What’s Really Wrong with our Space Policy

October 13th, 2010

There are issues about private industry vs. government, moon vs. Mars, each country for itself or in collaboration, etc., but these, I feel, pale in comparison with the real issue.

This week President Obama signed the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, a 3 year plan for NASA’s spending that also clarifies NASA priorities for the future.   Here’s some additional information.   The International Space Station is good through 2020, and there are plans for working with commercial interests to get to orbit.   For deep space, NASA is going for asteroids and eventually Mars.   Forget Constellation and the Moon.

New York Times science reporter Kenneth Chang is here in Wyoming a couple of days and spoke about it on campus.   I got the chance to chat with him, but mostly talked about other things.   I’m going to hit him up a bit more on his thoughts over dinner with a group of us from the department, but here’s something that has bugged me for years.

Space missions take years to come to frution, even decades.   Political and economic cycles are shorter term, generally speaking, rarely if ever a decade.

Obama may be making the right move, but we’re close to 20 years since the elder President Bush pointed us back at the Moon, without us getting there, and now we are making a new plan.

To properly explore space, we need to make a plan we believe in, that really reflects our long-term goals, and stick to it, somehow maintaining the vision and budget over that span.   I’m not against changing plans if showstoppers come up, or better opportunities arise, but we haven’t done this since the 1960s and Apollo.

Maybe commercial efforts and economics will wind up driving things.   Tourism and space hotels get our foot established in orbit, with cheaper prices.   Once in orbit, you’re most of the way to most attractive places to visit in the solar system.   Maybe that’s ok.   But as long as NASA is our main vehicle for space exploration and it’s government driven, I think we need a plan that we can stick to.   I don’t know how to implement it.   The American people seem more and more apathetic about space, and more and more politically crabby.

What do you think?

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