Source: The New York Times

Will President Obama’s plan for space exploration bring us closer to Mars — or is it a step backward for those who favor human exploration of the solar system?

In my Findings column, I discuss some potential advantages of Mr. Obama’s plan to encourage private companies like SpaceX to take over some jobs formerly performed by NASA. You can read more about SpaceX and its president, Elon Musk, in this article by my colleague Ken Chang. I can understand people’s enduring affection for NASA — I still thrill to see the space shuttle take off — but I don’t think we’ll get to Mars unless entrepreneurs Mr. Musk can sharply reduce the costs of the journey.

I also recommend a thoughtful article in The New Atlantis by Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer who runs the Transterrestrial Musings blog. In the article, he discusses ways to cut costs in space by shaking up NASA’s structure and by encouraging private companies. “Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, man’s future in space is too important to be left to NASA,” he writes, and elaborates:

  • We have had a monolithic government space agency for half a century at a cumulative cost of roughly half a trillion dollars (in current-year dollars). If we are going to continue to spend that order of magnitude of money—as, for political reasons, it seems we are going to do indefinitely—we should at least have something more to show for it than just a couple hundred brief trips to orbit for elite civil servants at an average cost over that period of about a couple billion dollars per flight. NASA needn’t do all the work of making space affordable and sustainable, but it ought to do something. To put it another way, it isn’t NASA’s job to put humans on Mars; it’s NASA’s job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society, or an offshoot of the Latter-Day Saints, or an adventure tourism company, to put humans on Mars.

 

To continue reading this story: http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/does-obama-have-the-right-stuff-for-space/?scp=3&sq=NASA&st=cse