In a thoughtful piece at the Space Review, Jeff Foust delves into the issue of the vision thing, which NASA’s human spaceflight program seems to continue to lack.
Foust starts his article with comments from Steve Squyres, the Cornell University planetary scientist who is the principal investigator of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers and chairman of the NASA Advisory Council.
Artist’s concept of SLS. (NASA)
Squyres said he is not so much concerned about the viability of the Space Launch System, but rather its lack of a plan to develop the hardware needed to go along with the rocket or spacecraft. Like a rover for the Moon. Or life-support systems for going to an asteroid.
And that’s one the of the dirty secrets of NASA’s current plan to launch a new rocket by 2021 or so: Under the current budget conditions — let alone a cut — there’s absolutely no money for actually building payloads, stuff to fly that will allow the space agency to go meaningful places and do meaningful things.
For Squyres, however, there’s a deeper, related problem: No clear mission-success statement. “It is harder than we would like it to be to clearly articulate to our stakeholders and to our workforce what the agency is trying to achieve. In the absence of that, it makes it harder to get the job done,” he said.
NASA has said its long-term goal is Mars, and President Obama has said he would like the space program to send humans to an asteroid in the interim. But there are no budgets or timelines for either of these missions.
Later in the article Foust notes that NASA is indeed working on a “180-day report” directed by Congress in the agency’s 2012 appropriations bill to further refine its exploration plans, including a discussion of specific destinations.
Beyond that some hope that an upcoming study, likened as a decadal study for human exploration, will provide recommendations for spaceflight goals during the period 2014 through 2023. The study is due in August 2014.
That in and of itself presents a problem, beyond just having to wait two-plus more years for a long-range vision.
By the summer of 2014, if re-elected, President Obama will have just over two years left in office and probably be disinclined to change the space program’s direction. Or if a Republican wins the White House, chances are he will have put his own stamp on the space program already, and the survey probably won’t have much effect.
Article source: http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2012/04/will-nasa-ever-articulate-a-mission-for-human-spaceflight/
Tags: jeff foust, nasa advisory council, steve squyres <BR/>
