NASA’s moon mission has trouble catching on with public
Published 10:34 pm Saturday, February 2, 2008
WASHINGTON — Four years after President Bush called for Americans to return to the moon and then travel to Mars, NASA is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to design, build and test the spacecraft that would make it possible.
But the effort has yet to capture the public’s imagination as the Apollo project did in the 1960s, something tacitly acknowledged recently when NASA hired an advertising firm to help “brand” the program, now dubbed Constellation.
Moreover, some top space exploration advocates, policy experts and scientists, including some who initially supported the program, are questioning whether it can ever achieve its goals at a price taxpayers will accept. The doubters are sufficiently worried that they have organized a conference for Feb. 12 and 13 at Stanford University to debate the issue.
“With a new administration coming in soon, we have to seriously think about whether Constellation is doing what it should,” said Louis Friedman, head of the Planetary Society. He was an active early supporter of much of the Bush plan but is now helping to organize the Stanford meeting.
NASA, meanwhile, is mounting a vigorous defense of the steps it has taken to turn Bush’s vision into a new generation of rockets and crew capsules, a lunar lander and ultimately a settlement on the moon.
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin gave a forceful answer to skeptics in a speech last month and in a statement responding to published critiques. He said Constellation is the kind of grand mission called for by the panel that investigated the space shuttle Columbia disaster. Changing it now, he said, would be costly and ill-advised.
The Constellation program calls for spending $230 billion over the next two decades, according to the Government Accountability Office, with about $8 billion in contracts already let and almost $3 billion spent.
