Jim Lovell, left, with Neil Armstrong, speaking at O’Hare in March 2010. Lovell and other astronauts criticized Obama’s proposed space program changes in two scathing letters sent to the White House. (Brian Cassella/ Chicago Tribune)

By Julie Johnsson | President
Barack Obama is expected to reshape his vision for NASA to emphasize
Mars exploration as opposition builds to his controversial plan to move
NASA away from manned space missions while commercializing spaceflight.

Lake Forest’s Jim Lovell, commander of the Apollo 13 mission, and Neil
Armstrong, the first man to step on the moon, were among the more than
two dozen space explorers to criticize the president’s plan, unveiled in
his fiscal 2011 budget, in two scathing letters sent to the White House
this week.

“We see our human exploration program, one of the most inspirational tools to promote science, technology, engineering and math to our young people, being reduced to mediocrity,” wrote Lovell and 26 others involved in NASA missions in the last half century.

The correspondence comes as Obama prepares to make the case for a radical overhaul of the space agency in an April 15 address at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a swing state critical to the Democratic Party in an election year.

Obama’s 2011 budget calls on private sector companies such as Chicago’s Boeing Co. and nascent aerospace firms like SpaceX to develop the replacement to the space shuttle, which is slated to be retired this year. Much of the $6 billion increase to NASA’s budget in the next five years would be used to seed commercial development.

But the president is modifying his plans to cancel the Constellation space exploration program, writing off much of the $9 billion spent to return astronauts to the moon with the goal of eventually exploring deeper space.

Critics claimed that without an exploration program tied to a specific long-term mission to keep NASA’s goals in sharp focus, the agency’s research will devolve into a “science fair,” whose funding eventually will be gutted by Congress without fear of political repercussions.

“I think the White House now realizes it made a big mistake by springing its new vision for NASA on the public without adequate warning,” said Loren Thompson, aerospace analyst with the Lexington Institute. “The president has already decided to make a shift in direction, probably focusing on Mars as the ultimate goal of the human space flight program.”

White House briefing documents on the president’s speech show that some aspects of Constellation will survive. The president will continue to develop a heavy-lift rocket developed in part by Boeing, deciding on its architecture by 2015, two years sooner than  under the troubled Constellation program.

The president will also salvage much of the work already done by Lockheed Martin Corp. on the Orion crew exploration vehicle, which would have returned astronauts to space by mid-decade and would have later been employed for moon missions.

The vehicle will be scaled down and housed at the International Space Station, providing a standby emergency escape vehicle for astronauts. The president would also extend the life of the International Space Station beyond 2020, making good on the more than $50 billion the U.S. has spent on it. Former President Bush planned to scrap the station in 2015 to fund Constellation.

Obama’s proposals are already being criticized by some in the space community. His plan still could leave the U.S. dependent on former Cold War rival Russia’s Soyuz rockets until the private sector developed a successor to the space shuttle.

“If we’re going to build Orion, we might as well built it as a genuine space ‘taxi’ for shuttling crews to and from the ISS,” said William Melberg, a Chicago-based aerospace author and historian. “The Soyuz spacecraft, after all, is a 45-year-old design and carries very little payload. Orion would be an excellent replacement vehicle — if it is designed as a spaceship and not a lifeboat.”