Obama Budget: NASA Would Have Private Companies Launch Astronauts

Feb. 1, 2010 — -- It is the year 2019, and a small supply ship is delivering a new crew to the International Space Station.

The ship looks vaguely similar to the Apollo spacecraft NASA used to send astronauts to the moon 50 years ago, and the commander -- for argument's sake, we'll call him Dave Bowman -- has, like Neil Armstrong, a background as a civilian test pilot.

What's different is Bowman's paycheck. He is not a NASA employee. He may work for Boeing, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin startup, or another aerospace company. His firm describes the U.S. government as a "customer."

Bowman is philosophical about his job.

"A lot of people thought we'd be flying to Jupiter by now," he says, "but we're doing something else that's important. We've finally made spaceflight affordable and routine."

If the Obama administration has its way, something like this may happen as NASA changes course under its proposed new budget. The Constellation project -- ordered by President Bush in 2004 to return astronauts to the moon and eventually send them to Mars -- would be canceled. The Obama administration says it was too expensive -- $9.1 billion so far -- and relied on old technology.

In its place, NASA would concentrate on developing new technologies for future exploration, leaving some of its existing functions -- such as launching astronauts to the space station -- to private industry.

"Imagine enabling hundreds, even thousands of people to visit or live in low earth orbit, while NASA firmly focuses its gaze on the cosmic horizon beyond earth," said NASA administrator Charles Bolden in a telephone news conference today.

James Kohlenberger of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy joined in: "While we are canceling Constellation, we are not canceling our ambitions for exploration."

Some space entrepreneurs said they were thrilled. Others -- especially if they worried about existing aerospace jobs in Florida, Texas and Alabama -- promised a fight to the finish in Congress.

Some highlights in the proposed NASA budget:

Build new heavy-lift rockets with improved materials -- but not the Ares I and Ares V boosters from the Constellation project. To save money and development time, they relied heavily on components from the space shuttles, which will be retired in a year after five more flights.