NASA CHIEF: SPACE PROGRAM AT HISTORIC TURNING POINTCOLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado The dream of interplanetary exploration is alive again, but crawling out of the gravity well of skepticism and cynicism is as challenging as landing humans on other worlds, it seems.
Sean OKeefe, NASA Administrator, called upon the public, the Congress, and the aerospace community today to back a broader space exploration agenda. The tragic loss of the crew of space shuttle Columbia last year sparked a reappraisal of NASAs exploration goals. Those long-range objectives of the exploring the Moon, Mars and beyond with both robots and humans can be sustainable and affordable -- a message that must be tirelessly backed, OKeefe said.
OKeefe spoke at the 20th National Space Symposium held here this week. The meeting is conducted by the Space Foundation.
Counter the skeptics
OKeefe said the space program is at a "historic turning point." But there is much work to be done to fend off doubters that exploration beyond low Earth orbit is too expensive and lacking in worth, he said.
"The advocates must become as vocal as the skeptics," OKeefe said. "We can win this debate."
There is no reason to turn back the clock to the 1960s and revisit the space race climate of U.S. versus Soviet Union one-upmanship in space, the NASA chief said. That was a "crash program to make a global statement. Thats not the environment we live in today," he said.
The new space exploration initiative posed by President George W. Bush in January "is not a budget buster," the O'Keefe said. He chided "establishment newspapers" as mischaracterizing the agencys new space goals as far too costly.
"This is an affordable program," OKeefe stated, one that can be measured by step-by-step progress to create "new beachheads in the cosmos."
Technological spinoffs
By reenergizing NASA with a new visionary plan, OKeefe said, there will be myriad technological innovations stemming from the work. Unexpected breakthroughs and a host of spinoff capabilities are sure to evolve from reaching out to other worlds, he said.
There are those that see the Moon and Mars as a worthless pieces of rock, OKeefe said. They are wrong, he countered.
The ongoing exploits of the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers have shown the value of robotic exploration. But they have also demonstrated the need for human explorers.
As an example, OKeefe explained, the Opportunity Mars robot spent some 36 days working its way around a small crater at Meridiani Planum. While it found amazing things, a human could have done that same investigation in a matter of a day, he said.
Whats ahead
Given some 9 billion hits of NASAs key web site in recent months due in part to the Mars rovers "people are voting with their finger" demonstrating keen public interest in space exploration, OKeefe reported. (The hits reflect files downloaded, not individual visitors.)
The recent X-43A hypersonic flight, zooming to seven times the speed of sound, has also captured public imagination, according to OKeefe. He also lauded projects that will soon be in the public eye, from the soon-to-launch Messenger mission to Mercury to the Cassini spacecrafts arrival at Saturn this summer and its Huygens probe's plunge through the atmosphere of Titan.
The NASA Administrator stressed the need to "extend the life" of the Hubble Space Telescope, which will not be serviced under the recent controversial decision he made. The telescope is likely to last into 2007 and perhaps beyond, but will not make it into the next decade as would have been the case if it were serviced. O'Keefe said that various options are being explored to lengthen the astronomical service of the orbiting space telescope. "The great news is that we have time," he said.
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