Source: The Star Press, Central Indiana
Somebody, please give NASA something to do.
President Obama’s vision for the nation’s space agency, as outlined last week, was yet another attempt by a sitting president to inspire the nation and NASA to reach for something higher. His speech could best be summed up as a failure to launch. Vague goals and fuzzy timelines were about all he could offer.
Give credit to President Kennedy nearly 50 years ago, when he laid out America’s space goal to land a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth: It was clear. It was attainable. It didn’t hurt that the U.S. was locked in a space race with the Soviet Union, which had sent the nation into a panic a few years earlier with Sputnik.
Obama, on the other hand, while speaking in eloquent terms, outlined America’s space future with fuzzy references to heavy lift rockets, perhaps a manned exploration to an asteroid, maybe orbiting Mars and sometime later on, a Mars landing.
In short, NASA will be in the business of deep space exploration and private enterprise will be responsible for getting to and from the International Space Station and low Earth orbit. He promised $6 billion to private companies to develop their own rockets to supply the space station because the grossly inefficient shuttles will be retired next year.
And just to keep everyone happy at Cape Canaveral, Obama wants to keep the Orion space capsule as a glorified lifeboat for the space station.
No matter how the issue is spun, NASA will have no manned space capability for many years. Private ventures might fill the gap, if they can afford to develop and maintain their rockets. That’s a pretty big “if.” It appears likely the U.S. will have to rely on the Russian and perhaps Chinese space programs to gain access to the final frontier. China has vowed to ramp up its own program with the stated goal of returning to the moon.
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