Originally published July 26 2005
Bush's focus on Mars and moon puts NASA projects on back burner
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Although his intention was to generate more interest in space exploration, talk of another lunar landing and an expedition to Mars from President Bush is generating way more cost than interest, and the Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the redirection of funds and NASA's focus has mothballed (or completely cancelled) certain large space projects.
In an abrupt turn of events, it will be retired by 2010 and many science projects have already been mothballed so NASA can push forward President Bush's promise to put astronauts on the moon and Mars.
Bush's 2004 announcement of his "exploration initiative" generated relatively little public discussion despite the enormity of commitment and expense the project will entail.
"There's been a seismic shift - a whole queue of flight experiments was scrubbed, including one of my own," said Charles Oman, an aeronautical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who has flown projects on 10 different shuttle missions.
Though a Senate funding panel last week told NASA not to sacrifice the Hubble Space Telescope and a few other programs, it offered little extra money over the space agency's $4 billion science budget.
"We have to free up money for the new program areas," said Don Thomas, International Space Station program scientist and former astronaut.
"Given this new direction for the President's exploration vision, we've done a dramatic refocusing," he said.
Regardless of whether there was some higher purpose to the roses, many scientists say they did design interesting, serious experiments for the shuttle or space station - a few of them published in prestigious journals such as Nature and Science.
NASA has yet to decide the fate of other projects, such as an possible unmanned mission to Jupiter's moon Europa.
But the next few years NASA will have to concentrate resources on Mars, because sending astronauts into space is so much more challenging than sending robots.
One of the most difficult hurdles will be figuring out how astronauts can survive the radiation they'd encounter on the trip, which would take six months to a year each way.
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