Bonnie Dunbar ----debatable where USA stands!!!!

In your view, where does the U.S. now stand?

 

We led the world in space exploration until early into the 21st Century.  However, I would postulate, that it is now debatable where our nation stands, especially with respect to human spaceflight exploration and concrete plans for the future.

 

The current star in our human spaceflight crown is the International Space Station (ISS), which we started designing nearly 30 years ago and then began assembling 15 years ago. At present, the U.S. remains the major investment partner in the ISS with its crew of six, representing five government agencies with 24 partner countries. The NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston shares mission control with the Russian Space Agency's control center in Moscow.

 

ISS is the most complex engineering and construction project of all time operating in the world's most hostile environment.  Among historic "wonders of the world", it must surely rank with the pyramids. A football field wide with four engineering and science research laboratories, it orbits about 200 miles above the Earth every 90 minutes.

 

Just as historic, that amazing development and assembly feat was accomplished with seamless international cooperation. The major national investors, in addition to the U.S./NASA are the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and the Russian Space Agency (RSA). This collaboration represents multinational support services and crews, a technological and cultural mix that symbolizes what nations can achieve working together.

 

To date, the ISS has been visited by 89 Russian vehicles, 37 Space Shuttle flights, three supply dockings by SpaceX, three Japanese supply vehicles, and three European supply vehicles.  Sometime in the future, we may need a space traffic control system not unlike the FAA for aviation.

 

The ISS has also provided lodging and work space for more than two hundred individuals, including professional astronauts and cosmonauts and a handful of paying "passengers."   In additional, thousands of researchers from all the partner nations have been utilizing the ISS research capabilities with the unique attributes of the microgravity and space environments which cannot be duplicated on the Earth. This research moves forward the fields of bioastronautics, fluid physics, combustion, biology, materials science, biotechnology, mechanics, engineering design, and —very importantly—spacecraft design itself. That peaceful and constructive lesson from space certainly demonstrates unlimited possibilities for "Spaceship Earth."

 

That's the good news. On the other hand, with the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011 after 135 flights over 30 years, our nation's participation and visibility in human space flight has changed dramatically.  Crowds no longer gather at the Kennedy Space Center to watch American and international crews launch aboard our Space Shuttle from U.S. soil. Instead, we now depend upon "purchasing" rides on Russian Soyuz capsules launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

 

Incidentally, Russia has now tripled what they are charging us for that transportation since 2006. After spending $60 billion of American taxpayer money to help build ISS, $40 billion more in Space Shuttle services to help assemble it, plus $3 billion in addition annually to support operating costs, we are now paying $71 million per transport every single American astronaut there and back.

 

And whereas the Shuttle launched up to seven astronauts (and cosmonauts) each mission about 6-8 times per year, the Soyuz, with capacity for only three crewmembers, departs only about half as often. Accordingly, while 355 astronauts and cosmonauts flew on the Shuttle, peaking at about 50 per year, our trips to the ISS are now limited with about four –six NASA astronauts flying each year.  Because of bartering arrangements, there will be more Russian cosmonauts visiting the ISS, than NASA astronauts. The recent astronaut selection class of eight new astronauts was the smallest since Apollo.

 

Because of that loss of visibility of our space program, many Americans and most of the press do not believe that the U.S. still has a human space exploration program. This decline in presence also has not been lost in the eyes of the rest of the world.

 

Bonnie, will you comment about U.S. previous proposals to return to the Moon and exploring Mars via the now defunct "Constellation Program"?

 

The Constellation Program was born of the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) following the Columbia accident in 2003. As fully approved by the G.W. Bush administration and a bi-partisan Congress, it was an international exploration program which would have taken us back to the Moon and on to Mars.  This program was also scheduled to provide a seamless transition of technology and NASA/industry workforce expertise following final retirement of the Space Shuttle.

 

In 2010 the Obama administration unilaterally cancelled the program before the Space Shuttle's last flight in 2011, and then replaced it with a proposed loosely-configured and congressionally unapproved robotic mission to rendezvous with  an as- yet unidentified asteroid. The idea is to tow the asteroid to a lunar orbit , then visit and examine it with a human crew, but never actually have anyone set foot on the Moon. This new proposal left our international partners adrift with no defined roles, and quite surprised.

 

I should note that planetary protection from asteroid impacts has been an important part of the NASA and DOD mission portfolios for research and robotic missions for many years. However, the current human mission to an asteroid, as described by the Obama Administration, has become both diversionary and divisive. The concept was not well developed from the outset, from either an engineering or scientific perspective before being proposed, and wasn't coordinated with NASA or within the normal peer review processes before being announced via a press release.

 

Most importantly, while we know where the Moon and Mars are located and can predict their orbits for planning purposes, this is certainly not the case with a yet-to-be-identified target asteroid. Only asteroids with certain orbits, sizes, rotation rates and surface characteristics would be candidates. However, this lack of information did not deter the Obama administration from identifying a date for this mythical rendezvous: as early as 2021.

 

Our traditional international governmental partners (ESA, JAXA, CSA, RSA) who are critical for spreading the funding risk involved with future space exploration, have not embraced a mission to an unidentified asteroid. This was very evident at a recent Association of Space Explorers meeting in Cologne, Germany, when ESA leadership stated that these missions could be more effectively performed by robotic spacecraft and that they did not plan to include them in their own strategies.

 

Even NASA's scientific advisory Small Bodies Assessment Group has criticized the idea as being too vague, costly and risky: "support for such a mission using planetary science resources isn't appropriate."

 

In summary, the U.S. currently has an outstanding space station, which is performing as intended and is a necessary stepping stone to future space exploration. However, the U.S. does not have a domestic crew launch capability, although a ""commercial crew competition" is in process with a selection in 2017, and the U.S. does not have a viable human space exploration strategy or budget. The nation is quickly losing the institutional technical expertise and facilities to put itself in the position of exploring. America's space leadership role is questionable at this point.

 

Bonnie, thank you for sharing your wise grandfather's advice with us. Let's think long and hard about where we came from, where we need to go, and where the necessary expertise and leadership will come from to get us there. Having accomplished so much and traveling so far, America can ill-afford to be content to remain where we are…a nation adrift in space.

 

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