Obama’s Space Revolution

On the subject of space conquest, the model American president remains John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He alone was able to order, in 1961, a national effort that required only eight years to put astronauts on the moon’s surface. Fifty years later, it can thus seem astonishing to read from the pen of one of the heroes of these Apollo missions, Buzz Aldrin, that Barack Obama has just had his own “Kennedy moment” by abandoning the return to the moon, which was decided by his predecessor George W. Bush. However, in many respects, the provocation rings true.

The space gamble of the Obama administration is as ambitious, and risky, as that of Kennedy. The upheaval that it implies is as adapted to its time as the journey to the moon was in the Cold War. This change of approach seeks to equip the explorers of the cosmos with new means instead of indefinitely assigning them the same aims. One can summarize it with an expression that inverts the terms of a familiar sentence: When the crazy person points to the moon, the wise man looks at the finger.

The finger, in space conquest, is first of all the rockets pointed towards celestial destinations. In this area, the Constellation Program seeking to return to the moon was diverting eyes from a more and more embarrassing fact: the Americans’ technological stagnation. Constraints of time and security had pushed NASA to choose the most proven and therefore least audacious techniques. Constellation combined the principles of Apollo with the machinery of the Space Shuttle, invented 40 years ago. This is the first restrained rupture in the White House budgetary proposals, to end the inertia and conventionality that was giving human adventure in space the allure of a soap opera that always replays the same episode.

If Congress accepts Mr. Obama’s arbitration, priority will be given to innovation in order to invent new modes of propulsion, new techniques for stowage or for refueling in space. “The retirement of the space shuttles and the cancelation of the Constellation program are going to free up 8 billion dollars per year, to which the White House promises to add a ninth,” says Vincent Sabathier, consultant for space concerns in Washington. “In one fell swoop, NASA finds itself unburdened of the very heavy operational costs and it gains a very large investment capacity.” From this effort of innovation, without precedent precisely since the Apollo program, the rockets and space vehicles will come out more likely to captivate the interest of the general public again.

For the program launched by Mr. Bush, with eyes fixed on the moon, no one, or nearly no one, was following it. Constellation was built on the gamble for the support of American crowds that never came. Since the end of the Apollo missions, Americans have become less militant about national fervor than consumers of regular space exploits. They were sated by the performance of robotic probes.

The Obama program draws on consequences from this diversification of centers of interest. The budget reinforces the science and the missions are led by automatic vehicles, which maintain curiosity. Manned flights will have multiple objectives: visits to asteroids, extended stays in more and more remote locations of the interplanetary void. In order to claim to approach Mars, one will have to get used to these crossings of deep space, and to not risking it alone. The Constellation Program was conceived as a solitary effort of the United States, closed to all partnership. That is dead. Conversely, the costly International Space Station, a long time threatened, will survive, in large part because cooperation is becoming, in the long run, a factor of stability.

It is on this point that the White House proposals imply the most radical changes. Turning to the private sector to service the terrestrial orbit, they add an appeal for collaboration in distant missions. This multilateral approach, conforming to Mr. Obama’s philosophy in foreign policy, seems to abandon the great contest to plant the national flag to those nations that have something to prove, for the moment China or India. “In order for this to work, NASA will have to renounce its very paternalistic approach to cooperation,” says Laurence Nardon, specialist on space for the French Institute for International Relations. “And it will be necessary to invent a mode of governance for international missions. So it is not out of the question that the United States will go as far as partnering with China, like it has turned, right now, towards the Russians.”

In order to approach these distant hopes, Mr. Obama will have to persuade Congress, which is very reticent, that the consequences of his space revolution justify the loss, in the short term, of jobs in NASA locations. And he will have to convince the agency to self-impose a change that will finally pull it out of the 1960s. Two indispensable initial conditions in order for success to one day validate Mr. Obama’s “Kennedy moment.”