Sharing the Adventure with the Public The Value and Excitement of 'Grand Questions' of Space Science and Exploration: Summary of a Workshop (2011) / Chapter Skim
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Session 6: What Could the Future Hold for Humans in Space?
Session 6: What Could the Future Hold for Humans in Space?
Pages 43-48
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From page 43... ...
Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Panelists: Marc Kaufman, Journalist, The Washington Post Linda Billings, George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs INTRODUCTION Elizabeth R Cantwell, director for mission development for the Engineering Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Space Studies Board member, began by talking in broad terms about the National Research Council (NRC)
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From page 44... ...
Returning to the present, Robinson continued, considering the environmental emergency we are facing, talking about human space exploration could be "easily misinterpreted as escapist and elitist, involving only a small percentage of the human population." Instead, the focus should be on space science, which he emphasized is an Earth science, and that fact needs to be communicated to the public. Studying Venus's atmosphere helped us discover the ozone hole, he asserted.
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From page 45... ...
Every member of Congress "blasted" the plan and for different reasons -- there was no clear picture "of why people hated this so much." In that environment, his committee, which is an "authorizing" or "policy" committee, needed to determine the direction of the human spaceflight program. Congress already had passed two laws, the 2005 NASA Authorization Act and the 2008 NASA Authorization Act, essentially embracing President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration4 and emphasizing the goal of human exploration beyond low Earth orbit (LEO)
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From page 46... ...
The Augustine committee5 came out and said Constellation was not funded sufficiently and there was not enough money for the ISS or for many other things, so the administration "understandably decided to blow up the whole process." He tried to discover who in Congress supported the administration's plan and could find only one member of Congress, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, who did, because he believes private enterprise is the right approach. The Senate came together largely because they viewed the NASA bill as a jobs bill, in his view, noting that Senator Richard Shelby, a deficit hawk, said that President Obama's plan would only pass "over his dead body." Kaufman thinks the final result is a bill that is acceptable but is not optimistic that it will be executed because of the budget situation.
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From page 47... ...
In response to Billings's statement that she did not think humans were sufficiently mature to go further out into space, an audience member asked if international cooperation might mitigate that problem because it was part of "growing up." Getting more people from other nations up to the ISS, for example, would be one way to galvanize support for human space exploration as well as for the United States and the other ISS partners. Billings agreed that nations are anxious to have their own citizens fly into space.
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From page 48... ...
Billings observed that, from her standpoint of following the ISS for 27 years, there has been little effort to explain how the ISS serves foreign policy. She thinks that careful thought be given to where the human spaceflight program is going and that it needs to be global: "we are all crewmembers on spaceship Earth and we need to think about our future .
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