According to reports initially published by Reuters and UPI, President Bush will make a major space policy announcement next week that will commit the nation to resuming human exploration of the Moon. (For the full details, read those articles, or get a one-paragraph summary I wrote for spacetoday.net.) If this is correct (and that remains to be seen—remember the hubbub last month about the impending policy announcement that never came?) it could indeed be one of the biggest moments in the history of NASA. Some comments and questions:
- The UPI article commented that the shuttle would be retired when the station was completed. The question is whether that is “core complete”, which would be just a relatively few flights, or the long-term original “assembly complete”, which has been put off indefinitely?
- What will Congress’s reaction—or the American people’s—be to having a period of several years between the retirement of the shuttle and the introduction of the OSP/CEV where the US would have no manned orbital spaceflight capability?
- How will the Administration and Congress define programs “that do not support the new effort” and thus would be scaled back or eliminated? Does it include science missions like New Frontiers (the Pluto flyby mission scheduled for launch in 2006) and the James Webb Space Telescope? Mars missions would presumably be safe because Mars is the ultimate goal of the program, but what about asteroid missions like Dawn?
Many questions, few answers… for now.
I’m guessing that ISS core complete will be the objective, since I understand a prototype OSP capsule will be introduced in 2007 or so, about the time the ISS core will be done based on the evolving Shuttle schedule. I think, however, that additional modules and such will be added as we go along, as it will be critical to use the ISS as a staging complex for the Moon and near Earth asteroids. I could imagine a dry dock of sorts in 10 years, were major assemblies would come together in orbit.
As far as missions now planned or proposed that will not support the human to Moon/Mars initiative (Webb telescope, Pluto, maybe Prometheus), I’m guessing these would be off the table, so to speak, and not part of the equation. If not, then I would imagine many will be cancelled, while others will simply be recast in a new role. For example, the MER missions, while scientific in nature, could easily be recast as prospecting missions. The end result is the same. For the James Webb telescope, this recasting effort would be hard to argue, so I think a few missions will be exceptions to the rule. Cosmology and astronomy as missions in their own right is justifiable and seems to be strongly supported by the public. One could argue that some of the time on these telescopes and such will contribute to the development of navigation charts (physical plots, gravity waves, potential visiting spots, etc.)