space science Archives

NASA’s decades-long success at enabling ground-breaking discoveries about our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, our origins and the billions of other planets out there is one of the crown jewels of our nation’s collective inventiveness and will, and surely of our global soft power.

Others have of course made major contributions as well. But from the Viking Mars landings of the 1970s on to the grand space observatories Hubble and Spitzer and Chandra, to the planetary explorations such as Cassini (Saturn), Galileo and Juno (Jupiter), New Horizons (Pluto and beyond) and Curiosity (Mars), to the pioneering exoplanet census of Kepler, the myriad spacecraft enhancing our understanding of our own planet and the sun, and the pipeline confidently filled with of missions to come, NASA has been the consistent and essential world leader.

What we know of our world writ large has just exploded in these decades, and we’re far richer for it.

But of late, the future of these efforts to ever expand our knowledge of the logic and make-up of our universe has become worryingly unclear.

First there are the recently revealed new problems with the James Webb Space Telescope, initially scheduled to launch years ago and now reportedly unlikely to meet its launch date next year. It is also over budget again and under serious threat.

This news came as Congress wrestled with the White House decision to scuttle the WFIRST dark energy, planet and star formation, and exoplanet mission, planned as NASA’s major flagship mission of the 2020s.

And perhaps most worrisome, NASA now wants to fold its Space Technology Mission Directorate into the Human Exploration and Operations Directorate, surely to support the administration’s goal of setting up a human colony on the moon.

This is an Apollo-sized, many-year and very costly effort that would have to take funds away from potential space science missions unless the NASA budget was growing substantially. But the proposed 2019 NASA budget would cap spending for the next four years.

Might our Golden Era of space discovery be winding down?

An illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope after deploying in space. The pioneering technology of the JWST is both its great promise and recurring pitfall. (NASA)

First the JWST situation. The telescope, far more powerful and complex than anything sent into space, is expected to open up new understandings about the origins of the universe, xxx, and exoplants.… Read more

Vice President Mike Pence addresses NASA employees, Thursday, July 6, 2017, at the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Vice President spoke following a tour that highlighted the public-private partnerships at KSC, as both NASA and commercial companies prepare to launch American astronauts in the years ahead. Pence spoke at length about human space exploration, but very little about NASA space science. (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

I was moved to weigh in after reading Vice President Mike Pence’s comments last week down at the Kennedy Space Center — a speech that seemed to minimize NASA’s performance in recent years (decades?) and to propose a return to a kind of Manifest Destiny way of thinking in space.

The speech did not appear to bode well for space science, which has dominated NASA news with many years of exploration into the history and working of the cosmos and solar system, the still little-understood domain of exoplanets, the search for life beyond Earth.

Instead, the speech was very much about human space exploration, with an emphasis on “boots on the ground,” national security, and setting up colonies.

“We will beat back any disadvantage that our lack of attention has placed and America will once again lead in space,” Pence said.

“We will return our nation to the moon, we will go to Mars, and we will still go further to places that our children’s children can only imagine. We will maintain a constant presence in low-Earth orbit, and we’ll develop policies that will carry human space exploration across our solar system and ultimately into the vast expanses. As the president has said, ‘Space is,’ in his words, ‘the next great American frontier.’ And like the pioneers that came before us, we will settle that frontier with American leadership, American courage and American ingenuity.” (Transcript here.)

Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17, the last team to land on the moon, almost 45 years ago. (NASA)

That a new president will have a different kind of vision for NASA than his predecessors is hardly surprising. NASA may play little or no role in a presidential election, but the agency is a kind of treasure trove of high profile possibilities for any incoming administration.

That the Trump administration wants to emphasize human space exploration is also no surprise. Other than flying up and back to construct and use the International Space Station, and then out to the Hubble Space Telescope for repairs, American astronauts have not been in space since the last Apollo mission in 1972. … Read more

Many Worlds

Tag: space science

Space Science In Peril

Has America Really Lost It’s "Lead in Space?"

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