President Barack Obama's budget grounds U.S. space program

That giant sucking sound you just heard was the end of the U.S. space program as we know it.

On Monday (February 1), U.S. President Barack Obama released his proposed fiscal year 2011 budget, which includes a three-year moratorium on non-military discretionary spending. In an effort to turn the tide of a projected deficit of US$1.27 trillion, the White House is also looking to slash spending in a number of government departments and programs.

The bad news for manned spaceflight comes in the planned cancellation of NASA’s Constellation program, which was to be the next giant leap in interplanetary exploration.

Constellation, a return to Apollo-style brute-force boosters and cramped, wedge-shaped crew capsules, was never really an evolutionary step in spacecraft design. Behind schedule and over-budget, it would, however, have provided the heavy-lift capability to get astronauts back to the moon and beyond.

With the Space Shuttle program ending this year after nearly three decades of service, this doesn’t leave the American space program with many options. In the immediate future, NASA astronauts will have to hitch a ride with the Russians, the only other game in town, if they want to get into space.

In the long term, the 2011 budget nebulously proposes that NASA work with private companies (such as Scaled Composites, which is building Virgin Galactic’s passenger spacecraft) to provide manned spacecraft service to the International Space Station.

Even if this public-private partnership works out, it still only achieves one thing for manned exploration: low earth orbit. Forget about the soaring adventure of NASA’s early days. Forget about the workhorse abilities of the shuttle fleet. And forget about the moon, Mars, and beyond.

Of course, with the economy reeling, housing, health care, and infrastructure all need massive infusions of capital. The space program, like an old car, is a hole to throw money into, and the money can be better spent elsewhere.

The $64,000 question is, will it? Will the money saved by killing Constellation really go where it’s needed? Probably not.

More likely, the surplus will be used to pay for the war in Iraq (currently running at a cost of US$10 billion per month). Or for corporate bailouts. Or for congressional pork like the National Helium Reserve or Alaska’s Bridge to Nowhere.

As far as the cost of manned spaceflight, consider this: if the economic weight of the Apollo program had been borne equally by each person in America, the cost would have been about US$123 per person. Spread out over the program’s 9-year length, that comes to about US$14 per year. Nowadays, it costs more than that to go to the movies.

The thing is, not everything’s quantifiable in monetary terms. Sure, the space program has brought innumerable technological advances to everyday life, but more importantly, it fulfills the basic human need to explore.

It’s that same urge that sent early humans out of Africa, over the Bering Strait ice pack, and into the New World. It’s what sent the Polynesians across the vast expanses of the South Pacific, and Europeans across the Atlantic. It’s what took us to the north and south poles, to the top of Mount Everest, and to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Exploration is hard-wired into our DNA.

At the dawn of the space age, U.S. president John F. Kennedy recounted a Frank O’Connor tale about a boyhood exploration of the Irish countryside. When O’Connor and his friend would come to an imposing wall, they would throw their caps over the top to give themselves the motivation to climb over.

"This nation has tossed its cap across the wall of space,” said Kennedy, “and we have no choice but to follow it.”

That cap is still out there, and we still need to go after it.