What of Constellation?
Was canceling NASA’s Constellation program a good idea?
Too much of this debate has taken the form of political venom for anyone to make a definitive case. In fact, the lack of convergence in this arguing has clearly rendered the cancellation decision moot.
If Constellation was such a great idea, it would have had more staying power than this.
In reality Constellation was step 1 in a long term process where future steps were ill-defined. No one knows if it would have produced anything useful. It was just as likely we’d have wound up flying another expensive system with no genuinely committed destination — much like the first two decades of the Space Shuttle.
The Russians could charge $200m per astronaut for trips to and from the International Space Station and still this would still be cheaper than flights aboard the Shuttle or Constellation.
Not having a American-based human launch capability doesn’t mean that we won’t have this in the future. Almost a decade passed between Skylab and the first launch of Columbia. We’ve been down this road before and didn’t seem particularly fazed — even without the availability of Russian Soyuz launchers.
Constellation wouldn’t have been enough for a mission to Mars, and frankly fell far short of a return to the Moon as a practice-run for Mars.
It would have been a launch capability in search of a mission.
All the pictures of lunar bases and methods for missions to Mars are fictional and bear little resemblance to what would be needed to fulfill these virtual hallucinations (sorry to be so blunt — but that’s far closer to the truth than any other word to describe NASA’s long range vision in recent years).
In this regard, the current Obama plan isn’t any better or worse than Constellation. Neither is focused on reality. Neither works directly toward a clearly defined and achievable goal, given the plan in place. Both budgets commit about the same amount of money. Neither puts a human on Mars in any quantifiable time frame (if Mars is even the goal at all — and not merely a dummy target to justify widely diffused efforts).
There is no point in complaining over Constellation or the Obama plan unless starting with the true extent of NASA ‘manned’ mission since Apollo — launching people a couple hundred miles up and having a place ready for them to live until the next crew is launched.
Until we –really– want to do more than this, no program is going to take us anywhere via engineering capability alone.
The horse — no matter how capable — rarely leaves the comfortable confines of a greener pasture without a committed rider.
