Your commission, like ours, meets on the heels of a tragic failure of the space shuttle," Augustine said, pointing out just the first of a number of similarities between the Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program he chaired 14 years ago and the commission Aldridge chairs today.
Then, as now, Augustine said, the public support for space exploration often expressed in public opinion polls did not always translate into budget support in Congress.
Augustine also said his commission, like Aldridges committee today, began its work against a backdrop of competing national needs, not the least of which being national security.
"The needs of the Cold War have by and large been replaced by the needs of the war on terrorism," he said.
The recommendations the Augustine commission issued helped set the agenda for an ambitious Moon and Mars program pushed by Bushs father when he was president. Among the recommendations were to pursue a balanced program of human and robotic missions, decreasing dependence on the space shuttle, development of a new heavy lift launch vehicle, and to consider a human trip to Mars as a long term goal with a return to the Moon as a stepping stone along the way.
It is a very similar agenda confronting todays commission, a point not lost on commission member Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of New Yorks Hayden Planetarium.
"Our commission exists because in some ways your commission failed," Tyson said, apologizing to Augustine for the bluntness of his observation. "I dont want our illustrious chairman to be sitting in that chair 10 years from now answering these types of questions" about what went wrong.
Part of the prior failure, Augustine said, was budgetary. The 10 percent annual increases in space spending the Augustine commission assumed never panned out. He also said the public never bought in to the new direction, a potential pitfall Bushs vision faces today. Augustines advice for avoiding some of the same pitfalls that befell past efforts to reform NASA and set it on a bold, new course: push for continued White House leadership.
"We have to have leadership at the top sustained leadership at the top," Augustine said.
Augustine testified that re-establishing the kind of White House space council last seen in the early 1990s could help ensure the visions survival from one presidential administration to the next, provided the group not overstep its bounds and interfere with operational decisions.
"A national space council would be valuable if constituted as a policy guidance organization and board of directors rather than another management level," Augustine said.
Reestablishing a White House space council was an idea broached in earlier testimony from Mark Bitterman, an Orbital Sciences Corporation executive who chairs the U.S. Chamber of Commerce space enterprise council.
"A reestablishment of a space council within the executive office of the president would be an effective way to sustain support across administrations," Bitterman said.
Aldridge told reporters after the meeting that he was open to the space council proposal and would give it full consideration.
"Whether its a national space council or something like it, it is in our purview," he said. "If this is what it takes for this program to be successfulthen we certainly could recommend to do something like that if it's appropriate. It's clearly been put on the table by certain leaders in our space community."
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