Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the last men to walk on the moon, has nothing good to say about President Barack Obama’s plan to all but ground the Constellation program, which calls for a return to the moon by 2020 and human landings on Mars by the middle of the century.Previous critical comments came from Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan.
“I’m afraid what the president and his administration want is for the United States to no longer be preeminent in space flight,” Schmitt, an honorary fellow in the UW-Madison College of Engineering, says in a phone interview from Albuquerque, N.M., where he lives. “And that has very, very serious consequences.”
Schmitt, a geologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard and the only person without a military background to ever walk on the moon, will be in Madison on Monday to make his case for continuing human space exploration. Schmitt, who taught several graduate-level seminars at UW-Madison from 1996 to 2004, will speak at 6:45 p.m. in room 1610 of Engineering Hall, 1415 Engineering Drive. The free talk is open to the public and sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and its UW-Madison chapter.
Speaking at the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, Obama explained his decision, made earlier this year, to scrap the Constellation program. Obama insisted he still is “100 percent committed to the future of NASA,” but believes a new approach to human spaceflight is needed. Part of Obama’s vision includes a larger role for private industry.
For many who viewed the grainy black-and-white television image of Neil Armstrong making his “giant leap for mankind,” it hardly seems possible that more than 40 years have passed since a person first stepped foot on the moon. What’s even harder to believe, says Schmitt, is that no one has returned since he and Gene Cernan left the lunar soil in December 1972 as part of the Apollo 17 mission, and there are no plans for the U.S. to go back.
“Frankly, it’s disheartening to me that there’s going to be at least a 50-year gap between trips to deep space for America,” says Schmitt, who claims to be the person who took the iconic “Blue Marble” photo, which features a brilliant shot of Earth hanging in the black void of space.
In 2004, former President George W. Bush called on NASA to retire the space shuttle and return humans to the moon and beyond with the unveiling of the Constellation program. The idea was to eventually set up a moon base, which would allow astronauts to practice living on another planet before someday shooting for Mars. But the Bush administration and Congress never added the necessary funding to NASA’s budget for such an endeavor to stay on schedule.
When Obama unveiled his proposed budget for fiscal year 2011 on Feb. 1, essentially shelving Constellation and the space shuttle’s successor, the Ares 1 rocket, it disheartened many.
“There’s disappointment because there were a lot of people who devoted their careers to getting us back to human space exploration, and that now looks like it’s gone by the board,” says Gerald Kulcinski, a UW-Madison associate dean of research in the College of Engineering who has worked with Schmitt since the mid-1980s.
Schmitt, who stayed on at NASA after the moon landings before serving as a Republican senator from New Mexico from 1977 to 1982, says there are two motives behind the president’s moves.
“The secondary motive is to make sure that we’ve canceled everything George Bush wanted to do, whether it’s the right thing to do or not,” says Schmitt, who served as chair in 2005-08 of the NASA Advisory Council, which oversees plans for America’s future in space. “The other thing is the Obama administration, including the president, is made up of people who do not really like what America has been. And our prowess in space is part of what America has been. And I think they would just as soon see us take a second- or third-rate status in that.”
I think there's a lot of truth in what Schmitt says, especially when he talks about the desire to cancel everything Bush wanted and the desire to make America a second or third rate power.
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I am not convinced that Pres Obama wishes the US to be a second or third rate country. It is clear that he wishes to press an agenda focused on shoveling money to the lower economic status people, and there simply is not enough money to do so while maintaining a military and defense posture with any credibility...let alone any money for space exploration. I, for one, would put the priorities in order 1) National defense, 2) economy and 3) jobs in the private sector. The shoveling money to the lower economic people and space exploration could slow to a crawl.
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