In a post at the Huffington Post,
Apollo 11 astronaut Buz Aldrin praised the Obama Administration's plans to cancel the Constellation moon program, and the Ares rocket program, and to rely on the private sector to ferry astronauts and cargo to orbit.
Thank you, Mr. President.
That's what we should say to President Barack Obama in light of his Fiscal Year 2011 space budget for NASA. The President courageously decided to redirect our nation's space policy away from the foolish and underfunded Moon race that has consumed NASA for more than six years, aiming instead at boosting the agency's budget by more than $1 billion more per year over the next five years, topping off at $100 billion for NASA between now and 2015. And he directed NASA to spend a billion per year on buying rides for American astronauts aboard new, commercially developed space vehicles-that's American space vehicles. Other NASA funds will go into developing and testing new revolutionary technologies that we can use in living and working on Mars and its moons.
Aldrin has criticized the Ares rocket program before, calling the test of an Ares 1 prototype: "
much ado about nothing, and "a little more than a half-a-billion dollar political show".
In this latest post, Buz Aldrin pointed out that the Constellation program was vastly underfunded, had little chance of success, and was eating into NASA's Earth and space science programs. The money spent for a return to the moon was taking away from the Mars part of the 'Moon-Mars Initiative.'
The administration's new priorities will add a billion dollars a year to NASA's budget over the next five years, with funds going to advanced technology research and to buy spaceflight capabilities from private companies like
Space-X.
The goal of a return to the moon - and
maybe Mars have been replaced with a '
Flexible Path' that may include manned trips to near-Earth asteroids and/or the Martian moons before landing on the Red Planet. Quoting Buz Aldrin again:
Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official. Augustine's team took testimony and presentations from many people with ideas on what way forward NASA should take (that group included me). In October, it presented its report to the President and to Dr. John Holdren, Obama's science advisor and a friend and colleague of mine. The report strongly suggested the nation move away from the troubled rocket program, called Ares 1, and both extend the life of the space station and develop commercial ways of sending astronauts and cargoes up to the station. And it suggested a better way to spend our taxpayer dollars would be not focused on the Moon race, but on something it called a "Flexible Path." Flexible in the sense that it would redirect NASA towards developing the capability of voyaging to more distant locations in space, such as rendezvous with possibly threatening asteroids, or comets, or even flying by Mars to land on its moons. Many different destinations and missions would be enabled by that approach, not just one.
He closes the article with a call to support the President and a promise to revisit the issue in future articles:
I'll be speaking out about the plan more in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, I ask my friends and readers to get behind Obama's new policy. Join with me and help usher in a new age of space. A space program that truly goes somewhere! With his deeds, not only words, President Obama has revitalized our struggling space program. His has been a "Profile in Courage" when it comes to space and science. And that's why I call it his JFK moment.
Edited to add: This comes with particular satisfaction for me. In the early 2000's time period, I went to Washington as part of the Space Frontier Foundation's 'March Storm' to talk to congress about new priorities for our space program. Those priorities included allowing the private sector to take a larger role in space transport and to divert the money saved into advanced research and exploration.
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