In one of his most daring and longest-term plans to date, President Bush announced last Tuesday an outline that’s out-of-this-world, both fiscally and otherwise, for the future of the space program.
If Congress agrees to Bush’s “new course,” the long-term focus of the nation’s space program will shift from shuttle missions and the International Space Station to a new manned space vehicle that will lift off in the next decade; NASA’s three remaining shuttles would be retired.
He wants America to make a return hop to the moon by 2020. (Oddly, that gives National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineers a much longer time to hash out details for a moon mission than President Kennedy did when he promised a man on the moon by the end of the ’60s.)
Moreover, Bush called for an eventual manned mission to Mars as early as 2030.
And if high-end field trips outside earth’s sphere of gravitational influence didn’t command enough eyebrow raisings, the initiative calls for the stuff that afternoons of playing with Lego sets are made of: the establishment of a permanent moon base.
The price tag? Well, that depends on how you do your accounting: Bush asked Congress for a $1 billion budget hike for NASA over the next five years, just a fiduciary nudge compared to NASA’s current $86 billion budget. But, the plan also calls for the reallocation of $11 billion from other NASA programs.
Still, big numbers and big plans aren’t impressing many Americans, particularly in a recovering economy: More than half of respondents would prefer that the budget increase be spent on domestic programs, a recent Associated Press poll found.
Those Americans would presumably be displeased if even this short-term projection dramatically increased, as some Capitol Hill pundits warn.
“The first year after Kennedy announced the Apollo program, the NASA budget doubled,” explained Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. “And in the second year it was doubled again. That’s not realistic today. But 5-percent-a-year increases are not going to get us to the moon.”
Nelson is more than a politician concerned about fiscal accountability, too — he’s the only current member of Congress who has flown in space.
The Editorial Board shares Nelson’s monetary concerns, as well as the importance of maintaining funding for critical domestic programs, but believes too in the importance of exploring the unknown.
The fruits of space exploration, as the last decades of space flight have demonstrated, go beyond satisfying the intrinsic human desire to stretch the boundaries of understanding; they include valuable new technology and information, from improved rocket design to a starkly deepened understanding of the structure of the universe.
Given that policy decisions factor in feasibility and fiscal common sense before fantasy, the Editorial Board gives a tentative thumbs-up to the first few years of Bush’s space plan.