President Obama’s plans to cancel NASA’s Constellation Program in favor of major new investments in commercial space transportation for astronauts and a future mission to Mars faced new bi-partisan criticism on Thursday from the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies.
Ares 1-x soars on Oct. 28 test flight
The hearing on NASA’s $19 billion 2011 budget was the first by Congressional appropriators since Obama outlined his exploration vision in new detail on April 15.
However, the skepticism expressed by the Senate panel largely echoed that voiced by House appropriators prior to the president’s space policy remarks at the Kennedy Space Center earlier this month. They questioned the capabilities of the commercial space industry to meet safety standards as well as aggressive timelines and budgets. They voiced concerns that frequent changes in U. S. space policy and inadequate funding threaten U.S leadership in space exploration.
“We owe it to the American people. We owe it to the taxpayers, and we owe it to the astronauts to be very clear about what we are going to do and how we are going to do it,” said U. S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., the Senate subcommittee’s chairwoman.
“I want to know if this is the program the Congress and the American people will support from one administration to the next,” said Mikulski. “We cannot reinvent NASA every four year. Every new president can’t have a new NASA agenda.”
The White House strategy replaces the shuttle, which is headed for retirement this year, with commercial space taxis for the transportation of astronauts to the International Space Station. Substantial investments in new technologies would pave the way for human deep space exploration, first with a mission to an asteroid by 2025 and an orbital mission to Mars a decade later.
Nonetheless, Senate appropriators challenged a strategy that abandons the $9.4 billion already invested in the back-to-the-moon Constellation Program initiated by former President Bush in 2004, and requires an additional $2.5 billion in phase out.
“The president’s new plan, like his old one, shows that NASA’s leadership team still does not understand the issues at stake,” said U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, of Alabama, the subcommittee’s ranking Republican and one of the new strategy’s harshest critics.
“Your plan does nothing more than continue America’s abdication of leadership in space,” he told NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, the administration’s only witness.
Shelby challenged the wisdom of turning to commercial providers as a less costly alternative when there is no apparent customer base for the service outside of NASA.
During is April 15 remarks, the president re-enforced his determination cancel Constellation’s Ares 1 and Ares V heavy lift rocket. However, Obama resurrected the Orion crew exploration vehicle as a rescue craft that would be parked at the space station. He pledged that NASA would devise a new heavy lift rocket concept by 2015.
The committee challenged the White House strategy on those new features as well, based on testimony from John Frost, a member of NASA’s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.
The cancelled Ares 1 rocket, which builds on propulsion hardware from the space shuttle and Saturn V rocket, and Orion, a scaled up version of the Apollo capsule, represent the safest successor to NASA’s shuttle and the system most likely to survive the difficult development phase faced by any new spacecraft, he told the subcommittee.
Ares 1-x lifts off on Oct. 28 test flight
“In our opinion such inherent safety simply cannot be taken as a given in possible alternative launchers as some would like to be the case,” said Frost. “We believe abandoning Ares 1 as a baseline vehicle for any alternative without demonstrated capability or proven superiority is unwise and probably not cost effective.”
Bolden defended the agency’s allegiance to safety, while noting NASA will complete work on a human rating standard that should be available to commercial developers this year.
No matter its design heritage, the un flown Ares 1 is not demonstrably safer than commercial alternatives, he told appropriators.
“They are all zero,” Bolden said, in his defense of the president’s new course.
Constellation was so under funded it was one to two decades away from achieving the goal outlined by the Bush White House of returning human explorers to the moon by 2020, according to the Augustine Committee, a panel of experts appointed by the White House to make an assessment last year.
“Many of the things NASA has learned from the Constellation Program will be critical as the agency moves forward,” Bolden said. “However as the Augustine Committee concluded, the overall human space flight program is on an unsustainable trajectory. If we continue on our current course, we will have to make even deeper cuts to other parts of NASA’s budget, terminate support for the space station early and reduce our science and aeronautics efforts.”
The White House plan extends operations of the space station from 2016 to 2020.