Opinion: NASA's Future Gets Murkier

(May 11) -- Late last week, NASA tested a key component of its Constellation program, launching an abort rocket a mile or so into the air at White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico and landing the Orion capsule by parachute a few thousand feet away from the pad. The apparently successful test was the first in a series meant to show how Orion could let astronauts safely escape at all stages of flight of the Orion.

What it really showed was the clouded picture at NASA in the weeks following President Barack Obama's high-profile speech outlining the future of American space travel.

While the Obama administration originally planned to cancel the entire Constellation program, including Orion, in its Feb. 1 budget submitted to Congress, Orion was restored last month, in a speech the president made at Kennedy Space Center.

But its restoration was not as a crew capsule to get astronauts to orbit, but simply as a "lifeboat" to get them home safely from the International Space Station in an emergency, leaving the job of getting astronauts to the ISS up to other commercial providers.

That means that there's no need for a launch-abort system, since it adds a lot of cost and weight to an Orion launch, and its only purpose is to allow crew to escape if something were to go wrong with the launch system. No crew, no potential need for an abort or an abort system. Without one, an Orion launched as a lifeboat could go up on a smaller launcher, or carry more cargo for the space station.

NASA tried to put on optimistic face on the potential wasted money from the test series. From the Space.com article:

"The test is part of an ongoing mission at NASA to develop safer vehicles for human spaceflight applications," NASA spokesperson Kylie Clem told Space.com. "Data from the test will have wide applicability to future launch vehicles."

Some (including the system's contractor, Orbital Sciences Corp.) have gone so far as to suggest that the commercial crew providers might want to buy the system. But it weighs and costs too much and is needlessly complex.

Meanwhile, over at the Orlando Sentinel, the reporting is that the White House plans are in trouble:

Though there is little unity in Congress on what to do next, most experts agree it could stall -- or even derail -- White House aims to retire the shuttle and to cancel NASA's long-standing plans to return astronauts to the moon.

"Purgatory is exactly the right word," said John Logsdon, a space expert at George Washington University. The White House can't marshal support to quickly pass the new NASA policy, while opponents have been unable to get enough traction to kill it outright.

On the other hand, veteran NBC space reporter (and longtime Ares booster, in the other sense of that word) Jay Barbree reports that a compromise may be in the works:

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat and former spaceflier who now chairs the Senate's subcommittee on space policy, is gaining the support of other influential Senate committees for adding $726 million to the president's budget request for the next fiscal year.

The money would go toward preparations for another Ares I prototype test launch -- a new rocket still under development that Obama wants to cancel.

All of this is further complicated by the news last week that Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., the longtime chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, plans to retire. That committee ultimately determines how much funding NASA gets and how it is spent.

Having a lame-duck chairman of the appropriations committee -- in a year when Republicans are expected to do well in November's elections -- almost ensures that Congress won't pass a budget this year, but will instead enact a "continuing resolution," which is essentially a bill that keeps the government running on autopilot.

For NASA and the White House, this is a problem because the current budget has explicit language essentially outlawing the administration from shutting down any Constellation-related contracts, and a continuing resolution would continue this, possibly all the way into January, with a new Congress, and perhaps one controlled by the Republicans in at least the House and perhaps the Senate as well.

Few congressional Republicans, other than longtime senior House space committee member Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., having expressed any support for the new plan.

So the Constellation zombie that Obama tried to kill may plod on for months to come, spending many more hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on development and tests, with no certainty whether they are for good or naught.

Rand Simberg is an aerospace engineer, space and business consultant and serial entrepreneur. He blogs at Transterrestrial Musings. His previous op-ed for AOL News was "A Space Program for the Rest of Us."


To submit an op-ed or letter to the editor to AOL News, write to opinion@aolnews.com.