America has left the Moon…

When the White House releases its budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was to return humans to the moon by 2020. The Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to return to the moon. There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases.

“We certainly don’t need to go back to the moon,” one administration official said.

Reading the news that the Obama administration has shelved plans by NASA to return to the moon by 2020 I can’t help but wonder if this is, in the larger scale of things, a strategic error of considerable proportions. And I don’t mean geo-politically or in terms of power politics.

The irritating thing is how often this debate devolves into nationalist tropes…

“My biggest fear is that this amounts to a slow death of our nation’s human spaceflight program, a retreat from America’s decades of leadership in space, ending the economic advantages that our space program has brought to the U.S. and ceding space to the Russians, Chinese and others,” said U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge.
“Until we have a clearer plan for the future, the only realistic and reasonable way to preserve America’s leadership in space is to provide for a temporary extension of the shuttle,” he said.

Truth is that the nationalist aspect of this is irrelevant, and I’ve often wondered, particularly when listening to Buzz Aldrin push that line, whether it’s not being used in a rather disingenuous way. Aldrin is clearly a US patriot, but he – and others making this case – seem to me to be considerably more nuanced in their beliefs than a simple nationalist dynamic would suggest.

But whether those making it are sincere or not, at this point there is a convergence of interests between those who – for whatever reason – believe in a strong human presence beyond low Earth orbit.

And an uncomfortable aspect of this is that without a US presence in that process there is unlikely in the short to medium term to be any presence at all. Sure, the Chinese and the Russians rhetorically make great play of their intentions. But those of us who follow such matters will know that the latter face even greater financial problems than the US (to the point that cooperative projects with the Europeans have been cut and cut again) and the former are at a very very early stage of human spaceflight.

So what are the intentions of the administration, as flagged by numerous anonymous briefings in the past week or so?

President Barack Obama will ask Congress to extend International Space Station operations through at least 2020 but abandon NASA’s current plans to return U.S. astronauts to the moon, administration and NASA officials said Wednesday.
The president’s 2011 budget request, due to be delivered to Congress on Monday, will direct NASA to invest in the development of U.S. commercial space taxi services to ferry American astronauts to and from the station.
The move is meant to reduce reliance on Russian crew transportation services after the retirement of America’s aging shuttle fleet.

Now this isn’t appalling news in and of itself. The ISS has been operational, in the sense of being manned, since 2000. It will be completed in 2011 and according to wiki will be deorbited in 2015/2016. Am I alone in considering this a bizarre situation where its use is little over half it’s completion time? Thankfully not.

So even to claw back a half decade or more is far from a bad idea.

And there’s a bone thrown towards future exploration…

Instead, according to White House insiders, agency officials, industry executives and congressional sources familiar with Obama’s plans, NASA will look at developing a “heavy-lift” rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low-Earth orbit. That day will be years away.

Albeit the ‘will look at’ isn’t exactly heartening.

And as for the suggestion mooted in an edition of New Scientist in the last week or two that Phobos, moon of Mars, should be the chosen destination of the next serious effort into space? Well, in the context of what we see here such plans appear utopian in the extreme. If we can’t return to the Moon, can’t even move beyond low Earth orbit, the opportunities for serious progress remain very limited indeed.

Thing is, though, that this may all simply be a ploy by the administration to smoke out the supposed deficit hawks, both Republican and Democrat, now that he has placed the deficit as a key issue to be addressed. The lustre of the space program, has, as with military programs (and it’s telling is it not that he has proposed the biggest defense budget since WWII – what he taketh with the left hand he giveth with the right), often been immune to mere budgetary considerations, so here is a perfect opportunity to generate cognitive dissonance, and worse amongst his opponents.

A pity that the return to the Moon has to be the victim. Although… although…

As noted on Space.com

Obama’s space plan will be a hard sell in Congress. Even ardent Obama supporters and some key space advisers are taken aback.
“If some of the reports about the president’s plans for NASA’s budget are correct, it would decimate the space program,” a Nelson spokesman said.
NASA’s planned return to the moon is behind schedule because about $12 billion budgeted for the project was not appropriated by Congress during the past six years.
But Project Constellation enjoys strong bipartisan support in both the U.S. House and the Senate, and Congress will have a big say in the plan for NASA.
The Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee passed legislation in December that requires broader congressional approval to change NASA’s existing exploration program.