DOLLARS AND SENSE
By Owen D. Kurtin
A New Path to the Moon
In December, we discussed the final report of the White
House Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee,
otherwise known as the Augustine Committee. The report
found NASA’s current human spaceflight program to be
on an “unsustainable trajectory, … pursuing goals that do
not match allocated resources.”
To solve this issue, the report advocated extending
the International Space Station (ISS) lifetime, choosing
between a “moon first” and a “flexible path” of exploration
of non-planetary inner solar system targets of opportunity,
and development of a commercial low-Earth orbit (LEO)
human transport capability, freeing NASA to pursue more
difficult human spaceflight goals.
As we noted at the time, the report took for granted
the imperative for a NASA (trans-LEO) human spaceflight
capability, even while recognizing that the NASA of today
is not the NASA of the 1960s. In February, the other shoe
dropped, as the Obama Administration’s budget for fiscal
year 2011 included $19 billion for NASA but proposed a major
restructuring of the agency’s mission and a rejection of much
of the Augustine recommendations. The 2011 budget rejected
the “moon first” proposal by scrapping NASA’s Constellation
program: the Orion crew exploration vehicle, the Ares 1 and
Ares 5 launch vehicles, and the Altair lunar landing vehicle,
on which $9 billion already has been spent.
Under this plan, the Ares, which made its first demonstration flight in October, is slated for the dustbin, along with
NASA’s post-space shuttle retirement LEO and trans-LEO
human transport capability. Following the end of the shuttle
program, NASA will depend on non-U.S. and, potentially, commercial operators to ferry humans to the ISS. The Augustine
proposals to extend ISS life, develop international partnerships and encourage commercial human LEO transport development were accepted, but NASA is
left with no program to return humans
to the moon.
Owen D. Kurtin is a
founder and principal of private investment firm The Vinland Group LLC and
a practising attorney
in New York City. He
may be reached by
e-mail at okurtin@
vinlandgroup.com.
The Obama budget proposal ear-
marks $6 billion for commercial crew
transport and new technologies once
the United States is prepared again
for human spaceflight beyond LEO.
We reported in October on the NASA
Commercial Orbital Transportation
Services (CO TS) program to subsidize and encourage com-
mercial players to deliver cargo to orbit. The Obama budget
has made commercial service for human space access the only
U.S. game in town, and the COTS participants and potential
participants have hailed the Obama budget proposals, while
members of Congress representing districts invested in the
Constellation program have excoriated them.
