Obama’s proposed budget for NASA starts moon war on earth

The battle over space has begun. And it’s likely to be brutal.

The Obama administration is attempting to kill NASA’s ambitious back-to-the moon program, an effort that carried the imprimatur of George W. Bush. The Constellation program had already run through about $9 billion to develop a new crew capsule, Orion, and a new rocket, the Ares 1. Both are vaporized by Obama’s new NASA strategy.

Instead of going back to the moon, the administration wants to invest $6 billion over five years in a commercial taxi to orbit. The idea is to let the private sector take over the routine flights into space.

But change does not come easily or quickly in the complex, costly and highly political enterprise that is space travel. Key lawmakers are furious at the prospect of losing jobs and NASA dollars. Also in an uproar are companies that will see billions in expected contracts fail to materialize.

“The president’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human space flight,” Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) said Monday morning. “The cancellation of the Constellation program and the end of human space flight does represent change — but it is certainly not the change I believe in.”

Last week, anticipating the news about the Constellation, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), whose state stands to lose 7,000 jobs when the space shuttle program ends next year, said, “[T]he president’s green-eyeshade-wearing advisers are dead wrong. And I, for one, intend to stand up and fight for NASA, and for the thousands of people who stand to lose their jobs.”

Obama’s 2011 budget request calls for $19 billion for NASA, a $276 million hike from the previous budget. The language in the budget repeatedly emphasizes technological innovation to make space travel less expensive.

The change in course is hardly shocking given the events of the past year. Obama appointed a committee, led by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, to examine options for human space flight. The Augustine panel saw no chance that Constellation could succeed in its goal of a 2020 landing on the moon.

“We were not a sustainable path to get back to the moon’s surface,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a conference call Monday. He said Constellation was eating up money that could have gone to innovations in space flight. The budget calls for billions in coming years dedicated to new technologies that, Bolden said, could make it possible for astronauts to explore the solar system.

“Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year,” Bolden said.

Former astronaut Sally Ride, an Augustine panel member, described the strategic shift as a “significant vote of confidence in NASA” that brings it “back to its roots as an engine of innovation.”

Obama’s budget document intimates that Constellation, with its ambition of a moon landing and a lunar base, was always a rather stale idea, in addition to being unrealistically expensive. Constellation, the budget states, “was planning to use an approach similar to the Apollo program to return astronauts back to the Moon 50 years after that program’s triumphs.”

Elon Musk, founder and president of SpaceX, a company that could bid on a commercial contract for a crewed mission to orbit, said the administration was simply being realistic in its cancellation of Constellation.

“If you’ve got a program where success is not one of the possible outcomes, you just can’t bury your head in the sand,” Musk said. “There is no way there’s the appetite for another Apollo-like program with Apollo-like budget expenditures.”

By Joel Achenbach, Washingtonpost.com