The decision has sparked an uproar in Congress

Feb 2, 2010 07:38 GMT  ·  By

The Obama Administration has announced officially that it plans to change its approach to space exploration. This means that Project Constellation, the American project to return to the Moon by 2020, will be canceled, and that emphasis will be placed on providing funding for the private space sector. NASA is to again resume its role as a leader in innovation. In the same budget President Obama proposed, the International Space Station will be supported in its operations by 2020.

“[W]e are proposing a cancellation of the Constellation program at NASA even while making other investments in long range [research and development] there, which again is a significant step,” Peter Orszag, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said on January 31. The official budget request was submitted to the Congress yesterday, February 1. Project Constellation has been in the works for the past five years, and considerable funding and efforts were placed in it. A major progress was also recorded, and NASA asked for a $1-billion boost in funding late last year.

However, authorities declined the request, and said that they would award $6 billion in additional funding for the space agency to support private-sector initiatives. Obama announced that his administration would fight through the Congress to support these decisions. And apparently they will have to, because their decision made a lot of people angry, especially the Congressional delegations from Alabama, Florida and Texas. These are the states that are most actively involved in the NASA human spaceflight research program, Space reports.

When the rumor that Obama would sack Project Constellation started making the rounds in Washington, it elicited a very strong, bipartisan wave of criticism. Though the White House says that it will fight special interests on Capitol Hill, many point at the fact that the interests may lie within the Augustine Commissions, the special investigation body that the US president set up last year, to look at NASA's plans. That panel was led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, and also included a number of representatives from the private-space industry.

Republican Senator Richard Shelby (Ala.), from the Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee, blasted the decision, saying that canceling Project Constellation as a government project risked diminishing the astronauts' access to space, and did not enhance it. “China, India, and Russia will be putting humans in space while we wait on commercial hobbyists to actually back up their grand promises,” he said. Awarding $6 billion in funding is nothing more than “a welfare program for amateur rocket companies with little or nothing to show for the taxpayer dollars they have already squandered,” he added.