Presidential Space Race

The scoop: A new U.S. president will soon step into office and face an awesome decision to make: Send humans out into the Solar System to explore, or continue fiddling around in low-Earth orbit?

In January 2004, President George W. Bush proposed "sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond" as the guiding objective for NASA. The first step in this multi-decade, indeed multi-century, plan is to return to the moon, then send people on to Mars.

A fine proposal -- but just a proposal. It will be up to the next U.S. president to decide whether or not to accept it, set the country on a course to send people beyond low-Earth orbit, and ultimately toward full exploration of our home planet's neighborhood.

Since the president announced his "Vision for Space Exploration," all that's really happened in the past four years has been flying of the space shuttle to finish the International Space Station and starting the development of a replacement system for getting astronauts into orbit. No hardware uniquely aimed at sending people to the moon is close to being finished, and won't be until the new president decides such an undertaking is indeed the best path for the United States in space.

"Constellation" is NASA's plan to send people back to the moon and, unfortunately, has been described by current NASA administrator Michael Griffin as "Apollo on steroids." It does resemble Apollo in the sense that it transports astronauts to orbit in a capsule-like spacecraft, uses a Saturn 5-style heavy lift vehicle, and calls for a rendezvous in lunar orbit. But many more differences exist than similarities between the new program and Apollo. The biggest one? There's no Cold War competitor to challenge U.S. leadership in space. The only way that the United States can lose its space leadership is through its own lack of political will.

In the two years after John F. Kennedy asked the country to commit to sending Americans to the moon, NASA's budget jumped by 89 percent the first year, and by 101 percent the following year. This was a war-like mobilization of resources, and there is no intent, and no reason, to duplicate such a commitment now. What's needed is a decision on what the focus of NASA's future efforts should be. Talking about a "balanced" program of science, exploration, and aeronautics without significant budget increase just guarantees more of the same from the past forty years.

Whether the United States gets back to the moon by 2020, as President Bush proposed, or a few years later, is much less important than whether or not the next president decides human exploration beyond Earth orbit as the guiding principle of the U.S. human spaceflight program. Frankly, if his choice is against outward exploration, it's hard to find a reason to continue such a program -- the private sector will soon be transporting people into orbit.

As a citizen, it's important to cut through the endless rhetoric regarding the current getting-to-orbit situation and instead focus on the incredible decision facing the incoming president: "Does the United States want to lead the way off of this planet and into the Solar System?"

All else is details.

John M. Logsdon is the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs and will become the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the National Air and Space Museum next September. The views expressed are the author's alone and do not represent the official position of the Discovery Channel.

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