NASA,
the agency that epitomized the “Right Stuff,” looks lost in space and
doesn’t have a clear sense of where it is going, an independent panel of
science and engineering experts said in a stinging report Wednesday.
The report by a panel of the distinguished National Academy of Sciences doesn’t blame the space agency; it faults the president, Congress and the nation for not giving NASA better direction. At the same time, it said NASA is doing little to further the White House’s goal of sending astronauts to an asteroid.
In one withering passage, the panel said NASA’s
mission and vision statements are so vague and “generic” that they
“could apply to almost any government research and development agency,
omitting even the words ‘aeronautics’ or ‘space.’”
The space shuttles were retired in 2011 and are now museum pieces. Few people are paying attention to the International Space Station,
and American astronauts have to rely on Russian spaceships to get there
and back. Meanwhile, rocket building is being outsourced to private
companies, and a commercial venture plans to send people to the moon by
the end of the decade.
Academy panel member Bob Crippen, a retired NASA
manager and astronaut who piloted the first space shuttle mission, said
he has never seen the space agency so adrift. He said that includes the
decade between the end of the Apollo moon landings in the early 1970s
and the beginning of the shuttle program.
“I think people [at NASA] want to be focused a little more and know where they are going,” Mr. Crippen told The Associated Press.
NASA spokesman David Weaver
defended the agency, saying in email that it has clear and challenging
goals. He listed several projects, including continued use of the International Space Station and efforts to develop a heavy-duty rocket and crew capsule capable of taking astronauts into deep space.
John
Logsdon, a space policy analyst who advised the Obama campaign in 2008,
said the panel’s report, which is more strongly worded than usual for
the academy, “rather fairly points its fingers at the White House.”
“There’s
a general sense of disappointment that the administration has not been
more bold and visionary in setting out a path for the program,” said Mr.
Logsdon, who was not on the panel.
President Obama told the space
agency in 2010 to plan to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 as a
training ground for an eventual Mars landing. But the 80-page panel
report and its authors said there is little support for that idea within
NASA and the international space community.
The
agency hasn’t done much to determine an asteroid target, and its
strategic plan avoids mention of an asteroid mission, the report said.
Also, panel members said NASA hasn’t allocated much money for it.
“More
than two years after the president announced the interim goal of
sending humans to an asteroid by 2025, there has been little effort to
initiate such a mission,” the report said.
Mr. Crippen said an asteroid mission just doesn’t make sense technically or politically and may just be too tough.
“I
hate to use the word credible, but people don’t buy it,” said academy
panel member Marcia Smith, president of Space and Technology Policy
Group. “They don’t feel that the asteroid mission is the right one.”
The
reason people aren’t buying it is that they don’t see money budgeted
for it and don’t see the choice of target, said panel Chairman Albert
Carnesale, former chancellor of the University of California, Los
Angeles. Inside NASA, “people were wondering: What are we doing to actually accomplish this?” Mr. Carnesale said at a news conference.
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