AAS Public Policy Blog

The long-anticipated final report from the Augustine Commission has been released.  You can download the full report here.

There are no big surprises in the main points of the report since the summary report was released in September.  The media has covered this extensively over the past day, so I won’t re-analyze the main conclusions – you can see the various media reports on NASA Watch.  What’s particularly interesting to me is that they don’t shy away from making some tough observations about the governance of the agency in Chapter 9.  The Commission astutely observes that the “why” should be considered thoughtfully before the “where” of what’s next for human space flight.  They mince no words in pointing out the gap between the expectations and the resources provided.  They also highlight the constant redirection of policy and budget reductions as being less than conducive to running an effective program.

It is of course up to the Obama Administration to decide what they will do with this report.  The Administrator of NASA and high-level officials within NASA have been discussing next steps for a little while now.  Hopefully a thoughtful policy will emerge as a result of all this effort.  As for how this will impact science funding at NASA, we will just have to wait and see!

What are your thoughts on the report?  We’d love to hear from you.

Various news outlets cover the final public meeting of the NASA Human space flight review. The general theme of the meeting – there’s not enough money to properly do exploration. From CNET:

A presidential panel wrapping up a review of future U.S. manned space flight options delivered a grim assessment Wednesday, showing NASA’s current plan to retire the shuttle, finish the space station and return to the moon by the early 2020s is not remotely feasible without a significant restoration of previously cut funding. In the absence of a major spending increase, “our view is that it will be difficult with the current budget to do anything that’s terribly inspiring in the human spaceflight area,” said Norman Augustine, chairman of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee.

And the NY Times:

The United States cannot afford to send humans anywhere beyond the space station — especially Mars — unless it wants to spend more money. “You just can’t get there,” Sally Ride, the former astronaut, said over and over again on Wednesday as she presented calculations of the costs and timetables of various proposed space missions, ranging from establishing a base on the Moon to touring asteroids to landing on Mars.

Here in Washington, the Norm Augustine-led human spaceflight review panel has a public meeting on Aug 12 at the Ronald Reagan Building.

1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Committee public deliberations: Discussion of final options Discussion of final report Discussion of close-out activities NASA Television will carry both meetings live on the agency’s media channel. The events may also be viewed on NASA’s Web site. Following the Aug. 12 meeting, committee chairman Norman Augustine will be available to answer questions from news media for approximately 30 minutes.

Further information is available at the NASA HQ website