By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 14 at 6:51 am ET A report released two months ago concluded there was no national consensus on NASA’s strategic direction, including a lack of agreement on a long-term destination for human space exploration. Two polls released this week, each with their own issues, appear to have inadvertently confirmed that assessment.
A “preliminary snapshot report” of a poll commissioned by Explore Mars and Boeing found that 75% of respondents agreed that NASA’s budget should be increased to 1% of the overall federal budget to fund a mission—presumably, although not explicitly stated, to be human—to Mars. (The Phillips & Company poll found that that, on average, people thought NASA already got about 2.5% of the federal budget, rather than the approximately 0.5% it actually gets.) That interest in a human Mars mission rises to 84% if Curiosity finds evidence of past or present life. 71% of people said they were “confident” humans would go to Mars by 2033 (67% of people said they were confident humans would go to Mars in their lifetime, suggesting some respondents were in touch with their mortality.)
Another poll, though, suggests humans wouldn’t want to stay there. A poll by YouGov for The Huffington Post finds that 79% of people think’s it’s not very likely or nor at all likely there will be a human colony on Mars in their lifetime. Only 7% of people said they wold be definitely interested in being part of such a colony, while 56% said no, they’re not at all interested in moving to Mars.
Is it possible to reconcile these polls: are people interested in supporting human exploration of Mars, but don’t think it’ll lead to anything more? Perhaps. Only 10% of the respondents in the Explore Mars/Boeing poll said that establishing a permanent settlement was the top reason for going to Mars, ahead of only creating jobs on Earth and supporting international cooperation among the rationales provided; achieving a “greater understanding of Mars” was the most popular choice.
And it’s possible that the polls themselves have flaws. The YouGov poll contains only three questions, all about human colonies on Mars: an odd, out-of-the-blue topic to be asking people about. There are also potentially selection issues, as YouGov polls are from a self-selected panel of people “who like to express and share their opinions, and earn points along the way.” The poll results also lack any demographics or other information about who responded, other than that it’s based on “1,000 adult interviews” with a margin of error of 3.4%.
The Explore Mars/Boeing poll results also lack, for the time being, demographic information, although the organizations state in the preliminary poll results that the full report “with demographic data” will be released on March 4. Some have questioned the poll results on other grounds, including that the head of Phillips & Company is a member of the board of advisors of Explore Mars and thus poses a potential conflict of interest.
It’s possible that the confusion in the poll results reflects a confusion in society: that “lack of national consensus” identified in the National Research Council report in December. Or, perhaps, people don’t think much about sending humans to explore and/or settle Mars; understandably so. It’s worth noting that the new human spaceflight study underway by the National Academies, as directed by the 2010 NASA authorization act, includes a number of panelists with expertise in public surveys: perhaps a new assessment of public interest in and support for human spaceflight, including missions to Mars, will come of that.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 13 at 8:38 pm ET Two key Senate committees, Appropriations and Commerce, formally organized their subcommittees this week. As expected, the chair and ranking member of the full Senate Appropriations Committee, Sens. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Richard Shelby (R-AL), respectively, will also serve in the same positions on the Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee, whose jurisdiction includes NASA and NOAA, according to subcommittee assignments announced by the committee on Tuesday. The rest of the CJS subcommittee:
| Democrats |
Republicans |
Barbara Mikulski
Patrick Leahy
Dianne Feinstein
Jack Reed
Frank Lautenberg
Mark Pryor
Mary Landrieu
Jeanne Shaheen
Jeff Merkley
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Richard Shelby
Mitch McConnell
Lamar Alexander
Susan Collins
Lisa Murkowski
Lindsey Graham
Mark Kirk
John Boozman
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On Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee held its organizational meeting, announcing members of its various subcommittees, including Science and Space. As expected, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) returns as chairman of the space subcommittee, but will have a new ranking member: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), elected in November to replace the retiring Kay Bailey Hutchison. John Boozman (R-AR), who had previously been the ranking member of the subcommittee, is no longer on the Commerce committee; his role was relatively limited in any case, as Hutchison, the ranking member of the full committee in the last Congress, played a bigger role on space issues, working directly with Nelson.
The full subcommittee:
| Democrats |
Republicans |
Bill Nelson
Barbara Boxer
Mark Pryor
Amy Klobuchar
Mark Warner
Richard Blumenthal
William Cowan
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Ted Cruz
Roger Wicker
Marco Rubio
Dean Heller
Dan Coats
Ron Johnson
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The assignments of Nelson and Cruz to be the top members of their parties on the space subcommittee comes just a day after the two clashed in a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting to vote on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be the Secretary of Defense. Will those subcommittee hearings be nearly as exciting?
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 12 at 6:54 am ET When Congress passed in December a defense authorization bill containing a long-sought satellite export control provision, the space industry understandably reacted with glee. However, as one leading proponent of such reform noted last week, the work in actually removing satellites and related components off the US Munitions List (USML), and thus no longer under the jurisdiction of ITAR, is not yet complete.
“What we got with the legislative victory was not reform itself, but the opportunity for reform,” explained Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace, the new chairman of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), during a session of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington last Thursday. Gold, who previously chaired COMSTAC’s export control working group, noted that the law now allows for these items to be moved off the USML, but does not itself take them off the list. “Everything that was under ITAR back in December is still ITAR today,” he said.
Gold said the administration plans to propose changes to items in each of the 21 categories of the USML, one at a time. Category XV, which covers spacecraft, is likely to be the third or fourth category taken up by the administration, which Gold said is an ideal position. “You don’t want to be the first category to come up, because I’m sure there will be a lot of confusion and a lot of process,” he said. “However, you don’t want to be number 21, because they might not get to it.”
The proposed changes to Category XV, Gold said, will likely follow the recommendations of the “Section 1248†report released last year that evaluated the national security implications of removing satellites and related items off the USML. “I think we’re going to see the entire 1248 report implemented by the end of this year,” he said.
Gold, a dedicated Boston Red Sox fan, likened the legislative reform to winning not the World Series, but the American League Championship Series (ALCS), the winner of which goes on to play in the World Series. If that parallel holds, it may be good news for the space industry: in their last two championships, in 2004 and 2007, the Red Sox had to come from behind to win the ALCS, but then went on to sweep the World Series.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 10 at 2:49 pm ET While a planned reauthorization of NASA this year is attracting headlines, another space-related priority for members of Congress this year is a reauthorization of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) and an update of the Commercial Space Launch Act. At FAA/AST’s annual conference last week, members of Congress and their staffs outlined several potential changes to existing legislation, from an extension of launch indemnification to granting the office authority for regulating on-orbit activities.
“I would suggest we could look forward to, at long last, a reauthorization of the Office of Commercial Space Transportation,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), vice-chairman of the House Science Committee, in a speech at the conference Wednesday. “It’s becoming very evident even to members of Congress that this industry is critical and we need to reauthorize that legislation.”
One issue will be the “evolving role of the FAA in regulating safety,” said Ann Zulkosky, senior professional staff on the Senate Commerce Committee, during a panel session at the conference Wednesday afternoon. AST retains its role in protecting the uninvolved public, but is restricted by law from promulgating regulations covering the safety of spaceflight participants. That provision, included in the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (CSLAA) of 2004, the last major update to commercial launch legislation, was set to expire last December, but an FAA reauthorization bill last year extended it until October 2015.
Another issue, Zulkosky said, would be the issue of on-orbit authority. AST currently has the ability to regulate launches and reentries, but activities in space after launch and before reentry fall into a gray area, with no single agency having oversight or other authority for all activities. (Some agencies do have specific authority on some issues, like the FCC on spacecraft communications.) “We’ll certainly be having conversations with FAA as we look to update legislation in this area,” she said, noting that some in industry had proposed giving FAA that authority.
Another topic that will likely either be included in any reauthorization, or done in parallel with it, is another extension of the commercial launch indemnification system. That system was extended for only one year in legislation passed early last month, although the original House version of the bill had included a two-year extension.
“We would love to see it extended for a long period,” said Chris Kunstadter of XL Insurance, the chairman of the Business Legal Working Group of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), an industry group that advises FAA/AST, at the conference on Thursday. One issue is the calculation of the “maximum probable loss” to third parties in the event of a launch accident, a level to which launch licensees are liable for, with the government indemnifying any losses above that level. FAA and COMSTAC will look for ways to improve the accuracy of that calculation over the next several months, he said.
One key industry official welcomed plans to examine these and other issues with current commercial launch law. “It is something that should be reopened and looked at in the context of the current state of play,” said Tim Hughes, vice president and chief counsel of SpaceX, during a conference panel Wednesday. Hughes helped draft the CSLAA as a staff member of the House Science Committee back in 2004, and he said they didn’t anticipate then some developments that have taken place since that bill’s passage. “It was not contemplated that there would be commercial entities carrying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station,” he said.
Rohrabacher said that it remained vital that FAA recognize that commercial spaceflight is still an emerging industry and not over-regulate it. He noted that the Office of Commercial Space Transportation was originally placed directly under the Secretary of Transportation, and only later moved to the FAA. “The culture of the FAA is based on a mandate to protect passenger safety,” he said, but argued that commercial spaceflight, being far less mature than aviation, requires a different regulatory philosophy. “That’s a very different mandate and a very different approach, but it’s necessary for us to recognize that if we are to be successful in moving the industry forward.”
Rohrabacher said that FAA was, for the time being, doing a good job treating aviation and spaceflight differently, but warned he would seek action to move the office out of the FAA should the situation change. “Ultimately, if that proves too difficult for the FAA to reconcile, we may end up having to move this whole job back to the office of the Secretary of Transportation.”
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 8 at 7:22 am ET Key members of Congress and their staffs indicated this week that reauthorization of NASA is one of their priorities for the coming year. However, in comments at FAA’s annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, they indicated that these efforts would be more along the lines of adjustments to existing policies than major revisions of them.
A NASA reauthorization bill has been a priority for members of both the House Science Committee and Senate Commerce Committee for some time, as the most recent NASA authorization act, passed in 2010, runs through fiscal year 2013. A key challenge, though, will be reconciling goals for the agency laid out in the authorization with available money, particularly as funding has fallen far short of authorized levels in 2012 and likely again in 2013. “Even in a constrained fiscal environment,” said Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), ranking member of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, “I believe it’s possible to cement an authorization” that can be funded.
That mismatch between authorization and appropriations—appropriations for fiscal year 2013 will fall far short of the $19.96 billion authorized for NASA in the 2010 act—will be a key challenge in the next authorization bill. “We realize that the appropriation has not kept pace with the authorization overall, making the next authorization much more of a challenge,” said Ann Zulkosky, senior professional staff on the Senate Commerce Committee, during a panel at the FAA conference Wednesday.
However, it’s unlikely the next authorization act will make major policy changes, at least compared to 2010. “The reauthorization this year will build off the 2010 act and make the necessary policy updates,” Zulkosky said, noting that the policy language in the 2010 act remains in effect even after the end of the current fiscal year. Tony Detora, senior policy advisor for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), concurred. “This process will be less contentious than the 2010 process,” he said, noting he was speaking for himself. “That policy direction is generally agreed upon.”
One area of discussion will be on NASA’s commercial crew program, including both funding levels and implementation. “We need to ensure an appropriate balance between the government’s investment and that of participating companies,” Zulkosky said, adding that the FY12 funding level of $406 million for commercial crew “would certainly be challenging against the backdrop of sequestration.” She said there’s likely to be discussion of contracting methods and maintaining competition.
Jeff Bingham, a veteran Senate staffer speaking for himself, defended previous efforts by the now-retired Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) to force NASA to downselect to a single commercial crew provider as soon as possible. “What she wanted to do was to try and make it possible for NASA to do a good job with commercial crew development in light of the lack of available resources,” he said. NASA needs both a commercial crew program as well as the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, he said, something challenging in the current budget environment. “We need to have both,” he said. “You can’t really do both on a flatline budget.”
The commercial crew program did get support from a key appropriator, though. “We fought to increase the commercial line,” said Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA), ranking member of the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, in a speech at the conference Thursday. “It is something I am committed to, and I pledge to continue to work with you on this as we go forward.”
That budget and policy situation hasn’t stopped some members from thinking about bigger changes, however. “We must have a better defined US mission going forward,” said Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), chairman of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee, in a speech at the conference Wednesday afternoon. “I believe we should go back to the Moon, so let’s create blueprints, dates, put the money forward, and set our boots on the regolith once again.”
“Astronauts have inspired generations of Americans, but, with no clear mission, NASA needs decisive leadership from Congress,” wrote Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the full House Science Committee, in an op-ed this week in Roll Call. “As we move beyond the space shuttle era, the committee will help keep our space program moving forward. We will work on a NASA reauthorization bill that promotes the commercialization of space and advances space exploration to expand our knowledge of the universe and inspire our nation.”
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 7 at 1:08 pm ET While the Obama Administration issued a new national space policy fairly quickly, releasing it in late June of 2010, it has been slower to develop more specific space policies, such as in the area of space transportation. While there were indications last year that the policy could be done by the fall, no policy has yet been released, and an administration official Thursday offered no specifics about just when that policy might be released.
“We continue to work the national space transportation policy,” said John Olson, assistant director for space and aeronautics in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation conference in Washington Thursday morning. Neither in his speech, nor in the question and answer period that followed, though, did he indicate when the policy might be released. “Significant progress has been made” on the policy, he said later. “It is in work.”
Olson didn’t give specifics about what the policy might contain, since it hasn’t been released yet, but reassured conference attendees that its contents will not come “as a surprise” when it is released. “In many cases, we’ve already implemented many of the principles” of the policy as various agencies implement the overall national space policy, he said.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 7 at 6:58 am ET The full House Science Committee, which will be devoting attention this year to NASA and commercial space transportation among other topics, emerged from a closed-door retreat on Tuesday with plans to work across party lines on key issues. “Newspaper headlines insist that Capitol Hill is hopelessly gridlocked. I want the Science, Space, and Technology Committee to be the exception,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the committee, in a post-retreat press release. “This bipartisan retreat sets a good tone of cooperation for what can be a year of bipartisan achievements.”
The ranking member of the full committee, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), shared those sentiments in the same statement. The committee, she said, “has much important work to do in the 113th Congress and the only way we will be able to get it done is through bipartisanship.” What the committee members discussed in the committee wasn’t disclosed, but they did have a couple of celebrity guests: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye, the latter noting on Twitter that they were at the retreat to remind the committee “of the great value of science.”
Speaking yesterday at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), the ranking member of the committee’s space subcommittee, also welcomed bipartisan cooperation she expected on space issues in the committee. “There really is a sense—and Chairman Smith has certainly indicated this—that we are really going to, as much as possible, return the Science Committee to one that really does think about the future,” she said.
Edwards said that she and the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS), have a “great working relationship” that will extend to work this year on a new NASA authorization bill that can establish objectives and funding levels that appropriators can fulfill with their separate funding bills. “I hope that the chairman and I are able to work on realistic goals, that we’re able to set a course that Mr. [Chaka] Fattah and his colleagues and his colleagues are able to resource,” she said, referring to the ranking member of the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 5 at 7:05 am ET It was a missed deadline that was hardly noticed. Monday was the day that, under federal law, the White House was supposed to release its fiscal year 2014 budget proposal. But the Obama Administration did not release its budget proposal on the first Monday in February, as was the case last year. Officials with the Office of Management and Budget say the FY14 budget will be released next Wednesday, the day after President Obama gives his State of the Union address.
However, not many people are thinking about the 2014 budget when spending for 2013 remains unresolved, more than four months into the fiscal year. Attention is now on the March 1 deadline to deal with across-the-board automatic spending cuts, aka sequestration, a deadline that’s already been pushed back from the beginning of the year. Now, though, there’s a growing belief that the sequester, or something like it, will go into effect at the beginning of next month. National Journal reported last month that senators of both parties think sequestration could go into effect given unwillingness to either accept revenue increases or redistributed spending cuts. And POLITICO, in a piece today on the effect of such cuts on defense spending, concluded that currently “bets are on the automatic cuts taking place.”
If sequestration does go into effect, it would mean for NASA a cut of over eight percent for its various accounts (science, exploration, etc.) How those cuts would be distributed among various programs within those accounts remains unclear, as NASA has divulged few details. Speaking at the American Astronomical Society meeting in California last month, John Grunsfeld, the NASA associate administrator for science, indicated that planning for the original sequestration deadline of January 1 started less than a week before. “We never got flow down of what the sequestration would have meant,” he said, before Congress passed legislation to push back the sequestration deadline to March 1. The agency then went back to working with the administration on the FY14 budget proposal, he said.
Grunsfeld did say at the time that he made it a priority with NASA’s science program to protect funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, noting that it had been previously identified as an agency priority. But the lack of information about sequestration planning has created plenty of speculation about how those cuts would be implemented, such as in NASA’s planetary sciences program. An OMB memo to agencies last month provides only general guidance for sequestration planning, emphasizing finding “the most appropriate means to reduce civilian workforce costs” and identifying cost savings in grants and contracts, while working to “reduce operational risks and minimize impacts on the agency’s core mission”. As we get closer to the end of the month, better understanding what those sequestration cuts might entail will become more of a priority.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 3 at 10:37 am ET Friday was the 10th anniversary of the Columbia accident, and a few members of Congress—but only a few—as well as President Obama marked the occasions with columns or other statements about the accident. Those comments shared solemn sentiments about anniversary, but offered a spectrum of views about the future.
In his statement about NASA’s Day of Remembrance (available on NASA’s website but not showing up on whitehouse.gov), President Obama noted the Columbia anniversary, as well as the previous Challenger and Apollo 1 accidents, but mostly looked ahead. “The exploration of space represents one of the most challenging endeavors we undertake as a Nation,” he said, adding that “it’s imperative America continues to lead the world in reaching for the stars while giving us a better understanding of our home planet.” His statement then briefly described NASA efforts “that will eventually put Americans on Mars.” Among the items he cited was “the biggest booster since the Apollo-era Saturn V [that] is well on its way to launching a new American journey into deep space.” Of course, when the Obama Administration rolled out its proposed NASA revamp in its FY11 budget proposal—released on the seventh anniversary of the Columbia accident—that heavy-lift booster work was set to be deferred for five years.
Friday’s Orlando Sentinel featured a pair of op-eds from members of Congress tied to the Columbia anniversary but primarily focused on the future. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) largely laid out NASA’s current plan, including develop of the Space Launch System and Orion as well as commercial crew initiatives. “I’d say NASA’s future is bright,” he concludes. Nelson, chairman of the space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, does note plans for a NASA reauthorization bill this year, but suggests it will not deviate much from the plan for the agency laid out in the 2010 bill: “the road map from the 2010 plan will continue guiding the agency.” He adds that he plans to “lead an update of space legislation to further enable private companies to meet our nation’s needs,” but offers no specifics.
However, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) called for more substantive changes to NASA in his Sentinel op-ed, including “divesting” NASA of “anything that can reasonably be placed in another agency,” such as Earth science. “We should prioritize technologies that give us the biggest bang for our buck, including solar-electric propulsion and cryogenic propellant storage and transfer,” he argues. He throws in calls for NASA efforts to clean up orbital debris and study near Earth objects. “We will never re-create Apollo, the product of many complex variables, but the truth is we don’t really want to re-create Apollo,” he states near the end of his piece. “This time we want to colonize the solar system, building settlements on the moon, in deep space, and on Mars.”
Rohrabacher also, unsurprisingly, expressed his support for commercial space transportation, but another House member noted safety concerns she had. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), ranking member of the House Science Committee, said in an op-ed in The Hill that NASA must ensure “safety is not compromised in the process” of developing new systems. “[W]e cannot let our enthusiasm for the efforts of private enterprises — albeit ones that are getting significant taxpayer funding — to develop vehicles that could one day fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station lull us into a false sense of complacency,” she wrote, citing a recent report by the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) that she said offered “troubling indicators” that compromised safety is a possibility.
“The best way to honor the crewmembers of the Space Shuttle Columbia STS-107 mission is to remember the hard lessons learned from that tragedy. Space travel is risky and is not yet mature,” Johnson writes in the conclusion of her op-ed. “I will work steadfastly with my fellow members of Congress to ensure that we pursue a meaningful human space flight program for our Nation, one that can continue to inspire Americans to look to the future, yet one that is grounded in NASA’s decades of experience, expertise, and hard-earned lessons.” And one that, presumably, can fit within the stricter fiscal constraints NASa is likely to experience in 2013 and for at least the next several years beyond.
By Jeff Foust on 2013 February 1 at 12:00 pm ET Today marks the tenth anniversary of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its seven person crew. A lot has been, and will be, said about the accident itself and its aftermath. The accident, though, also ushered in an era of uncertainty in space policy, particularly in regards to human spaceflight, that arguably still persists to this day.
The accident, of course, immediately derailed the plans to quickly finish assembling the International Space Station, plans that created schedule pressure later identified as a contributing factor in the Columbia accident. Less than a year later, though, it looked like we had that certainty back, in the form of President George W. Bush’s speech in January 2004 unveiling the Vision for Space Exploration. We would return the shuttle to flight, use it long enough to complete the ISS and then retire it, and then bring in a next-generation crew transportation system that would return humans to the Moon by 2020.
It didn’t work out that way: while the vision was in place, the funding didn’t follow, particularly for NASA’s chosen approach to implement that new transportation, Constellation. “I think the previous administration’s plans to go to the Moon was a great vision, but only poets plan strategy without a budget,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, put it at the recent Baker Institute forum on space policy. “The Obama Administration, quite frankly, was right to pull the plug” on Constellation, she concluded.
But the Obama Administration’s plans, rolled out three years ago today, also met with opposition, resulting in the compromise enacted in the form of the 2010 NASA Authorization Act that October. And even those plans look questionable today, thanks to changing fiscal environment. In that fiscal year 2011 budget proposal released exactly three years ago, the administration projected NASA’s budget to grow from $19 billion in FY11 to just under $20 billion in FY13, and on to nearly $21 billion in FY15. Today, with the FY13 budget still not resolved, $20 billion looks like a fantasy: anything around NASA’s FY12 appropriation of about $17.7 billion would be considered a major victory. Another gap between strategy and budgets is looming.
It’s easy to trace the chain of events back to the Columbia accident, but it’s also fair to ask how different events would have been without the accident. At first glance, it appears there would have been more certainty, especially in the near term: NASA would have continued with the assembly of the ISS at its planned brisk pace, completing the station much sooner. But after that? Things are less clear. At the time of the accident, NASA was embarking on the Space Launch Initiative (SLI), an effort to develop a second-generation reusable launch vehicle, but was also investigating ways to extend the life of the Space Shuttle to perhaps 2020. Would NASA have continued SLI, or would it have suffered the fate of previous RLV development efforts? And how long would NASA have tried to keep flying the shuttles? When, and how, would plans for human spaceflight beyond LEO emerge?
The Columbia accident put NASA’s human spaceflight efforts on a wandering path, from the Vision for Space Exploration to the Obama Administration’s plans to the current-day uncertainty of just what NASA will be able to afford to do. However, the accident didn’t cause that uncertainty so much as trigger events that have since been carried by an underlying uncertainty, one that arguably existed even before the accident, of just what NASA’s human spaceflight program should be doing, and why.
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