Panel says NASA needs more funding
WASHINGTON - Put more money into NASA or forget about exploring space with astronauts, a blue-ribbon panel told the White House yesterday. In its final, 157-page report - titled “Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation’’ - the 10-person committee, led by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine, has called into question the strategy of the civilian space program.
Means do not match aspirations, the panel declared.
“The human spaceflight program, in the opinion of this Committee, is at a tipping point where either additional funds must be provided or the exploration program first instituted by President Kennedy must be abandoned at least for the time being,’’ the report states.
Earlier this year the White House asked Augustine and his fellow panelists to review the entire human space flight program. After months of research, the committee presented the administration with five major options, three of which require considerably more money. Going beyond low earth orbit, which the committee advocates, would require a bump in NASA’s budget at a time when the White House has signaled that agencies should expect leaner times ahead.
The committee said the current program, which includes two new rockets and a lunar base, could be achieved more or less on schedule (with a moon landing in the early 2020s) only if NASA received an additional $45 billion for the exploration program between 2010 and 2020. Such a huge boost is unlikely, and thus the report explores less expensive alternatives.
Going to Mars, the most attractive target, would be cost-prohibitive given today’s technology and plausible NASA budgets, the committee found.
The committee said a Moon-first option is a viable strategy, but the report cites the advantages of what it calls the “flexible path’’ approach, in which a heavy-lift rocket would blast astronauts millions of miles into space, perhaps to a near-Earth asteroid or even to one of the moons of Mars.
