14 DAY TRIAL // When Obama took office about a month ago, he was faced with the prospect of having to fix the entire US space program, a duty that was first attempted by president Bush, but which had NASA sit on the bench for five years, between 2010 and 2015. Now, the new president has to solve this problem, and a group of Army officials, intelligence workers, and other representatives of business interests and of the people have come together in a non-partisan union to urge Obama to decide the future of America's space program. More than 30 prominent figures now demand that the systemic problems the country is currently faced with simply go away.
The group, named the Committee for U.S. Space Leadership, argues that the only way the space program can be saved is by means of more involvement from the White House and the Office of the President. Its members, former space officials, industry professionals and top military advisors, say that the stakes involved in space exploration are too high to allow for the US to lose its initiative as far as this matter goes. Over the years, they maintain, the country has always been at the forefront of innovation, but now NASA risks being overrun by ESA in its struggle to maintain its number 1 position in the world.
“I think there's widespread recognition that we have serious issues and challenges across the space community. What's been a little bit different about what we've tried to advocate is although we have distinctive space sectors in military, civil, intelligence, commercial, the fact is these are all highly interconnected. Many of the problems we see in one sector are paralleled in others,” Michael Hamel, a retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen, who is also a former commander of Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles, shares in an interview.
“Just as the mastery and use of maritime and air domains helped define the course of world affairs and the histories of the 19th and 20th centuries, so too mastery of space will be a defining feature of the 21st century,” the memo the Committee for U.S. Space Leadership has sent President Obama reads.
The party “quickly converged as a group to understand what was lacking was a vision and leadership from a White House level. When there were stovepipe issues from each domain that cut across other domains and agencies, they just weren't getting resolved at the White House level. The Bush administration issued what I thought was a pretty good [National Space Policy] in 2006, but there was no implementing strategy among all the departments and agencies. So a good policy is necessary, but you have to follow through with a decision-making mechanism,” retired Air Force major general James Armor, former director of the Pentagon's National Security Space Office, concludes.