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Exploration

Looking Back As We Look Forward

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
October 23, 2012
Filed under ,

The Vision for Space Exploration: A Brief History (Part 1), Paul Spudis
“Near the end of my recent two hour co-appearance with Dr. Jim Vedda on The Space Show (October 19, 2012), an ongoing misconception emerged about the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) and prompts me to detail some of the history of the VSE and its original intent. Such a review is timely as discussions rage about NASA’s current and future direction.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

9 responses to “Looking Back As We Look Forward”

  1. bobhudson54 says:
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    “The Vision of Space Exploration” was an ambitious plan not taken seriously by the Political,Scientific communities and mainstream media.The plan was revealed by George Bush after his reelection in January 2004 with the opposition,mainstream media still smarting from the defeat of John Carey. Their anti-Bush sentiment became their rallying cry to oppose anything he “backed”. Add to that, the beginning dismal state of NASA and the “Vision” was doomed for failure to begin with.

  2. Brian_M2525 says:
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    I don’t think that partisan politics is a significant issue in developing and maintaining support for the Vision. I think the 2004 Vision gave NASA cart blanche to establish the program it wanted. NASA needed to lay-out a plan and prioritize its goals. 

    Step 1 was to replace Shuttle capabilities and be able to maintain its current ongoing project, ISS. 
    Step 2 was to develop the systems to support future beyond LEO missions, including making good use of ISS to do this;
    Step 3 was to take its beyond LEO capabilities into deep space and back to the moon. 
    Step 4 or 5 might have been the moon.
    Mars should have come later. 
    I don’t think bipartisan support is or was ever an issue. 

    NASA’s budget is pretty constant. It has come down some in the last few years, but I think this has been as much as anything because NASA has not figured out what it needs and how to put its budget to work to greatest advantage and even more significant it has done a really job telling the story. NASA has repeatedly been told, since the time of Nixon, that it needed to live within its budget.

    The problem with Constellation was a lame, unsupportable plan that made no sense, throwing ISS away and trying to repeat Apollo, and that went well beyond the available budget, not to mention poor design decisions on Orion and Ares that repeatedly delayed even the first steps, and that even today continues to plague the program. 

    Fact is that when the stimulus funds came along a couple years ago, NASA could have been first in line to put educated people to work and might have gotten a substantial increase, but NASA had no plan for the community to support.

    I view the failure to be a failure of NASA management and leadership. I don’t think the NASA management took the Vision seriously.

  3. dogstar29 says:
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    The VSE clearly emphasized dramatic human flights to the moon, Mars and beyond as opposed to development of practical means of accessing space or any sustainable economic strategy for maintaining human presence there. It portrayed human spaceflight as a demonstration of American exceptonalism, not a productive human activity. . It abandoned all work on reusable launch systems. It ignored practical applications and markets. In an age when the nation has a massive deficit and debt, it did not realistically address cost or return on investment. The Constellation strategy, which continues today, was formulated at essentially the same time as an implementation of the VSE and was also under the direct control of President Bush, so it seems disingenuous to draw any significant distinction between them.