Dreams of a Neil Armstrong-like scene unfolding on Mars will have to stay as dreams for a little longer. President Barack Obama is scaling down spending on NASA missions. The economic crisis has everyone cutting corners and the Obama Administration is sparing no one in the process.
The return to the Moon in 2020 has been postponed along with “Constellation”, the name of the project responsible for establishing a base on the Moon to facilitate manned Mars exploration missions. The budget for 2011, relevant to NASA, is expected to concentrate on development of commercial rockets that enable the transport of astronauts to the International Space Station. NASA has long been criticized for its spending and the economic crisis has not helped either. The spending on recent projects such as Constellation, the Orion crew exploration vehicle and the Ares 1 rocket has exceeded $16 billion.
The new target for NASA is to have a commercial flight to the ISS ready for launch in 2015. This is in line with the role of innovator that the White House hopes NASA will play just as it did back in the 1960’s. The new approach is still in line with certain policies. For example, the shuttle orbiter fleet is scheduled to retire in September, thereafter U.S. astronauts will be ferried solely by the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The U.S. fleet has only seven more missions before the September deadline.
However, the proposed budget has to be passed in Congress and that might be easier said than done, which give NASA a glimmer of hope.
