Former Astronauts Slam 'Disastrous' Cancellation Of Moon Landing Program

LONDON — Two former astronauts have said they are disappointed with the U.S. government's decision to cancel NASA's moon landing program.

Jim Lovell, who led the Apollo 13 mission in 1970, told the BBC the cancellation could be disastrous.

"Personally, I think it will have catastrophic consequences in our ability to explore space and the spin-offs we get from space technology," Lovell said. "They haven't thought through the consequences."

Eugene Cernan, part of the 1972 Apollo 17 mission, said the U.S. has a responsibility to lead the world in space exploration and technology and that he hopes people will be back on the moon "sooner than later."

"I'm quite disappointed that I'm still the last man on the moon. I thought we'd have gone back long before now," Cernan said. "But I am absolutely committed to the fact that we will go back at some time."

Cernan and Lovell spoke to the BBC on Friday in London at an event at the Royal Society.

The decision to cancel NASA's $100 billion Constellation program was announced last month. Much of the money is earmarked for rocket research.

Comments

[bryanzth]

04:15 PM on 03/21/2010

Well.

In the race for human expansion, I have two things to day.

1. We gotta make far fewer babies. Go back to 3.x billion, the same population as we had during the 1969 Moon landing. I realize how impossible that is, given the fecundity of human arrogance.

2. When we go to these new places, we will be humans, not United Statesians, Chinese, Europeans, Russians, etc. It doesn't matter. IF it matters, BTW, we are doomed.

Ahhh, Mars was red already. What's one more flag?

BZ.

[Mensch99]

08:50 PM on 03/16/2010

Great lyrics from Gil Scott-Heron about astronauts on the moon. I'd post them but the cens0rs blocked.
www.gilscottheron.com/lywhitey.html

[StarDagger]

04:07 PM on 03/16/2010

First man on Mars will be Chinese, with a Russian copilot flying in a European spacecraft, they may allow a token American on board for PR sake.

The USA is a dying empire.

[RedDogBear]

05:33 PM on 03/16/2010

So the fact that the first man or woman on Mars will be Chinese worries you more than that the US is a massive debtor nation and that most of that debt is owned by the Chinese? Or that the leader in renewable energy is China rather than the US?

[StarDagger]

07:55 PM on 03/16/2010

No judgments, I simply feel that history will show China is running a better Plan than the USA, and that the EU is running a better one than both of them.

[RedDogBear]

01:22 PM on 03/16/2010

I'm very pro science but I think more manned exploration at this time is not a wise investment of money. We get much more scientific data per dollar spent on unmanned exploration. Even the strongest advocates for manned research will admit that if they are serious scientists. The justifications for manned exploration are always emotional arguments about the destiny of mankind, etc.

And I think those ARE good arguments as well but just that right now is not the time. We have enormous problems facing us that require technology solutions: global climate change and in a few years or decades Peak Oil. Whichever country figures out the best new energy solutions will be the leader for the 21st century and right now we are blowing it by letting countries like China take the lead. We need to invest every spare research dollar for the next few decades into renewable clean energy. Keep up unmanned exploration in the mean time. If we manage to save the human race from climate change in a few decades the moon, mars, and beyond will still be there.

[DismayedRepub]

11:15 PM on 03/16/2010

To understand why there is no substitute for manned space flight all you have to do is look at the two Hubble repair missions. The first one saved the project from becoming a billion dollar piece of space junk. The second improved sensors and extended its service life into the next decade.
Robots cannot do this type of work. It takes men and women that can adapt when there is no code written to deal with unexpected situations. If we don’t exercise our space skills we will lose them. That would be a dreadful legacy for the people that achieved the greatest engineering feat in the history of humankind and put a man on the moon.

[Sumocat]

10:07 AM on 03/16/2010

Yes, the astronauts are right. We need to return to the moon to do science and stuff. It is very important because science is important and we like important things. All the specific important things cited by the astronauts are good reasons to return.

[RedDogBear]

05:34 PM on 03/16/2010

Exactly. And those specific things are...???

[GEM-592]

06:54 AM on 03/16/2010

Another victim of the bloated, out of control defense budget, and defense contracting lobby. They only take-take-take and to h*ll with the rest.

[Downix]

11:11 AM on 03/16/2010

No, Constellations issue was only indirectly a budget one. Constellation was a failure when management chose the unworkable design over the workable.

The original proposal was to utilize the under-late development Delta IV and Atlas V rockets for short-term crew lift, and a new rocket, called Ares V, for beyond earth exploration. Ares V was based on the Regan-era National Launch System, utilizing cost-reduced expendible Space Shuttle Main Engines (already under late development for NLS when the program was cancelled), the Advanced Solid Rocket Booster (which was in late testing in 2006), a modified shuttle main fuel tank (simple work), and an upper-stage powered by the J-2S or RL-10 engines originally developed in the 1960's.

Instead, NASA upper management suffered from "Not-designed-here" syndrome, scrapped the proposal, and designed two all-new systems to fill the exact-same-roles as the original proposals, with the advantages that they could then funnel over 100 billion in no-bid contracts to pet-companies. And, it turned out that the Ares I's proposed design wouldn't work, so they had to redesign it. But then it could not do it's job, so they had to re-design the capsule. But then it did not lift enough, had to re-design Ares V, but then... and then...

You get the idea?

You want to read what the original Ares V design morphed into as a proposal, read this website:

http://www.directlauncher.com

[GEM-592]

09:29 PM on 03/17/2010

I'm sure it's more complicated than you present here, and it certainly has everything to do with money. Why come out against new design work just because it costs? It could have obvious upsides, and the mil complex demonstrates no such qualms whilst we throw money at them hand over fist. Based on what you say, it sounds like other companies were expecting large contracts themselves for the project, and were miffed when nasa chose to go another way. Your cut an dried rundown only suggest political bias.

[arnolds]

09:53 PM on 03/15/2010

"Personally, I think it will have catastrophic consequences in our ability to explore space and the spin-offs we get from space technology," Lovell said. "They haven't thought through the consequences."

I am delighted that we will no longer go to the moon or anywhere else out there. Far, far too much money spent on the effort.

I challenge Mr. Lovell's statement as to the net value of the "spin-offs" he champions. My guess is that the bang for bucks spent on the U.S. space program gave us a huge, huge minus figure.

Let's worry more about our national debt and cut back on NASA as soon as the shuttles run out of useful life.

[Downix]

10:24 AM on 03/16/2010

The irony in you typing on one of the very products created as a result of the money spent on the space program is lost on you

[RedDogBear]

01:11 PM on 03/16/2010

Nonsense. That's one of the myths that supporters of manned space flight push. While NASA provided FUNDING to places like IBM that helped get the computer industry off the ground the actual direct spin off from computer technology was trivial. Far less than what could have been achieved by direct investment in IT. The requirements for manned flight (real time, highly redundant, small and minimal weight) were so specific that they didn't have much transfer to the business world or even most of the military world. When I was going to research conferences I would talk to guys from NASA (who were always brilliant) and they were usually working in technologies that the rest of the world had moved beyond. They were still using mainframes when the rest of the world was using client-server and structured programming when the rest of the world was using object-oriented languages and architecture.

[RedDogBear]

01:14 PM on 03/16/2010

One more specific point: NASA played almost no role in inventing the Internet. That was done by DARPA. NASA was one of the earliest USERS of the Internet (going back to when it was the Arpanet) and they provided some huge servers that were part of the original backbone but the actual R&D for the network technology was done at other DARPA funded places: USC/ISI, BBN, U of I, etc.

[NWBrunette]

07:57 PM on 03/15/2010

As long as this country considers it a high priority to transfer massive amounts of taxpayer money to the wealth elite at the expense of literally everything else... well, stuff like moon landings are just going to have to wait.

[RedDogBear]

04:59 PM on 03/16/2010

Actually funding things like moon landings is one of the ways they transfer massive amounts of taxpayer money to the wealth elite. The money to build that technology goes directly to a few aerospace companies that are owned by the wealthy elite.

That's one of the unspoken reasons that people are so adamant about continuing manned exploration, even though any knowledgable scientist will tell you that unmanned exploration provides far more useful data per dollar invested. Of course they will talk about man's ultimate destiny and our quest for exploration and other vague emotional terms but what it comes down to is that a manned mission costs apx. 100 times as much as an unmanned mission so people like the Bush family who own massive amounts of aerospace stock are all for pushing man's ultimate destiny. Especially since every research dollar spent on manned exploration is one less dollar available to invest in renewable energy research and they also own lots of stock in the oil companies.

[DismayedRepub]

01:20 PM on 03/15/2010

NASA has a document at http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/140635main_ESAS_04.pdf which explains the Constellation lunar mission profile. In short NASA plans to preposition four landers before the first manned mission would be sent there. The sequence of missions would first deliver a power supply and polar resource extractor, then the habitation module. The third mission sends up the rovers and Oxygen plant. The fourth and last unmanned mission would place a redundant accent module. After all of this stuff is put in place then they’d send up the six month long crew mission.

This country once owned a trans-lunar transportation system. The architecture of the Apollo mission profile is tried and true. The Constellation is not just an “Apollo on steroids”. It is the right way to do this. It is a logical next step in the evolution of the lunar spacecraft and it will teach us the things we need to know to prepare for the trip to Mars. This sounds like a well reasoned plan to me. It would be a great place to develop and test the technology for the trip to Mars.

[Downix]

10:34 AM on 03/16/2010

Constellation was broken, it has been since the disasterous decision to re-create an existing technology with the Ares I. Ares V, as it was proposed in 2005, was more than sufficient, if paired with existing launchers, namely the Delta IV and Atlas V, both of which were already in late R&D and now, currently, are in service. These rockets were designed for this job, yet NASA management, led by Mike Griffin, decided on building another, unnecessary launcher, the Ares I. Once, it was proven that Ares I was broken, Ares V had to be modified, and modified again, and again, in order to make up for Ares I.

Ares V, if unchanged from 2006, would have been flying NEXT YEAR! Now, best case, you are looking at it being 2025 before its first launch. Ares V originally was based on the National Launch System designs of the late 1980's, and already had 80% of the design work done. It re-used the shuttle engines, finished the R&D on the advanced solid rocket booster program began in 1997, stretched the main tank, and re-used the tried and true J-2S engine. All existing or late-development technologies. Now Ares V needs a new solid rocket booster, new J-2X engine, new RS-68 Regen engine, new fuel tank.... they threw away 80% of the work to start from scratch....

All so they could build Ares I rather than use the resources we already have.

[PhilosopherEight]

12:28 PM on 03/15/2010

This decision proved to me that Obama is not as intelligent as he pretends, and he is just a political hack like Bush & Clinton.

The amount of money this goverment spends on wars & entitlement programs is so ridiculous that I have to laugh every time a conservative talks about cutting NASA's budget as a means of reducing spending. I laugh when liberals talk about needing to cut NASA for more money for their wealth transfer programs.That's like a junkie's decision to economize on his food budget, because he already spent his money on drugs.

None of these other things we do are anywhere near as important as space exploration. Yet we cannot bear to spend 1% of our tax dollars on it. We spend our money only on things that appeal to stupid people, because these are most of the people, and numbers of people matter more than smartness in people in a democracy. Thus, democracy tends to dumb down any society.

We have decided to not walk through that cosmic door we opened in 1969. After all, that was just a Cold War publicity stunt in the eyes of the masses. We have decided to not embrace the future with vision, but hold instead to the stupidity of the past. We have decided to not inspire ourselves to heights of achievement, but instead to pander to base voices whose lives will never improve the overall human condition. We have chosen to pacify the Herd instead of ennobling

[StansDad]

05:38 PM on 03/15/2010

NASA doesn't have the support that the wars and public service programs do, why not go out in the world and do something about that if it matters so much?

[fresnofreethinker]

08:24 PM on 03/15/2010

Let's wait and see what Obama actually proposes to do before we condemn him as a political hack. Promoting a privately based space transportation infrastructure to low earth orbit, and aggressively pursue enabling technologies (like plasma rockets) might be the best course in the long run. More important than going to the Moon is going to the Moon cheaply. I want to see humanity extend it's reach into the solar system, but we are never going to make it if access to space costs as much as Constellation.

[ClarcKing]

12:14 PM on 03/15/2010

NASA space programs are the source of the nation's strength; MSM must broadcast the letters of many astronauts, scientists and engineers warning of the consequences of shrinking and privatizing space exploration. In the face of all the depredation done to American citizenry and the U.S. economy, further expansion of the looting operation of the United States and its' public assets are promoted as "cost saving measures". When will it stop? The United States is under submission to a plantation, feudalistic, fascist economic /political organization.

[MaxPowerXP]

01:52 PM on 03/15/2010

Uh, NASA's overall budget has gone *up*. The moon program is not NASA.

[Cacey]

11:28 AM on 03/15/2010

This could be a key moment in the "We the People" movement. The Tea Baggers have been screaming about smaller government and wasting our tax dollars. Privatization will reduce the personnel of NASA though many will enter private industry and cut the number of tax dollars spent on NASA. Yet already those in Texas and Florida who have profited from NASA are screaming. This could be interesting. I wonder how Fox will spin it.

[lightningbolt]

11:58 AM on 03/15/2010

The tax dollars that were spent on NASA will now be spent to use private spaceships, which are more costly since you need to pay for those companies' profits. Using private companies for anything increases the cost. The government needs to keep the space program.

[Aaron Oesterle]

12:10 PM on 03/15/2010

You have that backwards. Now, we won't be responsible for the profits, since they will be commercial based, not contractor based.

Under the old mechanism, it was all cost-plus contracts, where by we had to pay both the development costs, and a profit for the companies (ie the contractors)

Now, it'll be a commercial buy, which means the companies are responsible for things like cost-overuns

[Fang1944]

11:22 AM on 03/15/2010

Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, applauded Obama's decision as his JFK moment.

Now, if I make it to 100, I might get to see people on Mars or at least exploring the moons of Mars.

[Dynamohum]

11:44 AM on 03/15/2010

WHAT A LIE. Buzz Aldrin advocates going to the moon and Mars, just not using the old "Apollo style" to get there. STOP LYING and get real. Buzz Aldrin has been around to all of the mainstream shows including Bill Maher and you are wrong.

[Aaron Oesterle]

12:11 PM on 03/15/2010

Obama's budget doesn't mean we aren't going to the moon. It just means we aren't going stupidly (like we were under Constellation).

Fang1944 was right

[BannedFromCommenting]

12:14 PM on 03/15/2010

Uh, he/she is not lying
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/president-obamas-jfk-mome_b_448667.html

This is Aldrin's direct article on the decision

[Downix]

10:46 AM on 03/16/2010

You'll see it sooner than that. Here is the proposed lunar architecture using the solution Obama is endorsing:

http://www.ulalaunch.com/docs/publications/AffordableExplorationArchitecture2009.pdf

[Tom Theodosiades]

11:11 AM on 03/15/2010

The Astronauts either know their being dishonest, or the just simply don't know what they are talking about. Maybe that's the problem at NASA, old lions never go away and let us go in a different direction. We know its dangerous Grandpa, but we're still going to do it. So shut up or we're leaving you here, too.

[frankdunn]

11:05 AM on 03/15/2010

I guess the reporter forgot to check that other astronauts applauded the decision.