Obama May Need Heat Shield at Space Summit

(March 9) -- Tax Day may seem an odd choice to kick off a campaign for controversial changes to NASA that will require billions of taxpayer dollars, but that's the date the White House has in mind.

The administration announced this week that on April 15, President Barack Obama will journey to Florida, home to the fabled Cape Canaveral launch pads, for a space summit where he will try to sell Americans on his ideas for the space agency. Those ideas include abandoning plans to send astronauts to the moon and canceling a spaceship that NASA has already sunk billions into.

Obama also wants an extra $6 billion over the next five years to fund, among other things, developing the technology to send humans to Mars.

Obama's proposals may face a climb as steep as a rocket's trajectory to orbit, and that's not just because taxpayers could get surly at the idea of more federal spending.

The administration's plans have gotten a savage reception on Capitol Hill and from powerful industry groups. Critics have said the change amounts to "a shot in the dark" that would "decimate America's human spaceflight capacity" -- and those were just the comments from congressional Democrats.

"The White House has an uphill battle to convince Congress to adopt the new plan," Marcia Smith, editor of SpacePolicyOnline.com, wrote in an e-mail to AOL News. Even if lawmakers agree to cancel NASA's planned moonshot and new rocket, "that does not mean they have to adopt the president's new plan, either. They could argue that clearly NASA doesn't know what it wants to do."

Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, bluntly told NASA's chief last month that Obama's plan "has not found a lot of support here."

"That's a pretty strong statement by a chairman that you'd better get your act together," says Bill Adkins, a former congressional staffer who worked on space policy.

In the past few decades, several presidents have announced ambitious plans for NASA that either ran into major trouble in Congress or died outright:

• George H.W. Bush announced a plan to set up a moon base and send astronauts to Mars, but it garnered no support among lawmakers and was dropped.
• George W. Bush directed NASA to return astronauts to the moon. That program, long on technical problems and short on public interest, now faces an unceremonious end at the hands of the Obama administration.
• Bill Clinton succeeded in getting congressional approval to build the International Space Station, but only after the House came within one vote of killing it.

The White House "totally botched the rollout of this policy," says Roger Launius, curator at the National Air and Space Museum. Now they're bringing in Obama, "the salesman in chief. ... His persuasive powers are such that I think he could change the game. That, of course, assumes he has a game to change it to."

Though the Obama administration is abandoning NASA's plans to go back to the moon, it has been silent on where astronauts will go next other than to the International Space Station, a giant laboratory in orbit.

In the end, Obama will probably succeed in making some of the changes he wants at NASA, say Adkins and Launius. They point out that the plan's fiercest critics in Congress are those whose districts would face the heaviest job losses, and most of those districts are Republican.

Even if Congress does support Obama, the real question, Smith says, is whether the next Congress and the next and the next will provide the long-term funding needed to enable astronauts to explore the solar system.

"The history of the last 20 years does not give the latest, greatest plan much credibility," she says, "no matter what one thinks of the specifics."