What's next for US spaceflight, if not the moon?

Where would NASA fly in the future, and when?
Under the proposed budget plan, the International Space Station remains a destination through 2020 and perhaps beyond. Some suggest that the station could remain a viable research facility through 2025.

The moon remains on the destination list, along with asteroids, Mars, and gravitationally stable points where it’s possible to park a space station or perhaps a space-based refueling station.

But in the Obama administration’s budget, these become simply aspirational destinations, rather than trips on a schedule with deadlines attached.

That’s troubling to a number of the space program’s supporters. Many argue that it’s hard to set a clear course when you have no clear destination.

During a Feb. 3 hearing on NASA’s challenges, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) of Arizona, who heads the House Science Committee’s subcommittee on space and aeronautics, said she was disturbed by what she perceived as a lack of vision reflected in the NASA budget proposal:

“My concern today is not numbers on a ledger, but rather the fate of the American dream to reach for the stars,” she said.

What are the biggest challenges of a new course at NASA?
Perhaps the largest is “traction,” or long-term buy-in from Congress, as well as from NASA’s rank and file. That’s necessary to get the program going and to boost the approach’s prospects for outlasting any single president’s time in office.

The NASA track record for traction that spans several decades is uneven. After its start in 1961, the Apollo program failed to outlast the Nixon administration. Apollo’s successor, the shuttle program, has had nearly 40 years’ worth of traction, in no small part because it became the critical link in building the space station and its international partnerships.

Why bother with human spaceflight at all?
For many people and countries, human spaceflight represents a pinnacle of human technological achievement and prestige.

Others point to potential economic and environmental benefits that could come from activities ranging from space tourism and tapping resources on the moon to use as fuel for fusion energy to mining asteroids or producing pharmaceuticals in microgravity conditions.

Still others argue that over the very long term, humans must become a multiplanet species to survive. Even without issues such as population growth, environmental degradation, and finite physical resources, Earth faces the risk of collision with a comet or large asteroid and of another Ice Age that would bury what today are some of the most economically and agriculturally productive swaths of Earth beneath two miles of ice.

Historians Roger Launius at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum and Howard McCurdy at American University in Washington have written that human civilization may have at most a few centuries to become a truly space faring species. Beyond that period, they say, it’s plausible that humanity will not have the collective wealth to support sustained space exploration and colonization.

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