14 DAY TRIAL // Soon, the US Human Space Flight Plans Committee, informally known as the Augustine Commission, will present its conclusions about the future development avenues NASA could be set on to the Obama Administration. Despite the fact that the panel is charged with rethinking the agency's policies, it seems to be at an impasse itself, as evidenced by the fact that it has not yet ranked possible options, according to their feasibility or sustainability. The group is led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine.
The committee held its last video-conference yesterday, in which the final details of the reports it would submit to Obama were discussed. After they turn over the report, the scientists in the commission will essentially have dropped the ball in the president's court. Obama will then have to decide which avenues of space exploration to choose, from only a handful of options. “We did not rate the overall options because, first of all, we were not asked to do that – and doing it would have required that we apply some sort of judgment as to what the relative weighting of those factors should be,” Augustine says, quoted by Wired.
Things are not too peachy within the panel either. There are those who would want to impose much higher safety regulations for the ARES I rocket, the key component of Project Constellation, while others strongly disagree with that idea. Augustine and other panel members tried to find common ground between the two sides during the latest video-conference, but their attempts were not very successful. “Different partisans of different systems have arguments for why their systems should be exempt from the lessons of history,” XCOR Aerospace CEO and Personal Spaceflight Federation Vice-chairman Jeff Greason says.
Even politicians are dissatisfied with the option expressed by the panel. “Instead of focusing on how to strengthen the exploration program in which we have invested so much time and treasure, they gave only glancing attention to Constellation – even referring to it in the past tense in their summary report and instead spent the bulk of their time crafting alternative options that do little to illuminate the choices confronting Congress and the White House,” the Chair of the space subcommittee, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona), adds.