If President Obama gets his way, we are not going back to the Moon. Or, at least, not on rockets made by the U.S. It turns out that “Race to the Top” really only describes an education initiative. One may wonder why this is such big news. NASA hasn’t manned a space flight to the moon since 1972, when Apollo 17 spent three days on the lunar surface.
When one looks at NASA’s recent missions, the manned space flights (which have essentially been errand runs to the International Space Station) seem much less impressive and useful than the robotic missions (like Mars Pathfinder and Mars Rover), which bring back pretty pictures and useful information from our nearest planetary neighbor. And then there is their more down-to-earth (it’s still largely done with satellites, but still) research, which provides much of the data that has lead scientists to conclude that the earth is warming because of increased concentrations of carbon dioxide.
But what of the Moon? The last frontier of human exploration, a place we went because the Soviets might get there first and because it was something cool to do. There may be Chinese, Russian, Indian or Japanese manned missions there in the next few decades, and there may even be private missions, but no more American ones for the time being. The Constellation program, which was supposed to use technologies we already have, was going to get us back to our nearby hunk of rock by 2020. It was, however, beset by cost overruns and was projected to take up such a large portion of NASA’s budget that scientific missions would be compromised.
The problem with Constellation’s budget-eating was that it was unclear why we were trying to get back to the Moon in the first place. In the announcement that the Obama administration intended to zero-out the Constellation program, it wryly observed that “even if fully funded, NASA’s program to repeat many of the achievements of the Apollo era, 50 years later, was the least attractive approach to space exploration.”
So where is that money supposed to go instead? After all, NASA’s overall budget is supposed to go up by some $6 billion over the next five years. Much of the money is going to be directed towards research and, for $420 million over five years, a new mission to the Sun. Presumably, it will be unmanned.
Another big change that the Obama administration has proposed is a shift towards using more private and commercial vendors and manufacturers for NASA’s mission. As it was described in the Washington Post, the budget “will call for spending $6 billion over five years to develop a commercial spacecraft that could taxi astronauts into low Earth orbit.” This means that NASA itself won’t be designing the spacecraft itself and will have a private company (or companies) do it. Although this probably won’t itself lower costs, it will provide a stimulus for the rapidly expanding private space industry which may soon supplant NASA for near-Earth space flight, which might be better done by eccentric billionaires than government bureaucrats.
Not surprisingly, the administration’s plan is running into opposition. Senators whose states have large NASA presences — like John Cornyn in Texas and Richard Shelby in Alabama — oppose the plan. In addition, those who are always concerned about the possibility that a drunken country whose population will probably decline is always hot on our rocket-flared heels are not too happy about it either.
But there really is no good reason to spend taxpayer money to do something we did back when The Who weren’t two embarrassingly old guys. There is, however, a good reason for the government to give seed money to private companies looking to do spaceflight and for basic scientific research that can’t be funded any other way. There are lots of things from the 1970s that we now shun and find worthless — including floral print shirts and Stevie Nicks — let’s add government funded manned flights to the Moon to that list.