Obama's proposals for NASA fail to gain much altitude on Capitol Hill

Plans hatched in the Bush era for a new NASA moon landing may not have seemed terribly logical, since U.S. astronauts already visited there in the 1960s and 1970s. But changing those plans to advance human space travel in the future is turning out to be a lot harder than it should be. What else would explain the chilly reception the Obama-appointed head of the United States space agency -- Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr. -- faced, even from Democrats, when he went before Congress on Wednesday to explain the new administration's proposed 2011 budget? Obama has proposed boosting NASA's budget by $6 billion over five years and directing the extra funds toward aeronautic and climate research, and science missions using robotic ships, not astronauts, according to the New York Times. But U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee told Bolden that Obama's proposed spending was nowhere near enough to achieve the president's loftier goals, and it makes no sense to cancel the existing program to return to the moon without the money to do anything else. Obama proposed in a speech last month that NASA gear up to put astronauts on an asteroid by 2025 and on Mars by 2035, and to cancel the existing Constellation program and open travel to the moon and the international space station to private companies instead. “So far we have not seen any hard analysis from the administration that would give us confidence that it can be done for the amount budgeted,” Gordon said. Gordon said the administration's projections were far less than a NASA panel had estimated human travel to an asteroid and Mars would cost. “It does no good to cancel a program that the administration characterizes as ‘unexecutable’ if that program is simply replaced with a new plan that can’t be executed either,” he said. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, also a Democrat, said she was "very dubious" that NASA would continue to work on the Constellation program while Obama's proposals were pending, the Times said. But Obama also proposed that the Constellation program's proposed Orion crew capsule that was going to return astronauts to the moon be redeveloped into a "lifeboat" for space station astronauts. Bolden said at the hearing that NASA estimates the capsule will take five years and $4.5 billion to develop, the Times said.

Plans for Mars exploration offer hope for international cooperation in space travel

If there's ever going to be a United Federation of Planets or anything like it with human beings involved, the next step -- fairly obviously -- has to be cooperation on space exploration between beings on this planet. Toward that end, apparently, comes word from NASA's Mars Exploration Program in Sunnyvale, Calif., that a merger between the U.S. and European Union space programs is being planned, according to Cable News Network (CNN). Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars program at the Ames Research Center, told CNN that an agreement could take a year to complete and joint missions could begin by 2016. "The European Space Agency's council and their program board have agreed to the terms that we're working with and have endorsed this partnership to go forward," McCuistion said. "So we are starting the new year with a renewed excitement for missions beginning in 2016 to be done in a joint partnership between Europe and NASA." Such an agreement would have the twin advantages of sharing the cost of the multibillion-dollar missions and assuring that any knowledge gained does not benefit one nation over another but contributes to overall human understanding of the universe. "That's a very challenging mission of launching something from here, putting it into orbit at Mars, getting it to the surface and collecting samples, getting those samples back into orbit, then return them to Earth," McCuistion said. "This is a mission that will change our understanding of Mars and change our understanding of planetary science significantly. It really needs to be a global effort." But understanding that means the integration of the space programs of the Soviet Union and China, something that could be decades away given the current state of international relations on the third planet.

Water on the moon changes a lot of assumptions

This week's realization that there probably is water on earth's moon raises a lot of questions -- not the least of which being, "what other things don't we know about space that we think we do know?" NASA scientists reached the startling conclusion about the presence of water after analyzing data from an instrument they supplied to to India's Chandrayaan-1 satellite, that country's first unmanned moon mission, according to the New York Times. The device detected the widespread presence of hydroxyl, a molecule composed of one atom of hydrogen and one atom of water, on a celestial body long considered completely dry. The discovery was published this week on the Web site of the journal Science. What may be even more surprising is that the finding actually replicates earlier findings of the Apollo missions, which brought back lunar soil containing evidence of water decades ago but were attributed to contamination from the moist earth atmosphere, the Times said. The data also confirms findings from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which passed the moon 10 years ago on its way to Saturn, and the Deep Impact spacecraft sent to study the comet Tempel 1, the Times said. “It’s so startling because it’s so pervasive,” Lawrence A. Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, told the Times. "It's like somebody painted the globe." Taylor co-wrote a paper analyzing the Chandrayaan-1 data. NASA scientists now are examining the possibility that the moon's hydroxyl could be used to supply water and even oxygen for future manned missions to the moon, or for a permanent installation there, the Times said. But that's just like humans to see this new discovery in terms of human beings. Maybe it means that there is or was another type of life on the moon or on other planets in our solar system, life that we don't even begin to understand or know how to recognize. And maybe, just maybe, it means that a lot of our other assumptions about earth and space are incorrect.

Maybe U.S. should rethink shuttle plan

News this week that NASA plans to use $50 million in economic stimulus money to encourage proposals for commercial passenger transportation to space raises the fairly obvious question of why the U.S. space agency decided to retire its fleet of shuttles before developing an alternative. While it's certainly encouraging that NASA is finally serious about replacing the shuttle, which is scheduled to make its last trip in 2010, the U.S. space program will be forced to depend on Russia's Soyuz space capsule and rocket until a new craft is developed. "The main thing that the public should be taking note of is that right now we are (solely dependent) on the Russians (for space transports) after 2010," Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, one of the U.S. companies competing to build the next space vessel, told the Reuters international news service. Musk could have a point, considering that Russia has not been among the United States' most reliable allies. Then again, NASA relied on the Soyuz for transport to the international space station for years when the shuttle fleet was grounded. Musk's company, Space Exploration Technologies, and another company, Orbital Sciences Corp., already share a $500 million contract to develop and build rockets and capsules to bring supplies to the station. Other U.S. firms that have expressed an interest in the commercial passenger program include Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., Airborne Systems, Boeing Co, Tether Applications, Retro Aerospace, Emergent Space Technologies, Davidson Technologies and Paragon Space Development Corp, Reuters said. NASA is planning a workshop for interested companies on Thursday in Houston.