When U.S.
President George W. Bush stepped to the podium at NASA headquarters here Jan. 19, 2004, to
call for returning humans
to the Moon by 2020, cynics could be forgiven for giving the Vision for Space
Exploration little chance of succeeding.
Many watching
the president's speech that day also had been watching 15 years earlier when
the first President Bush delivered a speech on the steps of the National Air
and Space Museum calling for sending humans back to the Moon in preparation for eventual missions
to Mars.
The Space
Exploration Initiative, or SEI, never progressed beyond viewgraphs, its growth
stunted by an unsupportive Congress, infighting between the White House and
NASA, and a hastily calculated price tag that gave the nation sticker shock. By
its third anniversary, the SEI was little more than an inadequately funded
Office for Exploration run by then-associate administrator Mike Griffin.
Today
Griffin runs all of NASA, wielding a $16 billion budget
more than a fifth of which is dedicated to building a space
shuttle replacement capable of launching astronauts on trips to the Moon.
For
Griffin, there is no comparison between what has been accomplished under the
Vision for Space Exploration in the first three years and how far SEI got in
the same amount of time.
"The Vision
for Space Exploration was enacted as the law of the land," Griffin said in a
recent interview, referring to the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 endorsing
building new vehicles to replace the space shuttle and carry astronauts to the Moon by 2020.
Congress
also has shown its support with money, providing $9 billion for exploration
since Bush rolled out the vision. While a substantial amount of that funding
initially went towards now-defunct legacy projects rolled into the exploration
program--notably the proposed multibillion dollar Prometheus space nuclear
systems initiative--NASA has received sufficient budget to go well beyond the
viewgraph stage. Scott Horowitz, the former NASA astronaut hired away from ATK
Thiokol in late 2005 to run the U.S. space agency's
$3.4-billion-a-year-and-growing Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, said
the vision has progressed in its first three years from a statement of goals
and objectives to a bona fide program that has signed contracts and started
building hardware.
"[W]e are
already cutting metal and testing components for Ares
I and Orion,"
Horowitz said. "By year four, we will have all major elements under contract to
provide the new capabilities to replace the space shuttle after it retires in
2010."
Griffin
echoed those comments in a recent interview.
"We have
vehicles in procurement right now and others yet to come," Griffin said. "We're
grappling with the real world of program management in the Washington
environment, the SEI was shut down frankly when President Clinton came to
power. We're in an entirely different world."
That world,
however, is far from perfect. NASA has not been given the budget increases the
White House initially promised, forcing the agency to make unpopular cuts to science
and aeronautics to keep its human spaceflight programs adequately funded. And a
decision by the new Democratic Congress to fund most federal agencies this year
at last year's levels has left NASA's exploration planners struggling with a
$500 million shortfall that Griffin recently announced
would delay the introduction of the Orion
Crew Exploration Vehicle and its Ares I rocket to
2015.
While NASA
still hopes to shoot for the Moon by 2020, agency officials readily concede the
next four years or so are all about completing the International Space Station,
retiring the shuttle, and building and testing Ares and Orion. Work on the
heavy-lift rocket, lunar lander and other hardware needed to send astronauts to
the Moon is not due to really get started before the shuttle is done flying.
Even the series of robotic precursor missions Bush called for in his landmark
2004 address now appears likely to be scaled back to a lone Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter and a piggy-back
payload NASA added to the mission because it had room on the rocket.
No less a
hardcore human space exploration proponent that Griffin recently acknowledged
that -- at least for now -- the vision is primarily a space shuttle replacement
effort.
"Many folks
have said, 'I'm not worried about the Moon right now.' I would say to them,
'I'm not worried about the Moon right now either.' I'm worried about replacing
the shuttle," Griffin told the Senate Commerce space and aeronautics
subcommittee during a Feb. 28 NASA budget hearing.
Of the more
than $16 billion NASA plans to spend between now and 2010 on exploration
systems, roughly 80 percent is designated Orion and Ares, with the rest
budgeted for lunar robotics programs, space station-based research, and other
advanced technology development efforts.
By 2011,
the first year NASA expects to be out from under the $3 billion to $4 billion a
year it spends on shuttle, exploration systems is expected to consume nearly
half of NASA's total budget, with upwards of 90 percent of exploration funding
going toward completing Ares and Orion and getting started on the Ares 5
heavy-lift rocket and other Moon-bound hardware.
Whether
NASA gets to hold on to the money freed up by retiring the shuttle and use it
to shift its space exploration plans into a higher gear remains to be seen.
John
Logsdon, a NASA advisor and George Washington University space policy expert,
said whoever wins the White House in 2008 will have no choice but to see Orion
through to completion if he or she wants the United States to have its own means
of launching humans into space. Continuing to fly the shuttle will not be an
option, he said, because--as NASA's human spaceflight chief William Gerstenmaier
put it recently--the agency is already nearly "past the point of no return" on
retiring the shuttle.
But the
next president will get to decide, Logsdon said, whether to stop with fielding
a new capsule capable of going to the space station or push on with the
necessary investment to send humans to the Moon. That decision, he said, will
happen in 2010 when the White House and NASA prepare their first post-shuttle
budget.
"That's the
budget in which the decision on how to use the resources freed up by ending
shuttle flights will be made," Logsdon said. "That's when we make the decision
[about whether we] are we going to take Ares V, the lunar lander and Earth departure stage into development or
not ... We could just decide to go on with the utilization of the station and fly
Orion [there] for a decade or more."
How much
progress NASA is able to make on Orion and Ares by the time there is a new
president in the White House depends on much more near-term political
decisions, starting with this year's budget.
Griffin
recently warned that giving NASA anything less than its full request for 2008
would inflict "grave and lasting damage to the program."
To NASA's
advantage, the agency has some key lawmakers out looking for more money for the
agency, including Sens. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), the chairwoman of the Senate
Appropriations subcommittee that drafts NASA's budget; Bill Nelson (D-Fla.),
the chairman of the Senate Commerce space and aeronautics subcommittee, and his
Republican counterpart Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.
In the
House of Representatives, however, there are fewer strong NASA supporters in
key positions.
House
Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) said in a
recent interview that he supports the Moon-Mars initiative, but does not think
his views are widely shared among his House colleagues. "There's not much of an
understanding of it," he said, a political reality he blames on the president's
failure to promote the vision the way he does other policy priorities. "So it's
not a matter so much of not supporting it, but supporting other NASA interests
more. That's the dilemma we have."
