Quotes of the Day

Never mind the tropical sun. Visit Florida and dis the space program, and the reception you'll get is going to be awfully cool. Nobody knew that better than President Obama on Thursday, when he toured the Kennedy Space Center and then spoke to a roomful of 200 VIPs about his plans for NASA after the shuttle program ends later this year. The President had to know that more than the agency's future could be on the line. In Florida — the ultimate presidential swing state — his could be too. So how was the temperature in the room? Chilly — and not without reason.

Obama's take on space has never been an easy thing to track. During the campaign, he targeted NASA as a likely area for budget-balancing cuts. Electoral arithmetic made that position untenable, and he quickly backtracked, pledging a robust future for the space agency, albeit one that would take it in a different direction from the one the previous Administration had pursued. That direction had involved mothballing the shuttles by this year and replacing them with what was known as the Constellation program, a collection of projects that involved building new spacecraft for both orbital flight and trips to the moon, as well as two new boosters — one for humans and a powerhouse version to lift heavy cargo.

Once elected, Obama began changing course fast. He started by sacking Michael Griffin, the fiercely focused if not always interpersonally winning NASA administrator who had pushed the program along to the point where metal was being cut on the new spacecraft and the booster Ares 1X was poised for launch. In Griffin's place, Obama picked Charlie Bolden, a former astronaut and a bit of a cipher.

In February, the President finally filled in some of the details of his plan and sent Bolden out to sell them — and the howls were immediate. Constellation would be scrapped, as would any NASA plans to design and build new boosters and spacecraft. NASA's roughly $15 billion budget would actually be increased by about $1.5 billion per year, but most of that would be invested in a vague series of projects that included developing advanced robotics, life-support hardware and flight systems like in-orbit refueling. The design and construction of the spacecraft and boosters would be turned over to private industry.

Missing from all of this was any clear sense of where we would go or what we would do if all this new hardware could be built, and Bolden didn't help much, serving up generalities about blazing new trails and answering bold challenges, but not much more. The rollout laid a deserved egg.

The White House regrouped, and in March promised that the President himself would go to NASA on April 15 to explain the plan more fully. That didn't do much to boost the mood either in Houston or along the Florida space coast — the residential and industrial communities that depend on NASA for their livelihood. Things got even worse for the President just two days before his visit when a Rushmore-like lineup of Apollo veterans — Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell, Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan and Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11 and the first man on the moon — released an open letter to the White House criticizing its space policy as "devastating," and one that "destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature." The fact that Armstrong, who has made a postmoon career out of avoiding controversy and publicity, signed the letter ensured that it got headlines.

It was into that storm that Obama flew Thursday, and for a visit that had been so long in the making, there were some tactical blunders almost from the outset. Before his address, the President visited Launch Complex 40, where the Falcon 9 rocket, built by the SpaceX company, is poised for launch. Falcon 9 is one of the private boosters that would replace NASA's own rockets, and while the optics might have been intended as eye candy — for space nuts, Falcon is an undeniably pretty machine — plenty of NASA folks want nothing to do with the private-sector interloper. Worse, though the White House billed the speech as aimed at the workers and other foot soldiers in the space program — many of whom will lose their jobs when the shuttle program is over — the event was closed except to a select, invitation-only audience. The rest of NASA watched on TV.

But it was the substance of the President's speech, not the visuals, that counted. Here he excelled as he often does at making a strong and exhaustively well-reasoned case for his plans; he clearly did his homework and seems honestly to believe in the direction he has chosen. But in the end, he may have succeeded only in applying very, very pretty lipstick to what remains, alas, a pig.

The problems with Obama's policies are numerous and represent a fundamental misreading of space history. His justification for killing the Ares booster — after $9 billion in development costs — was that the entire program was "behind schedule and over budget." That is entirely true, and it puts Ares in the company of virtually every spacecraft the U.S. has ever built and ever will build as long as NASA continues to use the competitive-bidding model in picking its contractors — a model that actually works quite well, but does ensure early lowballing from companies in order to win jobs.

The President also stressed that the idea of privatizing the design and construction of the space fleet is not so radical a plan, since NASA has always outsourced its work. That's true too — as far as it goes. But it was NASA designers who dreamed up the ships and determined the specs, then hired the firms that could deliver the goods — much the way you decide exactly the kind of house you want and choose the architect and builder who can give it to you. Under the new model, a scrum of competing architects will build what they want and force NASA to choose from what they offer.

The biggest historical flaw in the President's reasoning, however, is his belief that by essentially privatizing human space travel, "we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met, but ... also accelerate the pace of innovations."

That's a sound industrial sentiment, and what it says about the bracing effect of competition is true, but it applies much less well to space travel — a uniquely complicated, uniquely dangerous enterprise that has never lent itself to economies of scale. The Apollo astronauts used to distinguish between engineering missions — those in which you're still testing and refining the machines — and operational missions, in which those worries are behind you and you can focus on why you're flying. Even after nine trips to the moon, the Apollo flights were all engineering missions, and even after 29 years of flying, so are the shuttles.

Assuming American astronauts do get off the ground sometime in the future, Obama, like Bolden, offered only a general idea of where they'll go. The space station will be flying at least until 2020, but once the shuttles are grounded — as the aging and too-dangerous ships must be — we won't be able to get there without hitching a ride on Russian Soyuz rockets at $50 million per seat.

Obama did declare firmly that there will be no return trip to the moon. "We've been there before," he said. "There's a lot more of space to explore." Of course, when you've landed at only six spots on the moon, all within hailing distance of the lunar equator, and the Apollo 11 exploration covered an area barely bigger than the infield of a baseball diamond, it's not too much to suggest there's a lot more of the moon still left to explore.

Near-earth asteroids and flybys of Mars are also a part of Obama's eventual long-term itinerary, as is a landing on Mars. While the Mars landing is probably a very remote goal, flyby missions and asteroid landings are actually a very good and surprisingly practical idea, since you avoid the deep gravity well that comes with landing on a large body like the moon or a planet — and that means being able to fly a much lighter, cheaper ship with much less fuel.

The best part of the President's plan — and, in fairness, the only one that really matters to many people trying to survive in a battered economy — is that it will preserve and create new jobs. New NASA funding for all of the programs Bolden specified back in February plus a planned upgrade of the Kennedy Space Center will mean new opportunities even as the end of the shuttle program eliminates others, and an expansion of the private rocket sector should create even more. Obama promised 2,500 new jobs along the space coast within two years and 10,000 within five years. Those may or may not come to pass, but a promised $40 million government investment in regional job-creation efforts certainly won't hurt.

For all this, the only thing that may not materialize is the whole actually-traveling-in-space part of the manned space program. For that, sadly, we may have to wait.

• Jeffrey Kluger
• Obama's grand plan for the future of NASA and the U.S. manned space program promises lots of jobs, but not much more