The White House wants to abandon NASA’s Constellation programme, which was intended to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 (Illustration: NASA)

See also: Space 2020: what NASA will do next

NASA’s Constellation programme, which was going to fly manned capsules to the International Space Station in (maybe) 2015, to the moon in (maybe) 2020, and to Mars someday, is dead. Some people are mourning it. I’m not.

Is manned space exploration important? Yes – not least because it simply works much better than sending robots. When you look past the rhetoric and superstitions and compare the results, today’s robots (and tomorrow’s too) are pitifully limited, painfully slow, and not really all that cheap. (Case in point – NASA recently gave up trying to free the Mars rover Spirit from a sand pit it had been stuck in for nine months. But when the Apollo 15 crew’s lunar rover got bogged down in loose soil, the astronauts got off, picked it up, moved it, got back on, and drove away – all in maybe two minutes. Robots do fine when everything goes as planned, but that’s rarely true on complex, poorly-known planetary surfaces.)

Exploring with robots looks cheaper only because we set our expectations so much lower. Bolder goals need humans on the scene. Nevertheless, I’m not shedding tears for Constellation. Why not? Because it wasn’t going to get us there.


First, it probably wasn’t going to work. Even so early in its life, the programme was already deep into a death spiral of “solving” every problem by reducing expectations of what the system would do. Actually reaching the moon would probably have required a major redesign, which wasn’t going to be funded.

Second, even if all went as planned, there was a money problem. As the Augustine committee noted, Constellation was already underfunded, and couldn’t ever get beyond Earth orbit without a big budget increase. Which didn’t seem too likely.

Finally, and most important, even if Constellation was funded and worked … so what? The programme was far too tightly focused on repeating Apollo, which was pointless: we already did Apollo! Early ideas of quickly establishing a permanent lunar base had already been forgotten. Constellation was going to deliver exactly what Apollo did: expensive, brief, infrequent visits to the moon. That was all it was good for.

Sure, there were hopes that Constellation’s systems could later be adapted to support more ambitious goals. But Apollo had those hopes too. It didn’t work in 1970, and it wasn’t going to work in 2020.

The demise of Constellation is not the death of a dream. It’s just the end of an illusion.

The proposed replacements are a mixed bag, with reason for optimism but some reason for concern.

More R&D is good. Space flight technology has stagnated badly in recent decades; for example, we badly need a robust, fully-reusable, low-maintenance heat shield system for atmospheric re-entry, and promising concepts from 50 years ago are still awaiting flight tests. My one concern is that when money gets tight, it’s easy to cut R&D funding that isn’t tied to a specific project – look at what’s happened to NASA’s aviation research.

Switching to commercial space transportation, for both cargo and crews, is long overdue. For over 20 years, NASA has been legally required to use commercial space transportation whenever possible – and has used every possible excuse not to. It’s high time to end this.

Opponents’ main argument is that NASA will have trouble assuring astronaut safety if it uses commercial launch services. Hogwash. To be blunt, NASA has no financial incentive to build safe spaceships – the shuttle, on average, has killed its entire crew about every 50 to 60 flights, and yet it has kept going. (Indeed, after the Challenger disaster, NASA’s shuttle budget increased; compare that to what happened after Boeing’s first two launches of its Delta III rocket failed – no one bought more launches and the rocket programme folded.) Spaceship builders who have a direct financial interest in safety should do better, not worse.

At the very least, safety assessments should be done by an independent authority, with no vested interest in the answer. When NASA was considering launching its Orion capsule on Atlas or Delta rockets five years ago, its safety standards (pdf) were very strict indeed – and the commercial rockets ended up losing out. But when NASA started applying those standards to its own rocket when development of the Ares rocket and Orion crew capsule got well underway a few years later, suddenly the standards were in need of revision, and the revised ones (pdf) were much less demanding. It’s time to give commercial space flight a fair trial.

The one aspect of the announcement that is worrisome is the vagueness of the long-term plans. “We’ll do neat stuff someday” is a recipe for going back into the holding pattern NASA has been stuck in for many years, driving endlessly around the parking lot without ever getting out onto the road. Even if the transportation is going to come from commercial providers and the details will depend on them, they need some rough idea of what NASA wants to do and when. A clearer explanation of NASA’s new exploration goals is urgently needed.

Henry Spencer is a computer programmer, spacecraft engineer and amateur space historian