Guest Editorial By Wes Oleszewski

The headlines read "Bolden Denies Abandoning Human Spaceflight," but the budget for NASA says otherwise. Beware of politicians who rip apart national icons while offering undefined goals without deadlines. It is much the same as saying "we're going to bulldoze the Washington Monument, but don't worry, we're going to replace it with something really terrific sometime later." That is the same message that the new NASA Administrator and his immediate underlings are pandering to the spaceflight community when it comes to President Obama's new budget and NASA's place in it.

On Monday, February 1, 2010, the Obama administration released its budget. Contained in that document was an alteration to more than four and one half decades of United States domination in Human Spaceflight. The budget kills NASA's Constellation Program which was working toward returning Americans to the moon. Instead the Obama Administration commands that ALL future United States Human Spaceflight is to be outsourced to assorted "commercial" operators.

NASA proper is relegated to some aero-research, undefined educational things, robotic tid-bits and some, so called, game-changing new technologies. PLUS the grand adventure of exploring… Earth. Of course there is also a special directive for NASA to spend billions chasing "climate change" especially focusing on man-made Global Warming… (subscript; prove it is true, or else). The reality is that thousands of NASA related jobs will be lost- perhaps more than 7,000 right off the bat. People dedicated to returning humans to the moon and then moving on out to Mars are now moving on to the unemployment lines. But, says the Obama Administration, hundreds … "hundreds" of new jobs will be created (insert fake political grin here.)

So, the administration commands the de-funding of all purposed NASA boosters as well as the Orion spacecraft for NASA human Spaceflight, yet provides absolutely no means for production of any sort of specified replacement. But, Administrator Bolden, speaking at the National Press Club the same day as the budget release, flatly denied that the administration was abandoning NASA's ability to launch United States astronauts.

"We're not abandoning human spaceflight by any stretch of the imagination," Bolden said "I think we're going to get there perhaps quicker than we would have done before."

NASA's Administrator Bolden

Perhaps Administrator Bolden has been exposed to some of those "Game-changing Technologies" he spoke of in the previous NASA telecon concerning this new path to nowhere, because he seems to clearly be in another universe. Without boosters, without spacecraft, just how are we going to get "there" and how will we get to "there" quicker? He'll, perhaps, discuss that later - ya' know, at an as yet unspecified date and place.

Actually he's referring to those Obama relished "commercial" launch operators to which the budget is going to shovel some 6 billion dollars to in order to allow NASA to rent seats aboard their, soon to be planned and later to be developed and one day to be tested and sometime later to be flown, spacecraft- none of which have a single shred of hardware built or flight tested. Yeah, that's going to get us "there" quicker than the hardware that NASA already has on-hand and is still actively testing for Constellation.

And while we're on the subject, exactly where is this "there" that the NASA administrator is speaking of?

You see Administrator Bolden's "there" is an undefined cascade of currently vague goals in space that are to be named sometime later - and, naturally, that sometime later is also undefined. Politically, one can never fail and one can never slip one's schedule if one's goals consist totally of some vaporous circle-speak and one's deadlines are equally misted in the ether. It is the perfect cover to hide the demolition of what may be one of the last things that the United States still does better than any other nation- Human Spaceflight.

This budget creates a void into which the entire United States space program can easily fall. Once the elements of NASA's Human Spaceflight program are scattered into this undefined void, they will NEVER be reassembled. Plus, once the International Space Station is de-orbited, now set for 2020, there will be ZERO motive for those "commercial" carriers to continue to fly NASA astronauts or any other people. United States Human Spaceflight will end there- forever.

Another aspect of this non-abandonment actually is the residual of the previous administration. That is the flying of NASA astronauts on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft until those unspecified American  "commercial" space capsules are ready… at that unspecified time that the administrator refers to as being "…sooner, rather than later." Yes, we will be depending on the Russians to allow us to buy rides aboard their spacecraft at a rate of some 51 million dollars per person- that, by the way, is more than double the rate that the Russians charge billionaire space "tourists." THAT is another way that the NASA administrator reasons that they are not abandoning Human Spaceflight. (By the way- in contrast, it costs about 64.2 million dollars per person to fly a seven person shuttle mission and approximately 56.25 million per person if the shuttle flies its maximum 8 person capacity.)

The bottom line is that this new budget is little more than an aggressive attempt by the Obama administration to act out one of his ideology's greatest political dreams, to dismantle NASA and kill Human Spaceflight- a good way to take another swipe at our national pride. Attempts have been made at this since the 1960s. This battle has just started, however. Because the Obama budget is only a proposal to the United States Congress where the United States space program carries far greater respect than in the Whitehouse. President Obama is losing friends in the Congress almost as fast as he is losing public approval points, and the NASA budget will likely meet the stiffest opposition that any of the president's efforts has yet to see. Still, it is unlikely that the President will even care about the outcome here- he has shot his free-throw at NASA and probably feels quite good about it. In fairness to Administrator Bolden, who is left holding this blue-bag of administrative excrement, the NASA Administrator serves at the pleasure of the Pesident- and right now, President Obama is probably quite pleased with him.

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