Asteroid Capture Mission Widely Seen As A 'Distraction' For The Agency

By Wes Oleszewski, ANN Spaceflight Analyst

Speaking at the “Humans 2 Mars Summit,” which was held May 6-8, 2013 at George Washington University, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden (pictured) stated that if another administration (or perhaps the Congress) steps in and says do a mission to the Moon, “…it’s game over! …we’re back to square one.” In other words if anyone at any time in the future deviates from the Obama plan for human spaceflight, NASA has to start all over again. We will thus be finished as a spaceflight nation- it’ll be a disaster, doom, toads raining from the sky, dogs and cats living together, MASS HYSTARIA!

Apparently NASA’s politically-appointed upper management has added hyperbole to its list of all things NASA, just ahead of hypergolic and hypersonic.

But wait Charlie… did not the President, at whose pleasure you serve as NASA Administrator, whose cabinet you sit upon, already take NASA back to “square one” with his 2011 budget proposal that de-funded the Constellation Program and ended our return to the Moon? In fact, since his budget proposal not only de-funded America’s planned return to the moon, which was $9 billion along the way, he at the same time caused tens of thousands of Americans to lose their jobs while his administration vacated the leadership of the United States in space. Did this President not, in fact, take us past “square one” and onto square none?

The answer is YES! The Obama “new space” plan to nowhere has placed this nation’s human spaceflight program at square none. Thus, if a program, such as a return to the Moon would place us at “square one,” it would actually be a step forward.

Yet, why is it that the NASA Administrator and his President are so in fear of a lunar return? Well, the answer is; because the President and his advisors have cooked up a brand new objective for NASA. It is one that Charlie Bolden told the Congress he was “proud” that the President trusted NASA with. It is the bold challenge of going out into space, capturing an asteroid, about the size of a pickup truck and returning it into an orbit near that of the moon, so that astronauts can someday go out and study it. Yes indeed, this is the challenge that is being sold as one that will advance human technology and civilization in the same manner as Apollo and will place us on the path to Mars. Charlie Bolden himself said that the project will teach us a lot about having humans in deep space. Countless skills involving astronauts in deep space will be gained which we will need for the, someday, maybe in the 2030s, venture to Mars. There is only one problem with that statement; the asteroid capture is slated to be a robotic event. No humans will venture into deep space to catch the boulder. Of course, that part of the mission is being kept fairly quiet- since it negates most of the mission’s selling points of humans learning how to work in deep space.

Although the current talking points surrounding the boulder catch mission are that “NASA has been looking at this for a long time,” that point should also be taken as spin. Indeed the mention of a manned asteroid visit popped up in the Constellation program, but that was a visit to a sub-Moon sized asteroid. They even made a spiffy computer animated video of it. By comparison, the current “idea” is to fetch a rock roughly the size of a pickup truck with a robot spacecraft. So, although NASA has had the “idea” under very minimal consideration for a long time, frankly you can say the same about belly button lint, or wall paper. Just because you have been sitting around “looking at it” for a long time does not mean that any serious engineering has been done on the subject.

The fact is that this little venture was spun straight out of the White House and smacks of having the fingerprints of their Office of Science and Technology Policy all over it. It was sprung upon NASA and its current contractors out of the blue and resulted in a collective yawn from nearly everyone, and even laughter from more than a few. It is not a new bold challenge and it was never intended to be such. What it is, in fact, is simply something for NASA as a whole to diddle with until the end of the Obama administration. Something to keep them busy making fancy computer animated movies and PowerPoint presentations and doing some make-work development while NASA employees and contractors worry about being laid off. It is indeed another program to nowhere, a stall to keep NASA and this nation on square none.

Unfortunately for Charlie and the President that he serves, nearly everyone in the spaceflight community and many in the Congress have seen that the “asteroid mission” is little more than a distraction; a waste of time and a waste of resources. NASA’s own Small Bodies Advisory Group called the boulder retrieval scheme, “Entertaining, but not a serious proposal.” For that reason Charlie has been assigned new talking points by his bosses. He now has to go out and insist that doom and disaster will take place if anyone ever dares to change course from Obama’s new nowhere program. Especially he must sell the spin that any notion of returning to the moon is the kiss of death for a manned space program that has already been stabbed in the heart by the sharp point of the presidential budget pencil back in 2010.

In keeping with that selling of the lunar doom notion Administrator Bolden recently testified in front of a House subcommittee and presented the startling fact that the restart and development to flight readiness of the Altair lunar lander, which was a part of the Constellation program, would cost an estimated $8 to $10 billion dollars! Sounds like a shocking sum of taxpayer dollars doesn't it? Well, that is until you consider that if you take the cost of the Apollo Lunar Module and inflate it into 2013 dollars, it comes out to more than $15 billion. Suddenly Charlie’s point isn't so shocking and the Altair looks like a bargain.

So, the logical question becomes; what is so bad about a return to the Moon? It is a very practical step toward Mars and the technology that would be required for manned lunar surface missions and protracted stays could easily be applied toward a Mars venture. Why is it that the politically appointed management at NASA now considers this to be such a poison pill? Simple, the answer is that this is what the White House has directed them to do. The President and those close to him want this, like everything else, done their way. The answer to the next question, “why is that?” is not so simple, however. Some may speculate that it is part of the de-developmental direction of the OSTP; where everything that could advance United States exceptionalism must be torn down and replaced with their “new normal.” Nothing more clearly demonstrates that exceptionalism like huge rockets, astronauts and space vehicles bound for glory with “UNITED STATES” written all over them. Perish the thought. Or it could be reasoned that much like President Nixon, who wiped out Apollo in large part to purge a program promoted by his political rivals, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, President Obama is seeking to, at all costs, wipe away every trace of his political opposite, President George W. Bush who proposed Constellation. Granted that Bush himself was doing a pretty good job of strangling Constellation to death, but Obama was far more direct; he simply defunded it- outright. There is also the possibility that the President himself actually had nothing to do with the cooking up of the NASA boulder grab-mission. The idea may have been conceived by some ad-hoc gathering of White House, OSTP and other bureaucratic wonks. Or it could be that some individual in the administration looked at the original Obama plan for spaceflight, saw the word “asteroid” and simply said “Let’s get NASA to do that.” We may never know the whole answer, which will likely end up hidden in secret catacombs under Washington DC along with the Lost Ark and Obama’s college transcripts.

The bottom line here is NASA does not have the budget to fool around with this nonsense and Obama, the OSTP and NASA’s politically appointed upper management all know it. The asteroid-grab distraction will bleed away billions of dollars and slow both commercial crew and heavy lift development. So, the next question that we should all ask is why are they really doing this to what remains of America’s space program? Of course, most Americans are far more interested in Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy and who may win on “America’s Got Talent” to ask such foolish nerdy questions. By the way… did you see “Game of Thrones” the other night? Whoa!

FMI: www.nasa.gov, www.whitehouse.gov