Posted 2/12/2010 09:07:00 PM by Douglas

Here's one take on the Canstellation Program that's a bit hyperbolic, but not too far off the mark.

By the end of this year, there will be no shuttle, no U.S. manned space program, no way for us to get into space. We're not talking about Mars or the moon here. We're talking about low-Earth orbit, which the United States has dominated for nearly half a century and from which it is now retiring with nary a whimper.

At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA was consuming almost 4 percent of the federal budget, which in terms of the 2011 budget is about $150 billion. Today the manned space program will die for want of $3 billion a year -- 1/300th of last year's stimulus package with its endless make-work projects that will leave not a trace on the national consciousness.

Obama's NASA budget perfectly captures the difference in spirit between Kennedy's liberalism and Obama's. Kennedy's was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons. Obama's is a constricted, inward-looking call to retreat.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.

There was a two and a half year gap after both shuttle disasters and an even bigger one before the first shuttle launch, so it's not the end of the world. The bigger issues is if there is going to be a program in the wake of Constellation. The administration cancelled NASA's next manned vehicle, as flawed as it might have been, and replaced it with nothing, effectively. You can't put your finger on any one ship today and say this is the one that's going to take American astronauts to the ISS or anywhere else. That's a problem. So NASA got an additional billion dollars a year for the next five years, but where it's going to get spent is anyone's guess.

The Russian angle is turning out to be the real interesting part in all this:

"We have an agreement until 2012 that Russia will be responsible for this," says Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian space agency, about ferrying astronauts from other countries into low-Earth orbit. "But after that? Excuse me, but the prices should be absolutely different then!"

The Russians may be new at capitalism, but they know how it works. When you have a monopoly, you charge monopoly prices. Within months, Russia will have a monopoly on rides into space.

In the wake of NASA's plan to "privatize" the path to low-earth orbit, the Russians must be laughing their asses off. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, their space program continued in private hands without a hiccup as they maintained and resupplied their Mir Space Station with launches from a country that wasn't even in their empire anymore.

It's just a bit early to throw up your hands and say America has lost its place as the world's preeminent space power. Or maybe it just took this Cancellation to remind people that we still want one.