On January 14, 2004 President George W. Bush announced a major overhaul of U.S. space exploration strategy and infrastructure, stipulating that NASA complete the International Space Station (ISS) and retire the Space Shuttle fleet by 2010, develop a new suite of launch and exploration vehicles for deployment shortly thereafter, and embark on a program of human exploration of the solar system with crewed landings on the moon by 2020 and, eventually, Mars. The “Vision for Space Exploration” would be funded by resources liberated by the end of the International Space Station construction and the Shuttle program, assuming a very modestly increasing NASA budget. While this decision marks a decisive attempt to grapple with longstanding issues concerning the Space Shuttle and station, it has stimulated both optimism and fear within the space community. There is skepticism about its intent, its feasibility, and concern for the effects on various areas of space science and technology. This decision is similar to other, major such initiatives in the history of NASA and space flight, relies on longstanding scenarios and models, and much of its content has been proposed unsuccessfully in the past.
On January 14, 2004 President George W. Bush announced a major overhaul of U.S. space exploration strategy and infrastructure. He stipulated that NASA would complete the International Space Station (ISS) and retire the Space Shuttle fleet by 2010, develop a new suite of launch and exploration vehicles for deployment shortly thereafter, and embark on a program of human exploration of the solar system with crewed landings on the moon by 2020 and, eventually, Mars. With a modest increase of the NASA budget to $16.2 billion for the first year, the “Vision for Space Exploration” would be funded by resources liberated by the end of the International Space Station construction and the Shuttle program [1] and [2]. Two and a half years later, Bush issued a new US National Space Policy, the first such revision since 1996 ( Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). The unclassified portions of the new policy make no explicit reference to the Vision, nor to any of its elements [3].
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Fig. 1.
NASA Budget, 1958–2007. By William Sims Bainbridge, based on data at Wikipedia, NASA Budget [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_budget] and verified by the author. This entry is detailed and contains excellent interpretive information on the various categories used over the years and important cautions concerning the effects on the data.
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Fig. 2.
NASA Vision for Space Exploration Projected Budget, 2004–2020; from NASA, The Vision for Space Exploration (Washington, DC: February, 2004), p. 19. Available at: NASA, Exploration, News and Media Resources [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/exploration/news/index.html] as 55584main_vision_space_exploration-hi-res.pdf. This represents the initial budget projections, which have since been adjusted several times, and also subjected to critical analysis by several organizations, including the Congressional Budget Office.
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NASA and its associates had been struggling for a year to determine and overcome the causes of the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia, and had for many years been hamstrung by a Space Station program running very late and over-budget and a Space Shuttle that had been effectively reduced to Space Station support. These two programs consumed most of the NASA budget, and prevented future ambitions from even being seriously planned. Successors to the aging and increasingly fragile Space Shuttle had had several expensive false starts, the Bush White House had shown almost no interest in civilian space flight, and in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent military actions space flight had receded from public interest. Many observers had wondered whether the Space Shuttle program would even continue at all after the Columbia accident, and indeed it may not have survived had the half-built International Space Station not required the Shuttle's unique capabilities to deliver elements already built by international partners.
The Columbia accident forced the administration to confront a Space Station-Shuttle problem that had been “kicked down the road” without resolution for many years. For a solution, it fell back on a well-established scenario that went back a century, as far as the earliest space pioneers, and had been articulated by a young Wernher von Braun even before the World War II. This scenario had been advanced seriously at the national level and either rejected or ignored several times before—at the beginning and at the end of the Apollo program, after the Space Shuttle Challenger accident, and shortly thereafter by President George H.W. Bush [4], [5], [6] and [7].
This time, however, various factors made its acceptance more likely. First, while not strictly part of the exploration plan itself, declaring the International Space Station “complete” after delivery of existing modules in 2010 offered a graceful way to sever the nation's space program from a huge project that had failed to sustain a purpose. Second, since the Space Shuttle had long since been stripped of its omnibus purposes, except for Space Station construction, and was being declared by the accident investigation board too dangerous for routine use, it could finally be euthanized. Both of these closures promised to relieve NASA of its largest budgetary burdens. In place of the Space Shuttle, a vaguely defined “Crew Exploration Vehicle” (CEV) was proposed, as well as an equally vague stable of launch vehicles derived from the best existing hardware. Few had hope that such a vehicle could be developed and put into service before the Space Shuttle Retirement deadline, but the optimistic scenario was that it would begin flying only a few years later, with the interim service picked up by Russian Soyuz and Progress vehicles. The precise United States role in the International Space Station after 2010 was left equally vague.
