Revolt of the Apollo Astronauts

SatelliteSpotlight.com: Revolt of the Apollo Astronauts
On the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's call to put men on the moon, a number of Apollo astronauts called out President Obama and NASA for botching up America's space policy. Do they have a point -- or are they just grumpy old men?

In a May 24 USA Today Op-Ed piece, the first man to set foot on the moon, Neil Armstrong, Apollo 13 mission commander Jim Lovell, and Apollo 17 mission commander Gene Cernan noted the 2005 Constellation program was effectively shut down in the proposed 2011 budget. Invoking the spirit of President Kennedy, Obama's advisors "ignored NASA's operational mandate" and "strayed widely" from Kennedy's vision and the will of the American people to be the leader in space exploration.

"But today, America's leadership in space is slipping," states the piece. "NASA's human spaceflight program is in substantial disarray with no clear-cut mission in the offing. We will have no rockets to carry humans to low-Earth orbit and beyond for an indeterminate number of years... After a half-century of remarkable progress, a coherent plan for maintaining America's leadership in space exploration is no longer apparent."

The president's 2012 budget keeps funding below Congressionally authorized amounts for development of a large heavy-lift rocket and the multi-purpose crew vehicle (MPCV), while increasing funding for cooperative R&D of commercial rockets and spacecraft.

Armstrong and company snipe that costs for commercial services to space will be "substantially larger and more time consuming" than entrepreneurs predict, not having factored in NASA-funded development costs.

Meanwhile, Cernan's Apollo 17 lunar module pilot and former Senator Harrison Schmitt goes beyond the USA Today piece to call for the wholesale dismantling of NASA. In his blog piece, "46. Space Policy and the Constitution #4," Schmitt recognizes that budgetary actions for the last 8 years (i.e. during the former Bush administration, as well as current activity) have imposed "immense difficulties." In addition, he notes NASA's transformation from a center of national necessity during the 1970s to a source of pork barrel spending with "NASA Centers, large contractors, or concentrations of sub-contractors."

Schmitt wants to ditch NASA with the start of a new presidential term in 2013, starting from scratch to create a dedicated National Space Exploration Administration (NSEA) to enable exploration of deep space. Existing component parts of NASA would be redistributed among existing agencies with the exception of U.S. obligations on the ISS. NASA's climate and earth science research would go to NOAA; aeronautic R&D would go to the recreation of the NACA. Space sciences activities would be shifted to the National Science Foundation, excluding lunar and planetary science.

NSEA would hire a totally new workforce and have the authority to maintain an average employee age of less than 30; NASA's is over 47. A younger work force would provide the "the imagination, motivation, stamina, and courage of young engineers, scientists, and managers" to be successful in meeting the goal of not being in second place to the Chinese or other nation.

Of the two pieces, I have to say I like Schmitt's better; he recognizes that America hasn't come to this point in time overnight, calling out both Congress for pork-barrel politics and more than one administration for failing to provide leadership and funding. Finally, he proposes a solution, abet a radical one, to "fix" NASA and put the country on a more solid path for future space exploration efforts.