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US space plan in danger
(Washington Post)
Updated: 2005-11-24 16:08
A large deficit in NASA's troubled shuttle program threatens to seriously
delay and possibly cripple US President Bush's space exploration initiative
unless the number of planned flights is cut virtually in half or the White House
agrees to add billions of dollars to the human spaceflight budget, reported
Washington Post.
Sources familiar with ongoing negotiations between NASA and the White House
say the administration has no intention of spending extra money to deal with a
shortfall that some space experts say could exceed $6 billion from 2006 to 2010,
when NASA plans to retire the shuttle for good.
The source of the deficit is the travail that has plagued the shuttle program
since the Columbia disaster in 2003. After a single flight by Discovery this
summer, the orbiters -- grounded for 2 1/2 years after Columbia -- are out of
action again until at least May while engineers work to make them safer.
One option being considered to close the shortfall is to limit the number of
flights to two per year -- 10 in all -- and cut the workforce. But shuttle
program manager Wayne Hale said in a televised news conference yesterday that
"frankly it doesn't save you very much money. . . . From my point of view,
that's a non-starter."
NASA's John Chapman, manager of the external
tank program, points to problem areas on a model of a space shuttle rocket
during a news conference Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at Johnson Space Center
in Houston. [AP] | NASA Administrator Michael D.
Griffin has said that terminating the shuttle program would be just as expensive
as keeping it going. The shuttle routinely consumes more than 30 percent of
NASA's budget.
The impasse has put the future of Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration" in
doubt less than two years after it was announced. Without extra money, experts
say, NASA could have trouble developing a new "crew exploration vehicle" by
2014, as originally planned, let alone fulfilling Griffin's wish to fly it by
2012. The dilemma is also fueling an odd confrontation between the
administration and Congress, where once-wary lawmakers now appear willing to
provide the extra funding even as the White House backs away from its own
initiative.
"The decisions made over the next few weeks will determine whether the Bush
White House is serious about supporting the vision," said John Logsdon, director
of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute. "We've reached a
watershed."
The cornerstones of the Bush initiative, announced in a speech on Jan. 14,
2004, are to use the shuttle to finish the international space station by 2010,
develop the crew exploration vehicle by 2014, return humans to the moon by 2020
and eventually move on to Mars.
Bush called the plan "a journey, not a race," to be completed without
appreciable increases in NASA's budget.
Initially, Congress expressed suspicion that the initiative was either a
grandiose but empty gesture or a risky project that would cannibalize
established NASA programs to raise the needed funding. Last year, it took an
eleventh-hour arm-twist by then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to win passage
of NASA's $16.1 billion budget, but this year lawmakers easily passed the 2006
budget -- for the full $16.5 billion the White House requested.
The difference was that Griffin, confirmed in April of
this year, earned congressional trust by reorganizing NASA and segregating the
shuttle and exploration vehicle programs from the rest of NASA's portfolio.
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