To Boldly Go Somewhere

Tonight (hopefully) the space shuttle will blast off on another trip to the international space station. America's space pick-up truck (my pet name for the space shuttle) is scheduled to retire next year according to the schedule. Soon it'll be up to President Obama's administration to decide how NASA should continue manned spaceflight.

President Obama's administration had asked for a review of NASA's plan for human spaceflight. The US Human Space Flight (HSF) Plans Committee was formed with an impressive group of members. It includes first US female astronaut Sally ride along with members from industry and academia. The HSF committee will not tell President Obama's administration what to do. They will only give options. They've presented some of what they will present and it doesn't look good.

Last year I talked a lot about what then candidate Obama could do (or not do) for NASA. It became a popular topic on this blog (here's an earlier post as an example). My quick analysis...

• We didn't send people to the moon for science. Although we ended up doing science expirements on the moon, we went there out of fear that the USSR would dominate space and use that dominance to threaten the US and its allies.
• Sending people into space is dangerous, even after all the missions by all the countries of the world for the past half century
• Man has a need to explore.
• The Chinese have launched several manned missions and India is on track to launch their own manned mission in the comming years.
• We're in (or comming out of) a recession
• The end of this article from the Huntsville Times states:

Last week, during a speech in Huntsville, new NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told a gathering of defense and aerospace leaders that he did not see a drastic change in the American space program. However, he did underscore that the three top priorities handed down to him by President Barack Obama were environmental research, technology innovation and space exploration, in that order.

I wouldn't hold my breath on any exciting new moon/Mars/Venus manned mission anytime soon. I would expect a decision on more environmental research satellites later this year. A consolation might be that most launches will be supplied by private space companies. That will give these space companies the ability to establish products and services that could turn a profit and fuel spin-offs like space tourism.