Live from the Nuke Free Zone

From SpaceRef we get this report:

WASHINGTON - The year-long review of future directions for the U.S. space program is rapidly drawing towards selection of a policy path, Spacelift Washington has learned from sources close to the deliberations.

The final result may be a presidential announcement of the new space goal in a national address at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 2003, the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brother’s first heavier-than-air powered flight.

Now, I would like to cheer when President George W Bush gets up in front of the picturesque sand dunes and announces, chest thrown out and jaw jutting, that America Will Go Back To The Moon. But I won’t.

Part of this, admittedly, will be because I will be sleeping in that day after seeing Return of the King in the wee hours of the morning, thus undoubtedly missing the announcement. However, I remember another Historic Space-Based Announcement on another Major Anniversary.

I remember July 20, 1989. The 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. I remember President George H. W. Bush rearing up on his hind legs and saying that America Will Go To Mars In The Next Twenty Years. I remember a few dozen breathless articles in Time and Newsweek describing the Mars mission, and what we’d do once we got there, and how we’d colonize the Red Planet. It was great theater for a couple of months.

Then the sticker shock came in - NASA wanted $500 billion dollars over 20 years to make the project work. Congress balked. Bush got involved in a land war in Asia, then was kicked out of power. The great Bush space initiative died on the vine.

Not unlike what I suspect is going to happen now, speech or no speech:

Citing policy and budget concerns, key members of Congress have called on NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe to postpone further work on the next U.S. space plane designed to carry crews to and from orbit.

Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Science Committee, and ranking Democrat Ralph M. Hall (Tex.) urged O’Keefe “to defer the current program” to build an Orbital Space Plane, at a cost of as much as $13 billion over the next five years, until the White House and Congress complete a multi-agency review of U.S. goals for human spaceflight.

Keep in mind that these are the same creatures who, shortly after the Columbia accident, were hammering O’Keefe left and right demanding he Replace The Shuttle Right Damn Now Because It’s A Deathtrap. Now that the American public has forgotten, they want to defer. But what does a deferment on OSP mean to the NASA?

Well, no OSP means no backup crew transfer capability for the station, meaning we’re stuck with a slowly decaying Shuttle and a perpetually cash-strapped Soyuz for operational purposes. This means that ISS operations will continue to lag behind, allowing Congress to nod sagely and start debating cutting this “expensive boondoggle,” never mind the FOUR BILLION DOLLARS A MONTH we’re currently spending in Iraq or the TWENTY-FIVE BILLION DOLLARS we’re spending to LEASE KC-135 tanker aircraft from Boeing over the objections of the Congressional Budget Office AND the Pentagon. Cutting on ISS without any visible funding for future manned space operations (i.e. the sturm und drang of a Dubya speech backed up by zilch) means the scaling back of Soyuz (which needs NASA money to maintain even the bare operational status it has now), the end of Shuttle missions (as eveything in the pipeline save for two flights is now scheuled for ISS construction and resupply) and ultimately the end of manned spaceflight in the West.

Unless the government actually decides that the long-term goals are worth supporting and funding, this is what we have to look forward to. No photo-op on December 17 or anything else will change it.

When I was still a kid, I thought we’d have space stations and lunar bases and maybe even landed somebody on Mars by now. We certainly could have done the first two at any point over the last twenty-five years. Nowadays I feel glad that we’ve got a cobbled-together space station and a handful of rickety old spaceplanes even flying.

This depresses me beyond anything else.