Rusty Schweikart steps up to the plate in support of the new policy. I don’t agree with all of it — I think he misses the point in some cases, but I like this:
Are we, in fact, on a dead end road? In answering this critical question you should not overvalue either my opinion or the opinions of my fellow astronauts, but rather focus on the considered and thoughtful, and even hard-nosed, analysis of the panel of experts who dealt explicitly with this, the Augustine Committee on our Human Spaceflight Program. Norm and his panel are very experienced and highly qualified academics, business leaders, astronauts, and space program executives. I have immense respect for them and their considered judgment. They performed a thorough, open and difficult review and analysis of where we are. Their conclusions were not reached lightly nor did they shy away from calling it as they saw it. I take their work and their conclusions very seriously and I believe you should as well.
Note that he’s not asking Senator Nelson (as others have) to take his word for it because he’s an astronaut — he’s citing someone who has actually studied the current problem (as opposed to a different problem that we had to solve half a century ago).
But I disagree with some of his arguments. First:
Technical arguments can and have been made to support this intermediate step, and they are not without justification and support. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the arguments for necessity are fundamentally weak, and in any event are overwhelmed by the widely held and devastating question “been there; done that… tell us why you’re doing that again?” Why, after 60 years, should we be devoting incredible resources and effort to going back to the Moon instead of to a challenging, pioneering new goal? As Norm Augustine stated in your 12 May hearing, the long term space program has to be supported on a continuing basis by the public, and the public simply will not maintain support to reliably sustain a monumental and expensive effort to do again what we did 60 years before. This is especially true of young people, who are hardly inspired by a goal of repeating their grandparent’s achievements.
The problem here is that he is confusing the goal of going to the moon, as established by the VSE, with the means (Constellation) chosen to achieve it. Yes, we don’t want to do Apollo again (and that was what Mike Griffin proposed, explicitly declaring it “Apollo on Steroids”). But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t, or don’t want to go back to the moon, if it can be done in an affordable, sustainable, and useful (which is a key attribute of sustainability) way. This problem will pop up again a little later in his letter. But he thinks that the problem is one of destination, and (surprise, surprise) he likes the asteroid mission.
As I’ve repeatedly said, destinations are beside the point, other than that they be beyond LEO. There is basic infrastructure needed to do so on a cost-effective basis, and once that’s in place, where we go is a relatively minor detail, which can be addressed by small additions to the infrastructure (a lunar lander for the moon, a long-duration ship with radiation protection for deep-space missions). But until we get that basic infrastructure in place, which won’t occur for years, even if we start now, arguing about the specifics of what we’re going to do with it is a dissipation of valuable political energy that would be better served to make sure that we get it, so we later have something to argue about (or more likely and preferably, options to do whatever we want).
He follow up with another confusion between VSE and Constellation, in “explaining” the Gap:
The sad state of our current space program, and the gap in particular, is a given. An unfortunate, but unavoidable given. We are here because of the complete mismatch between the program announced by President George W Bush in early 2004 and the inadequate funding which was subsequently sought and allocated since that time. As Norm Augustine testified before your committee on May 12, in the 4 years between the announcement of those ambitious goals and the time when his Committee conducted its comprehensive review of human space flight, the Ares launch vehicle development slipped between 3 and 5 years. This slip, combined with the planned termination of Space Shuttle operations in 2010 created and ultimately extended the “gap” in our nation’s ability to launch astronauts into orbit to 7 years or more. This gap, during which time we will be dependent on the Russians to launch our American astronauts to the ISS, was created during the prior space program. It is a given and it cannot be eliminated.
Emphasis mine.
Note that he (like many Constellation defenders) claims that there was a “mismatch” between Bush’s program and the funding. But this simply is not true. The mismatch was between the funding planned for the VSE and the program that Mike Griffin later chose to implement it. George Bush never said anything about developing an Ares I and Ares V, and it was the decision to go that route that cratered the budget, and created the sinkhole into which funding for all other aspects of the VSE disappeared. It continues to be frustrating that people commenting on this, who should know better, continue to misstate history, as I pointed out this weekend.