Bush's space plan eyes new generation

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush needed to know whether it would be feasible to create a permanent base on the moon as the first step to send humans to Mars, administration officials turned for analytical help to an institution that has a long history with the space program: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And if the financial and political obstacles facing the president's plan for the next generation of space flight can be overcome, researchers and administration officials say that the role played by MIT and other universities that emphasize scientific research is expected to expand.

One big obstacle to the Bush plan is the dwindling number of people at NASA who have the skills and knowledge needed if the United States is going to turn dreams of new spacecraft into actual vehicles and overcome the biological challenges of sending men and women into space for what could be years at a time.

Indeed, some specialists said that part of the impetus for the president's bold new strategy is the steady erosion over the past three decades -- since the end of the first Moon missions in 1972 -- of key skills, such as developing rockets to transport humans outside Earth's orbit and keeping astronauts healthy on long journeys.

As a starting point to help bolster research and inspire a new generation of scientists and engineers, Bush would spend $12 billion on research and development over the next five years, and a significant portion of that is expected to be disbursed as research grants to MIT and other institutions for spacecraft design, rocket science, unmanned probes, and space biology.

"We want to capture all the capabilities across the country and the world," said retired Rear Admiral Craig E. Steidle, director of NASA's new Office of Space Exploration, saying he will establish "an open atmosphere."

MIT has long been a key partner in the space program, including helping to develop the robotic rover Spirit that is now studying the surface of Mars. In the past year, some key analyses were conducted in Cambridge, including whether the president's vision to return to the moon by 2020 and establish a base or future missions to Mars and beyond was achievable. Scientists there sketched out how the missions might be planned, different spacecraft designs, and the physiological factors that would have to be overcome.

"The president doesn't make an announcement like this without study," said Ed Crawley, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. "We have spent part of the last year doing a detailed study."

The Bush plan was met with a heavy dose of skepticism in Congress, where some questioned whether it is affordable and capable of gaining enough public support.

But NASA has another looming challenge: It has been more than 30 years since Americans traveled to the moon, and many of the skills and NASA's institutional knowledge to get there have been lost. Rebuilding the brainpower required to travel to the moon and initiating new training to reach other worlds will determine perhaps more than any other factor whether the goal can become reality, according to current and former NASA officials, astronauts, and space specialists.

"The fact that we don't have a good enough skilled work force poses major problems to getting it done," said Lori Garver, former associate NASA administrator for plans and policy. "Those who worked during the Apollo days are gone. The knowledge has dropped off since."

NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe said 25 percent of NASA's work force of nearly 18,000 people is near retirement age. The agency, O'Keefe said, must recruit "new hires from graduate schools in engineering technology and science-related fields."

"I have to think that reconstituting our technology base is one of the main drivers of the policy," said Garver, the former NASA official. "It's one of the benefits we'll get from it. NASA hopes that this will be an attraction to university students to do something exceptional."

The work force "is a huge issue for NASA, but also an opportunity," said Claude Canizares, associate provost of MIT and a space scientist who served for 10 years on the NASA Advisory Council. "If you are going to have a long-range plan, you want to have a lot of young people involved."

The specialists said two primary areas of expertise that will be needed are the renewed ability to develop space launch and transport vehicles and to figure out whether and how humans can survive in space for much longer periods than ever before. A trip to Mars and back would take at least a year.

"It's been almost 30 years since we built a new launch system," said MIT's Crawley. "There is an enormous difference between the skills the nation had during Apollo and now. You have working at NASA now . . . a generation that has never built a rocket."

There are also many unknowns facing the Bush plan. While much has been learned about the effects on the human body of weightlessness, there is much that remains a mystery about the impact of long stays on the moon or a journey to Mars that would take at least six months each way. Astronauts working on the International Space Station have remained in space for only up to six months.

Scientists also don't know what impact long exposure to radiation -- especially outside the so-called Van Allen belts, which protect the Earth from space radiation -- will have on astronauts.

Meeting such scientific challenges will make or break the new space program, specialists said.

"NASA has been scattered to the four winds," said Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon as commander of Apollo 17. He said university students now coming up the ranks and those to follow "are the generations the president is talking about." He predicted that "you'll see a lot of kids in college studying math and science."

MIT is already geared up. "We have been working with this for some time," said Crawley. "We are educating students to work for NASA, run these programs, and solve these problems."