When I was at community college before coming to UCR, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. I took just about all the sciences, from psychology to biology, chemistry to astronomy to try to find what interested me most. After taking astronomy and having brilliant, inspiring professor I found that my passion was for the stars. I was attending Pasadena City College, and every day on the way to class I would drive by JPL and Cal Tech, hoping to be working there someday. Ever since NASA “shut down,” people close to me assume that my hopes must have changed: crushed by a government shut down. “Didn’t they shut down NASA?” or,“I thought there were no more space missions,” are among common comments I get. So is it realistic to hope that there will be jobs in the field? Or, should I change my aspirations and abandon Astronomy for more down to earth options?
The truth is NASA itself is not shutting down. What is shutting down is the space shuttle program. After six main shuttle projects, spanning over thirty years, the federal government shut down the space shuttle program, for good. But why? Government officials say that it’s all money, and that during a rough time for the United States economy vast amounts of money for space shuttle missions just isn’t ideal. On the other hand, there was already over 9 billion dollars invested into the new Constellation program which planned to build a new shuttle Orion and the Ares rockets for future manned moon missions. On top of that, the federal government has set aside another 6 billion dollars over five years to go towards commercial construction of spacecraft to send NASA astronauts into space. So, they’re throwing away 9 billion dollars that had already gone toward the Constellation program, and also putting another 6 billion out there so some private company can build spacecraft.
To me, this doesn’t really make sense. The budget request for the Constellation program was about 19 billion dollars. So, once the government was 9 billion dollars in, they pull the plug and throw another 6 billion on top for someone else to build a shuttle? So overall, the government saves 4 billion dollars and basically surrenders the honor and prestige of the NASA shuttle program to private companies? Why would the government want to so strongly disassociate themselves with space exploration? I see only two possible explanations for this.
One explanation is simple. The vast amount of money that goes into space exploration and into building these shuttles is sometimes perplexing and even frustrating to some Americans who don’t understand the benefits of these missions and the NASA program as a whole. This leads to our President, who is seeking reelection, to perhaps want to separate himself from all this spending during a time when money is tight for our country. So perhaps, as the new public outlook on what NASA and space exploration can actually bring to us changed, the position of our government also changed. When NASA was founded by President Eisenhower during the Cold War in 1958, the general public was overwhelmingly supportive of the program because it was seen more as an “us against them,” patriotic, and competitive endeavor. Now, there isn’t much for people to cheer about, as the public eye may see these missions as repetitive and unimportant, forcing the government to act accordingly.
Another possible explanation for the government trying to disassociate itself with the space program is perhaps less obvious. Mostly due to the amount of money associated with the space program in the past, it has been highly scrutinized and under the media microscope. If these endeavors become privatized, the requirement to explain and justify every billion dollars being spent, as well as sharing any discoveries publicly, disappears. These operations can go on without limitations of public opinion and the limited amount of tax dollars than will go towards these missions. If it is privatized, these rich companies can do as much spending and research and development of new craft, new ideas, and new missions as they want, and there isn’t any public scrutiny involved because these programs are no longer directly connected to the federal government. This way, we can basically do much more space exploration and missions than ever before, but the catch is that we have to find investors willing to risk large amounts of money for uncertain results.
Either way, the government is trying to set itself apart from the space program as much as possible, first to deflect some of the budget inquiries and objections, then to allow the space exploration to continue to grow in the long run.
There is one more angle at which we can look at this situation. Throughout the history of NASA itself, it has periodically shifted the focus of the organization. Is the shutting down of the space shuttle program just a preparation for better things to come? Have we outgrown the space shuttle and do we need to focus on building new crafts to get further out into the solar system? Is NASA doing this to cover up some more sophisticated, perhaps confidential missions going on that they don’t want the public to know about? We may find out soon enough. The most important thing to me is that whatever happens, I still want to be able to know what is going on as far as stellar research and any space missions. So far, I’m not convinced that these changed will allow us to know what is happening out there in the cosmos.
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