NASA Chief Takes Heat for Not Shooting for Moon

WASHINGTON (Feb. 2) – NASA Administrator Charles Bolden won a Distinguished Flying Cross as a combat pilot in Vietnam, but this week he's caught in a different kind of crossfire.

Bolden inherited a program to return to the moon a full half-century after the first lunar program. On Monday, the White House canceled the program, which was over budget, behind schedule and plagued with technological problems. Officials also increased the budget by $6 billion to begin developing technologies for space exploration, to expand the International Space Station and for other science programs.

"When you have a program that's going to cost a fortune to resurrect ... you pick a new course," Bolden said in a news conference Tuesday at the National Press Club. "And that's what we've done."

Without the moon program, critics charge that America's space program lacks vision, allows upstarts like China to fill the void and cedes too many safety responsibilities to private companies planning missions.

"The new direction is no direction," said John Pike, space expert and director of the research group GlobalSecurity.org. "What are they going to do when they grow up?"

Bolden, a former astronaut and retired Marine Corps major general, highlighted seven companies Tuesday that will receive a combined $50 million in funding to develop private spacecraft and components.

David Thompson, head of Orbital Sciences Corp., said the private space industry is "ever more capable" and NASA's decision to rely on it is "the most dramatic change in our civilian space activity in at least the last 20 years."

Rep. Ralph Hall of Texas, the top Republican on the House Science Committee, said that's risky compared with the NASA-run Constellation program, which already has cost $9 billion.

"I am alarmed that this administration is planning to reject all that we have accomplished and instead rely on a risky new initiative to buy commercial crew services from companies that, in some cases, have little to no track record developing space systems," Hall said.

Bolden acknowledged that killing off the Constellation program, which would have returned astronauts to the moon as a precursor to someday going to Mars, was like a "death in the family" for NASA workers.

Constellation, the shuttle and other NASA programs have long used vehicles built by private industry but owned and developed by NASA. Under the new commercial system, NASA will help fund the development of private crew vehicles and their components, but will have a lighter hand in developing and overseeing them. NASA cites the example of the commercial sector that already launches the nation's military and communications satellites.

"Left to their own devices they tend to produce unreliable hardware that explodes," Pike said of the private sector.

W. Henry Lambright, professor of public administration at Syracuse University's Maxwell School and a space expert, said the reliance on the private sector is a gamble, and a NASA advisory board has raised questions about the safety of the idea. "It's hard to imagine they [private companies] are going to be able to do it much less expensively."

After the space shuttle retires at the end of the year, the United States will not have its own transportation to the International Space Station. And the new plan has no details on human space flight after the station is retired in 2020. But Bolden said that doesn't mean the U.S. is ceding the heavens to countries like China, Russia and India.

"We are not abandoning anything. Human space flight is in our DNA," Bolden said.

"We are still the nation to which everyone looks and with whom everyone wants to partner," he said, adding that NASA will work with other countries on future space exploration.

Bolden acknowledged he still needs to get his bold remake of NASA approved by Congress. But he said President Obama's budget, if approved, has enough money to fund the new plans. After years of NASA cost overruns and delays on projects, he vowed it would be different this time.

Bolden said the $6 billion that Obama added to NASA's budget over the next five years will help develop "leapfrog technologies" for human space flight. Bolden talked about astronauts traveling to Mars in "days not months." (Though George Washington University professor John Logsdon said a review of the NASA budget found no evidence of a nuclear power program that would be needed for that.)

John Holdren, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the new destination would be determined by the pace and direction of the technology that is developed.

One near-term advantage of the new NASA plan is that Obama will extend NASA's trips to the International Space Station an extra five years, Logsdon said. Previous budgets planned for ending the station in 2015 and deorbiting it. Now scientists will have more years to do research there.

"It can't do much research on the bottom of the Pacific," said Logsdon, a space policy expert who has served on NASA advisory boards.

But the murky future of human space flight makes it harder to spark the public imagination.

"It's going to be a little hard to package and sell it. No one gets excited about an investment in technology," Logsdon said.