Pat Dollard

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Nasa’s newest spacecraft, the Obama 13

Times Online:

President Obama promised a delayed “leap into the future” for Nasa yesterday in a speech designed to quell a growing dispute over his cuts to manned space exploration, and to persuade critics that America will eventually put astronauts on Mars.

Despite cancelling Constellation, the $108 billion (more than £69 bn) programme that aimed to get astronauts to the Moon by 2020 and the Red Planet by 2030, he outlined a series of “stepping stone” destinations where Nasa will first seek a foothold in deep space using humans and robots.

A landing on Mars will come sometime after the mid-2030s — at least five years after the date Constellation aimed for — but Nasa will spend more time before then “looking at not just where we can go, but what we’re going to do when we get there.”

The President delivered his speech at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida: “Nobody is more committed to manned spaceflight, to human exploration of space, than me. But we have got to do it in a smart way, we can’t just keep doing the same old things that we’ve been doing and thinking that somehow that’s going to get us to where we want to go.

“Step by step, we will push the boundaries,” he said, starting with a manned mission to land on an asteroid sometime beyond 2025 before venturing further into the cosmos to scout potential sites to establish fuel depots for future missions.

“By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth,” he continued, echoing words chosen by President Kennedy in his 1961 challenge to Nasa to put a man on the Moon. “A landing on Mars itself will follow, and I expect to be around to see it.”

The decision on how to get humans to such destinations will not be made for another five years. Instead, $3.1 billion will be spent researching new rocket technologies before a specific blueprint is selected for 2015. Orion, the spacecraft that was to have carried crews to the Moon by the end of the decade, will be salvaged from the Constellation plan — and sent to the International Space Station to be used in the event of an emergency, reducing America’s reliance on Russia’s Soyuz capsule.

Critics of Mr Obama’s plan, who include Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, dislike it for its lack of detail and definite timeline and its failure to maintain human launch capabilities in the interim.

“The President has replaced one visionless plan with another,” said Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. He said that the new plan “still ends human spaceflight” and added: “There is no rocket or capsule being built through this plan that can safely carry humans to space. The President commits to building a heavy-lift vehicle five years from now, at which point he may very well no longer be in office. It extends the International Space Station’s life by five years, yet we will have no way to reach it on our own.”

John McBride, a retired astronaut, told workers at a rally before the visit: “We need sufficient funding dedicated to space exploration. Back in Apollo days our space budget for Nasa was three to four per cent of the federal budget, today it’s less than one per cent.

“We have been told by our leaders that we can’t have it all. I say why not? If it costs a gazillion dollars to get to Mars, we get two gazillion back.”

A new world

1964 Exploration of Mars begins with Mariner 4, with no sign of water or life

2004 President Bush announces Nasa initiative to send humans to Mars after 2020

2005 Ice sheet detected by the European Mars Express gives strongest sign yet that life could exist

2008 Nasa’s Phoenix probe lands safely in the northern polar region of Mars