This Wednesday, a Senate hearing will attempt to sort out what's wrong with NASA, but also what amount of right stuff remains at the space agency to propel humans outward into the future.
Against this backdrop, and more importantly, the White House has stepped into the fray. The Bush Administration, according to Washington, D.C. buzz, is thinking about anointing NASA with a new, beyond Earth orbit vision statement.
Some suggest that this declaration could occur as soon as December 17th -- during the 100th anniversary festivities marking the first successful sustained powered flights in a heavier-than-air machine by Wilbur and Orville Wright. Other insiders envision a Presidential decree coming as part of the State of the Union address to the nation early next year.
Fear of flying
NASA may be incapable of hurling humans beyond low Earth orbit. So says an astronaut who was once on the front end of a Saturn V mega-booster heading for the Moon in December 1972.
"The NASA of today is probably not the agency to undertake a significant new program to return humans to deep space, particularly the Moon and then to Mars," said Apollo 17's Harrison Schmitt, the last man to step onto the Moon's battered surface. He also served as U.S. Senator from New Mexico from 1977 to 1983.
"NASA is too old, too bureaucratic, and too risk adverse. Either a new agency would need to be created to implement such a program or NASA would need to be restructured largely along the lines of the NASA of the late 1960s," Schmitt said.
Schmitt said of particular importance is for NASA to consist of engineers and technicians in their 20s and managers to be in their 30s, and the re-institution of design engineering activities in parallel with those of contractors.
Like many, Schmitt said that a new NASA or a new agency needs the guarantee of sustained political/financial commitment. But NASA, at present, is a shell-shocked agency after the fall of Columbia, Schmitt suggested. "NASA is so risk adverse that it won't live up to its responsibilities in space and fly perfectly good shuttles until there is no risk in flying! That is an impossible requirement," he said.
"We are now in the position of pretending to be a spacefaring people while only Russia and China are actually flying," Schmitt said.
Institutional paralysis
Veteran space journalist, William Burrows -- author of This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age among the long list of books to his credit -- also sees NASA as a sad shell of its former self.
"The space agency is effectively shut down in a kind of institutional paralysis," Burrows said. "The old hands from the Apollo days have mostly drifted off and, with the exception of the kind of solar system exploration being done at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there's virtually nothing going on to attract smart, energetic, and ambitious replacements."
Burrows senses that the International Space Station (ISS) is "emblematic of the wider problem."
"First of all, it's not finished. The Bush Administration has lopped off two modules as a blatant vote of no confidence. We need Russians to get us to and away from it. And NASA has never articulated a purpose for it other than the ubiquitous old standby: science," Burrows said.
The science Burrows feels has merit has to do with physiology, but adds: "There's no point in learning about how the human body reacts in space unless we plan to send people there for a serious, historic purposeand clearly we don't," he added.
"The space agency is in limbo because it has no overarching goalno majestic purpose," Burrows said. "It is capable of pulling off an overarching effort with the White House and Congress squarely behind it. The institutional core is still there and so are the basic resources at Headquarters and around the empire."
Keeping heroes home
In the historical scheme of things, NASA has reached a critical juncture as to its future. That's the judgment of Roger Launius, Chair of the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
"We have not been at a more significant time in space policy since the decision to cancel Apollo and move forward with the space shuttle," Launius said. "There is an opportunity, right now, to decide exactly what the next 30 years is going to look like."
America's reach for the Moon was driven by a specific geo-political reason: a "space race" between two superpowers fueled more by ego and political pride than huge amounts of liquid oxygen, hydrogen, and kerosene.
What's missing now is that enabling trigger to prompt going to the Moon today, or trooping off to Mars, Launius said, enough to mobilize money, a sustained action plan, as well as gain the support of the President, members of Congress, and the American public.
"What scenario can one envision that would suggest that this is something we need to do? The loss of Columbia is not in that category, in my mind," Launius said.
But shutting down the human spaceflight effort, Launius said, and letting the robots do the heavy lifting of space exploration, doesn't seem like a viable option. "What President wants to go down in history as the guy who sent the heroes home?"
Keeping heroes homebound rings true, however, for Robert Park, a University of Maryland scientist who is scheduled to testify before the Senate later this week about the International Space Station.
"NASA is looking a little sick. But to imagine that the cure is a larger dose of what made it sick is downright pathological," Park noted. "Manned spaceflight is going nowhere because there's nowhere to go."
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