Space

With NASA in a budget crisis, the US faces a historic choice between boosting human space exploration like President Kennedy did in the 1960s or confining astronauts to low-Earth orbit like President Nixon did a decade later, former NASA chief Mike Griffin told a congressional committee on Tuesday.

But while some members of Congress expressed support for a budget boost for the agency, it remains to be seen whether a majority will support such a plan.

Griffin, now a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, compared the situation to a choice between following in the footsteps of Kennedy, who spurred Congress to fund the Apollo moon programme, and Nixon, who later shut it down. He spoke at a hearing of the House Committee on Science and Technology in Washington, DC.

The budget proposed for NASA in May is not sufficient to pursue human space exploration beyond low-Earth orbit, he said. "With the budget in front of us, we're poised to behave not like the Kennedy administration but the Nixon administration, where after spending literally a fortune to develop the spaceships of Apollo we threw them away," he said. "Do today's leaders want to be remembered like John Kennedy or Richard Nixon?"

The House committee met to discuss a summary report released last week by a White House panel that reviewed NASA's human space flight programme.

The panel was led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, who also spoke to the committee on Tuesday. He reiterated his panel's conclusion that NASA would be stuck in low-Earth orbit indefinitely without a budget boost of at least $3 billion per year.

Drop in the bucket

Committee member Dana Rohrabacher, a congressman from California, said NASA's cost overruns on projects such as the International Space Station are partly to blame for its budget crisis. But he added that the amount of extra money it needed was relatively small. "Let's face it, we gave [insurance giant] AIG $150 billion, and now we're arguing about $3 billion for NASA," he said.

Vernon Ehlers, a member of Congress from Michigan who has a PhD in physics, argued that NASA should seek to fill its funding gap in part by strengthening cooperation with other countries. "[Seeking] bragging rights by virtue of being first to do something – I think that era is no longer with us," he said. "I think if we want to go to the moon, I would like to see it become a multi-nation effort where we get a lot of contributions from other countries."

Augustine and fellow panel member Edward Crawley of MIT both spoke in favour of joint space ventures with other countries. Pooling the space resources of the European Space Agency and its member states, as well as those of Canada and Japan, would add up to about 60 per cent of NASA's existing budget, Crawley said.

Dream team

"And you would have real capability: the robotic capability of the Canadians, the propulsive capability of the Europeans, the on-orbit robotics and laboratory capability of the Japanese," he added.

But why spend money on human space flight at all? Augustine said the usual reasons given, which include spurring innovation, boosting the economy, and inspiring people to pursue careers in science and technology, did not justify the expense. "Programmes have to be justified, we think, to a large degree on an intangible basis, which makes it no less important – namely to lay the path forward for humans to move [out] into the solar system," he said.

Augustine, who will be speaking to a Senate committee on Wednesday, said the panel intends to have its full report ready by the end of September. The full version will provide a detailed comparison of the five options presented in the summary report – including one plan that would culminate in a trip to Mars orbit.

The White House and Congress will have the final say over where NASA will go, and what resources it will have to get there.

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