http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-02-06-nasa-cover_x.htm
Columbia's disintegration over Texas didn't curb America's appetite for launching people into space. Public opinion polls and soaring rhetoric from the White House and Congress make that clear. But to what end? Should the next generation of space travel be driven by awe-inspiring goals such as colonizing the moon, landing on Mars or even traveling beyond the solar system? Or should NASA's ambitions be more modest: Find a safer way into space, stay in Earth's orbit and keep doing experiments that amount to updated versions of John Glenn's journey 41 years ago? (Related item: Photos of new shuttle designs) Those questions will be the backdrop next week, as Congress begins hearings on the shuttle disaster. As much as anything, the hearings will focus on what the future of American space travel might look like. For now, budget deficits, the threat of terrorism, a possible war with Iraq and a balky economy are huge barriers to any massive new spending on the space program. NASA's immediate future is tied to the shuttle - an aging equipment hauler whose reliability again is in question - and to the International Space Station. Before it was scaled back amid cost overruns, the $100 billion station was to have had a launch facility for trips to the moon and Mars. There are many proposals, but no definite plan for a second-generation shuttle, or "space plane," that would be launched either by rockets on the ground or from atop a moving jet. The most ambitious space dreamers are pushing for a manned flight to Mars. But that likely would require an entirely different kind of spacecraft. There's been no action yet on plans to develop nuclear propulsion or other advanced power systems that would be needed to make the 280-million-mile round-trip feasible. That's partly why its harshest critics see NASA as a moribund program that is underfunded and sorely in need of direction. These space analysts say that after operating two decades without a clear goal that excites Americans, NASA for the most part has slipped from the public consciousness. The critics, along with many members of Congress, want NASA to define an ambitious vision for itself, much as President Kennedy did in 1961 by calling on the United States to put a man on the moon by decade's end. If NASA simply continues with its current approach, "it probably, in 25 years, will be the death of human space flight," says Howard McCurdy, an American University professor of public affairs. "The people who go to work for NASA want to go somewhere" besides the station, says John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "They look back at the journeys of Apollo with nostalgia and hope for the day when the country allows NASA once again to go somewhere." At Tuesday's memorial service in Houston for the Columbia astronauts, President Bush aimed high. "This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose," he said. "It is a desire written in the human heart." Bush wasn't the first president to take a cue from Kennedy. In 1989, 20 years after NASA and Neil Armstrong beat Kennedy's deadline to the moon, the first President Bush called for a mission to Mars. It created barely a ripple of debate, especially after NASA offered a mind-boggling cost estimate for a Mars program: $500 billion, equal to about a quarter of the U.S. government's current budget. Kennedy's challenge was all about proving America superior to the Soviet Union, and to meet it NASA's budget grew to more than 4% of federal spending during the mid-1960s. It's less than 1% today, about $15 billion. The new debate in Congress over NASA's future will focus largely on whether to provide money for another shuttle (Endeavour, the newest one, cost $2.1 billion in 1991), or to step up development of a next-generation spacecraft that could cost billions more. Last year, NASA scaled back a $4.8 billion program to come up with an alternative to the shuttle after a government audit called the effort wasteful, in part because NASA hadn't decided what it wanted its next spacecraft to do. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, who was appointed by Bush in 2001 and told to address the space station's rising costs, directed $2.1 billion of the money toward the station and to maintenance aimed at extending the shuttle fleet's lifetime to 2020. NASA officials generally can count on strong political backing on Capitol Hill, particularly among lawmakers from the states where the space agency has flight centers. But NASA's lack of a grand plan, and lawmakers' frustration with the rising cost of the station, has led to some grumbling. Some members of Congress who grew up during NASA's glory days of the 1960s say that challenging the space agency's spending can seem almost unpatriotic. But the reality is this: NASA is part of the same funding bill as the Veteran's Administration. When the agencies compete for dwindling funds, veterans are likely to win because they typically have more political clout than NASA. So while many in Congress talk about supporting grand space exploration plans, for now they just want something cheaper and safer than the shuttle, whose missions cost about $400 million each. "We need to decide what we're going to recommend to take care of" now, says Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee, a top Democrat on the House space panel. "It will be hard to keep people focused on that because it's not as sexy." Shuttle seen as limited Hours after Columbia's demise, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, suggested that NASA should be aiming to go to Mars. "My vision is to push the envelope on the human exploration of space," he said. But DeLay, whose district near Houston is home to many astronauts and Johnson Space Center workers, also is pushing for more money to improve the shuttle. To some space analysts, that's a contradiction. The shuttle, built on 1970s technology and now with catastrophic failures in about 2% of its flights, has a limited future because it's tied to Earth's orbit. The three remaining shuttles will continue to be funded, and after Columbia's disaster more money is likely to be poured into making them safe. But the real future of space exploration, analysts say, is not the shuttle. A vehicle that initially was supposed to fly twice a month, pay its way with commercial cargo and produce a diet of exciting missions instead flies only five or six times a year. Its astronauts lug construction material to the space station and conduct a range of experiments. In the early 1980s shuttles deployed satellites, but operators of billion-dollar satellites turned elsewhere for launch systems after Challenger and its crew of seven were lost in 1986. Shuttle crews have made valuable repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope and briefly have captured the nation's attention with space walks, but most missions these days are deliveries to the space station. Since the first few shuttle flights in the early 1980s, America hasn't held its breath over the shuttle's missions the way it did over Apollo's quest for the moon. "The one positive thing that will come out of this accident, I hope, is accelerating the technology development to build a replacement for the shuttle," Logsdon says. Closely tied to the shuttle's future is the space station. The shuttle is the only vehicle that can ferry large pieces needed to finish building the station. If the shuttle is idle for a long time because of the Columbia probe, work will stop, the station's three astronauts could have to return to Earth and the station could be left uninhabited. NASA says that finishing the station by 2006 - albeit several years late and billions of dollars over budget - is key to any future plans for manned flights beyond the moon. A high priority of the station's research is to study the impact on the body of long spells in space. (If existing rockets could be made with enough fuel to get astronauts to Mars and back, the trip would take at least six months each way, experts say.) In its present configuration, a 150-ton complex the size of a three-bedroom house without a launching platform, the space station's usefulness to moon or Mars exploration is uncertain. Many scientists say most of the station's research - and the shuttle's - could be done with robots on unmanned craft. The station, first manned in 2000, was built to last 20 years. U.S. officials assume it will be used longer. But even in its grandest incarnation, the station would stay in Earth's orbit, and would be only a steppingstone to interplanetary travel. "In that sense it's no more exciting to build than the interstate highway system or a gas station," McCurdy says. "The exciting thing was getting to Yellowstone National Park. That was the exciting part of the vision." The next generation For years, NASA officials have examined ways to replace the shuttle with a smaller craft that would be cheaper to operate and could fly far more often. But like the shuttle, none of the next-generation vehicles would be able to take crews to the moon or beyond. In recent years, NASA has examined several potential replacements that were touted as sleeker, lighter, safer and more advanced than the shuttle. The proposals included a model by Northrup Grumman that could be launched by booster rockets, or take off from atop a jet. It then would climb to a high altitude and fire rockets that would carry it into orbit. Another plan, by Lockheed Martin, would launch a winged craft from a "wedding cake" stack of reusable rockets, with the craft firing its own rockets for a final boost into orbit. Last year, O'Keefe said those proposals and several others did not represent enough of a technological leap from the current shuttle. He then began to focus on a concept by NASA engineers for a relatively small, five-passenger space plane that would blast into space atop a Delta 4 or Titan 5 rocket, then return to Earth as a glider, much like the shuttle. NASA officials said the plane would have two advantages over larger craft: it could be parked at the space station as an escape vehicle and therefore allow more people to work there; and it would cost "only" $1 billion a plane. It's unclear whether the Columbia disaster will turn NASA's attention back to a larger craft; the agency hasn't committed to any model. Aiming for Mars Those who want NASA to reach farther into space say the public long ago lost interest in the types of missions space planes could do. Scientists, activists and lawmakers who support a Mars mission say America should think of space as a frontier, not a program. They say the president should set an aggressive agenda, and they want NASA to hand off space exploration, at least between here and the moon, to the private sector so that entrepreneurs and scientists could revitalize space technology and lower the exploration costs. "The overriding goal of humans going into space is to settle space," says Rick Tumlinson, founder of the Space Frontier Foundation. "It is our destiny ... to expand beyond the Earth." It's not just dreamers who challenge NASA's assumptions, who chafe at a system dominated by big contractors, big bureaucracy, congressional pique and year-to-year budget squeezes. Others recall the computer and telecommunications revolutions of the past 20 years and wonder why the same hasn't happened to space travel. A great venture such as sending humans to Mars has to fit a political niche, like the Apollo moon shots fit the goal of beating the Soviets, says Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society. He believes the Columbia tragedy might create momentum for manned exploration. "They are our emissaries in exploration," he says. "We have this innate desire to believe that astronauts are explorers," not lab technicians. "I'm a space buff, and I want to be part of a humans-to-Mars mission more than anything, (but) I've got to believe we don't have that political niche right now." xponent In Aeresychonous Orbit Maru rob ________________________________ You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here. And whether you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind your back. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
