Buzz Aldrin Backs Obama in Scrapping Moon Program
The famous Apollo 11 astronaut says NASA’s sights should be on Mars.
On
Monday, the Obama administration
announced its 2010 budget for NASA. It cancels plans to return to
the moon by 2020 and focuses on using commercial companies to ferry astronauts
to and from orbit.
While
some are up in arms over the future of human spaceflight, Buzz Aldrin is backing
the president in an editorial in The
Huffington Post.
Aldrin
calls Obama’s decision his “JFK moment.” He praises the president for
deciding “to redirect our nation’s space policy away from the foolish and
underfunded Moon race that has consumed NASA for more than six years, aiming
instead at boosting the agency’s budget by more than $1 billion more per year
over the next five years, topping off at $100 billion for NASA between now and
2015.”
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Aldrin
has been far from shy about criticizing the Constellation program, previously calling
the launch of its prototype rocket, Ares I-X, “fake” and
“a little more than a half-a-billion dollar political show.” He
thinks that NASA should be spending taxpayer dollars on developing technology
for trips to Mars, and he backs a “flexible path” plan that would
“redirect NASA towards developing the capability of voyaging to more
distant locations in space, such as rendezvous with possibly threatening
asteroids, or comets, or even flying by Mars to land on its moons.”
NASA’s
administrator, Charles Bolden, said in a press
conference Tuesday that he
and senior White House officials will spend the next few months devising a new
overarching goal for NASA, and a schedule for developing technologies to send
astronauts to destinations as yet unknown.
But
Obama’s budget proposal still has to be approved by congress. “My biggest
fear is that this amounts to a slow death of our nation’s human space flight
program,” Representative Bill Posey, Republican of Florida, said in a
statement.
