Panel To Review Spaceflight Policy
By Frank Morring, Jr.
President Obama's long-term plan for human spaceflight will have an asterisk next to it until the end of the summer at the earliest, while a panel headed by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine reviews it at the request of the White House.
Augustine, the 73-year-old former CEO of Lockheed Martin, will lead a mixed panel of NASA insiders and outside experts to review the Bush-era "Vision for Space Exploration" adopted after the Columbia accident in 2003.
Among topics to be covered will be narrowing the post-shuttle gap in delivering crews to the International Space Station (ISS) on U.S. vehicles; pushing human exploration beyond low Earth orbit to the moon and beyond, and boosting commercial human spaceflight, according to John Holdren, Obama's science adviser.
"We have a new administration and a difficult budget situation," Holdren tells Aviation Week. "I think any administration in this situation would want to review the options and try to assure itself that it's looked at everything, thought of everything, compared the pros and cons, because quite clearly there are more things we'd like to do than we can do under the existing budgets and in the available time."
The detailed $18.7 billion Obama budget request for NASA in fiscal 2010 released May 7 adds $630.4 million to exploration in FY '09-10, but that includes $400 million from the economic stimulus package adopted for FY '09. In the three years after that the request actually drops $3.760 billion from the comparable out-year figures in the final Bush administration budget request last year, for a net loss to exploration of $3.130 billion.
Without the stimulus-package money, that is very close to the $3.5 billion former administrator Michael Griffin complained had been cut "over the next four years" by "career civil servant staff" instead of elected officials.
That could change once the Augustine panel finishes what will be known officially as the "Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans" no earlier than the end of August. At that point NASA may revise its FY '10 funding request to Congress to reflect the panel's work, according to Christopher Scolese, the agency's acting administrator.
"Clearly, if we're on the wrong path, we should change," Scolese says. "If you're asking me if I think we're on the wrong path - No, I don't."
Scolese and Doug Cooke, associate administrator for exploration systems, says the U.S. space agency will continue with its plans for exploration while the review is under way, using the extra funding in FY '09-10 to buy long-lead items and accelerate testing.
But they don't plan to initiate any new contracts for the lunar exploration phase of NASA's plan - including study work on the Ares V heavy lift rocket and Altair lunar lander - until the Augustine panel finishes its work.
The out-year funding cut, if it stands, is approximately what NASA hopes to spend on lunar exploration development over that period.
In its 1990 report, the Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program that Augustine headed recommended setting the human exploration of Mars as a long-term goal, with the moon as a stepping stone on the way. It also called for a "mission to planet Earth" focusing on the environment, and a significantly expanded technology development effort to upgrade U.S. space transportation systems.
Norman Augustine photo: McGraw-Hill
