Washington DC – July 25, 1997 – While the Mars Pathfinder was approaching its
rendezvous with the Red Planet this summer, NASA space officials were
quietly conducting an internal study to see how to fund a more ambitious
Mars exploration plan: sending humans to land on Mars early in the 21st
Century. The effort, conducted by senior NASA headquarters staff, centered
around a way for the civil space agency to launch manned missions to Mars
without major increases in its anticipated budgets.
The result was an effort aimed at trimming NASA budgets by $2 billion per
year, beginning with the FY2000 budget formulation in two years. Space
planners were looking at ways to take most of the self-inflicted cuts out
of the U.S. space shuttle budget, about a $4-5 billion per year total
program. Total privatization of the shuttle to commercial industry, plus
releasing restrictions on shuttle payloads, possibly allowing the craft to
once again fly commercial satellites, were among the options to generate
the savings. The monies thus gleaned from shuttle and other agency programs
would then be directed to the new exploration plans. One option called for
use of liquid fly-back boosters now being proposed for the shuttle in the
post-2000 time frame forming the basis of a new heavy-lift space booster
for Mars bound astronauts called Magnum Lifter. But there’s only one
problem about diverting the NASA budget cash to Mars: Capitol Hill found
out about it this week- and blasted the plan.
“This will never pass my committee!”, thundered Rep. Dana Rohrabacker
(R-CA.), chairman of the House Space Science Subcommittee, when he heard
about the internal study. Rohrabacker warned NASA that if it found millions
to move towards new manned exploration projects, he would seek to redirect
the money to additional X-rockets. The current main X-rocket project, the
X-33, is aimed at development of a new all-reusable single stage vehicle
whose low-cost operations could supplant and replace the space shuttle
early in the next decade. Rohrabacker had tried earlier last week- and
failed by a wide margin – to strip away $100 million from the Russian space
station funding to divert to a second X-rocket, a back-up to the X-33
initiative. “If NASA can find new money, it should spend it on new
X-rockets, and cheap access to space,” Rohrabacker told a Washington DC
conference on low cost space transportation this week. His opposition
raises the classic case facing any federal bureaucracy: if it finds funds
by internal budget cutting to spend on new programs, Congress might take
the money away and spend it on what it sees fit, leaving the effected
agency with nothing for its cost-cutting efforts.
How NASA Administrator Dan Goldin deals with the Congressional opposition
may shape the future of long term human spacelfight in the years just
ahead. And determine in large measure if human footprints may one day be
added to the Sojourner Rover’s Martian wheel tracks. Stay tuned!
