Space: Hoping for Change

The scoop: NASA faces a budgetary conundrum just short of a crisis as President-elect Barack Obama prepares to step into the Oval Office. An expert brings us up to speed on the challenges -- and expectations -- that lay ahead.

When President-elect Obama is inaugurated, he will inherit a space agency at a crossroads.

Down one path for NASA lies a robust program of exploration, scientific discovery and technological marvel worthy of a superpower. Down the other is a dim shadow of the new frontier envisioned by John F. Kennedy nearly half a century ago.

After the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, a Republican president and a Republican congress -- acting with substantial Democratic support -- heeded the words of the accident investigation board and launched NASA on a mission to return people to the moon and eventually send them to Mars. Honoring U.S. commitments to its partners in space, they also promised to finish the International Space Station and retire the past-its-prime space shuttle.

With help from both political parties, NASA has laid out a space exploration architecture, continued building the space station, promoted the commercialization of spaceflight in low-earth orbit, safely returned the shuttle to flight, picked teams to develop a moon-bound replacement program (Constellation) for the shuttle and developed robotic missions to the moon and Mars scheduled for launch in 2009.

The debit side of the ledger, however, is bleak.

NASA is funded some 20 percent below 1992 levels, and its budget never fully accounted for the costs of returning the shuttle to flight after Columbia or recovering from Hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, anticipated funding increases have evaporated in the budget process. These limited resources have delayed development of Constellation several years to 2015 and lengthened dependence on Russia for human access to space, all while technical problems with Constellation loom. One could prioritize NASA's programs, but interest groups make successful claims on NASA's budget that block prioritization and efficient management of available resources.

Now the country faces an economic recession. Revenues will likely plummet at the same time that President Obama will be challenged to make good on hundreds of billions of dollars in promised new spending. Looking at it dispassionately, the debits outweigh the credits -- and NASA appears headed for insolvency.

President Obama himself is the wild card in the mix.

During the Democratic primaries, he planned to cut into the Constellation program to pay for increased educational spending. Yet by the general election he had reversed himself and promised increased funding to close the gap between shuttle retirement in 2010 and Constellation's arrival in 2015. Does this change represent a true change of heart and the beginning of a commitment to our future in space, or an opportunistic campaign tactic to appeal to voters along Florida's important space coast? That remains to be seen.

At the beginning of the space age, John F. Kennedy noted:

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone and one which we intend to win."

If we still agree with those words, we must choose the right path.

Eric Sterner is a Fellow at the George C. Marshall Institute, has held senior staff positions on the House Armed Services and Science Committees, and served in the Defense Department and as NASA's Associate Deputy Administrator. The views expressed are the author's alone and do not represent the official position of the Discovery Channel.

Article posted November 7, 2008.

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