[FPSPACE] US manned return to the Moon unlikely by 2020, says Senator Bill Nelson

[Peter Pesavento]

>From Agency France Presse

 

http://rawstory.com/08/afp/2009/06/17/funding-threatens-us-return-to-moon-by
-2020/

 

 

US ambitions of returning to the moon by 2020 and then heading to Mars risk
being grounded because of "unrealistic" funds allocated to NASA, said
Senator Bill Nelson, a former space shuttle astronaut.

"NASA simply can't do the job it's been given - the president's goal of
being on the moon by 2020," Nelson told the first public meeting of the
Review of US Human Space Flight Plans Committee in Washington.

Nelson, a senator from Florida - home to the Kennedy Space Center - said
that for years NASA's budget has been too small for its tasks.

"And that has led us to the point where we are now: with a space shuttle
that's going to shut down but without the new rocket developed in time to
pick up where the shuttle leaves off," Nelson said.

When President Barack Obama unveiled the federal budget last month, he
ordered a review of the problem-plagued, budget-busting rocket that NASA
hopes will be on launch pads by 2015 to replace its shuttle fleet, due to be
retired next year.

The cost of the next-generation rocket has ballooned from an initial 28
billion dollars to about 44 billion due to technical troubles and cost
overruns.

Nelson said that Congress last year authorized six billion dollars for
NASA's space exploration program in 2009, a sum "well above what the
president requested" in the budget.

Obama's budget proposal would leave the US space program with "a four or
five year gap with no American human-rated launch system and that would
expand to six, seven, possibly eight years," said Nelson.

With no US means to get to the International Space Station - in which the
United States has invested 100 billion dollars, according to Nelson - US
astronauts would have to hitch a lift into space with the Russians for
several years.

"I don't think anybody wants us to continue in the circumstance where the
only way to get to the International Space Station . would be in a
multi-year period dependent upon the Russians," Nelson said.

"It's my hope that our foreign relations with the Russians are going to get
better, but who knows what the geopolitics are going to be later in this
decade."

 

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