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"  Civil space policy has been roiled with uncertainty ever since the 2008 election. When the Obama administration asked for, and received, Bush-administration NASA head Mike Griffin&amp;#039;s resignation in January of 2009, it was clear that there were major changes coming to NASA. The Augustine commission, which met last summer to evaluate the program and provide options for the White House going forward, did nothing to calm the fears of those invested, either emotionally or financially, in Constellation\u2014Griffin&amp;#039;s proposed means of carrying out the Bush Vision for Space Exploration (VSE). None of the options the committee provided had 2020\u2014Constellation&amp;#039;s aim for lunar landings\u2014as an explicit goal or date. The uncertainty as to which option the president would choose continued throughout last fall. It was partially resolved in early February, with the submission of the NASA budget. Many were shocked to discover that all of Constellation was slated to be canceled, without any obvious replacement for getting humans beyond low Earth orbit, in which they had been confined since the last Apollo mission in 1972. The absence of clear details about the new plans since then has resulted in cries that the president was ending the human spaceflight program, or even &amp;quot;surrendering to the Chinese.&amp;quot; Much of this is driven purely by partisan antipathy to this president; some by a sense that if we don&amp;#039;t have a specific planet and date with a really big rocket, it&amp;#039;s not a real space program. But some of the loudest cries, and greatest concern, come from those states and districts that stand to benefit the most from the status quo with their major NASA centers: Alabama (Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville), Texas (Johnson Space Center in Houston) and Florida (Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral). Florida&amp;#039;s problem is compounded by the planned ending of the space shuttle this year. Many layoffs will result, devastating the economy on the Space Coast, and any new comparable program in terms of jobs is likely years off, if ever. Those bewailing the program&amp;#039;s end generally ignore the fact that it was a decision (along with a several-year &amp;quot;gap&amp;quot; until something else would be able to deliver astronauts to orbit) made over six years ago, by the Bush administration as part of the VSE, falsely implying instead that it was just one more Obama space-policy mistake. In the face of the political opposition, the White House decided a few weeks ago to attempt to calm the policy waters with a presidential speech, planned for April 15 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The choice of date was curious for two reasons and, according to at least one agency official, it wasn&amp;#039;t coordinated with NASA. First, the date coincides with the last day of the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, arguably the biggest American space conference of the year, and a day on which NASA administrator Charles Bolden was scheduled to speak (his speech was later moved to yesterday, the 13th, and he reportedly remained vague on the details, presumably so as not to pre-empt the president on Thursday).  Second, this is a day on which everyone is reminded of the high cost of the federal government as they frantically file their tax returns, often standing in line at the post office. It hardly seems an auspicious day to be announcing an increase in a discretionary program that many consider a luxury in hard economic times. The choice of location makes more sense\u2014the launch gantries and the Vehicle Assembly Building (the largest building in the world) make a spectacular backdrop for a presidential speech on space. But it&amp;#039;s not too cynical to also suggest that of the three affected states, only Florida&amp;#039;s electoral votes are potentially available to the president in his 2012 re-election bid. So what will he say? We got a pretty good hint on Tuesday, in the form of a fact sheet put out by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), run by the president&amp;#039;s science adviser, John Holdren. Constellation consisted of two new launch systems (Ares I and the heavy-lift Ares V), the Orion crew module, earth-departure stages and a lunar lander. But only the Orion and the Ares I, its launcher, were under active development (the rest weren&amp;#039;t scheduled to start until years in the future). So in canceling Constellation, only Ares I and Orion were immediately affected. Most expected Ares to be canceled, given its technical, budget and schedule difficulties; the shock was that Orion was canceled as well, leaving NASA with no crew module under development to get its astronauts to orbit and close the gap created by the end of the shuttle. But according to OSTP, the administration has apparently reconsidered, and resurrected, Orion. Sort of. Its original mission (which had driven it to grow in weight, partially contributing to the Ares I performance problems) was to go all the way to lunar orbit and back, as the Apollo command and service modules did. The new mission is much less ambitious. Not only will it not take astronauts to the moon; it won&amp;#039;t even take them to orbit. Instead, it will be used as a &amp;quot;lifeboat&amp;quot; at the ISS, being delivered without crew (removing the need for an expensive and heavy launch-abort system) and staying there for months at a time against the possibility that the ISS crew will have to evacuate to Earth.  The second key element in the OSTP release is a more firm commitment to a heavy-lift vehicle (HLV). While the previous budget release discussed HLV &amp;quot;technology development,&amp;quot; the new policy is that a decision will be made in 2015 to decide what it will look like and initiate the actual vehicle (as opposed to engine) program. This allows the engine development to move forward, potentially providing United Launch Alliance with American-made engines for the Atlas first stage, which currently uses Russian RD-180 engines (the cost per engine will thus increase by a significant factor, probably tens of millions per engine, as opposed to a single 10 million for the RD-180, but apparently &amp;quot;Buy American&amp;quot; outweighs frugality for the taxpayer). And 2015 is forever in space policy terms, giving plenty of time to decide that perhaps we don&amp;#039;t even need a heavy lifter, or at least nothing heavier than a growth version of the current Atlas and Delta. That decision will hinge at least in part on the third key element in the fact sheet, which is the development of means of refueling vehicles in space. If this technology is proven out in the next few years, it would eliminate the need for a Saturn-class rocket. Either way, it should be clear from these elements that, regardless of whether or not the president announces a specific planet and date, the intent to go beyond Earth orbit is clear, and that hysteria about the &amp;quot;end of human spaceflight&amp;quot; is just that. Will the president&amp;#039;s speech assuage his critics? The shuttle is still ending, this year or next, and Ares will not be restored, so it doesn&amp;#039;t offer much hope for Floridians, though it has change in abundance. Florida may have to come to terms with the reality that the Apollo era, and the days of NASA operating a large launch system from the Cape, is finally over, a half century after it began. It was an accident of history and the urgency of the Cold War, which created all of that infrastructure and work force in that time and place, and the world has moved on. The new commercial expendable providers, particularly SpaceX, need to reduce costs, which means being more productive, with a smaller work force. As we enter the era of reusable orbital space transports that may grow out of the current fledgling suborbital companies, and we no longer shed parts downrange on nominal flights, the Cape&amp;#039;s historical geographical advantage will go away. The new space ports may be inland, and more convenient to their customers than central Florida. And no presidential speech, no matter how eloquent or inspiring, is likely to change that inevitability. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a5564/obamas-new-nasa-speech/>