Obama Pits Human Space Exploration Against Education

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama released a new $18 billion education plan yesterday that he proposes to pay for by delaying the NASA Constellation program (to return humans to the moon) five years.

"We're not going to have the engineers and the scientists to continue space exploration if we don't have kids who are able to read, write and compute," Obama said.

Space Exploration is becoming more of an issue in the 2008 presidential election. Hillary Clinton released her civil space policy on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik last month, promising to speed development of next generation crew exploration vehicles. Her release says:

Hillary is committed to a space exploration

program that involves robust human spaceflight to complete the Space

Station and later human missions, expanded robotic spaceflight

probes of our solar system leading to future human exploration, and

enhanced space science activities. She will speed development,

testing, and deployment of next-generation launch and crew

exploration vehicles to replace the aging Space Shuttle.

Obama's proposal to slip NASA's Constellation program to pay for education puts education and space in direct competition for tax dollars. Space Exploration historically has not competed with education for federal dollars because most educational programs are funded at the state level. The Department of Education and NASA are also traditionally in separate funding bills going through Congress and thus are not competing for the funds within a given appropriation bill.

Given that that Space Shuttle is retiring in 2010 and there is already a four year gap before the Ares I vehicle will be ready to launch crews to Space Station, a five year delay of the Constellation program would leave the United States government without its own human launch capability for nearly ten years.

Such a delay would result is a loss of capability as the workforce with the knowledge to build spacecraft will not be around when you want to hire them in 2020 and there will be few to train any students coming out of the education pipeline.

Hillary did specifically acknowledge this national concern in her policy, stating:

And in

pursuing next-generation programs, Hillary will capitalize on the

expertise of the current Shuttle program workforce and will not

allow a repeat of the “brain drain” that occurred between the Apollo

and shuttle missions.

According to a 2004 press release from Congress, there are three times as many scientists and engineers at NASA who are over 60 years old then are under 30 years old. It is unclear either group would be around 13 years from now to restart the program.

Most of the veteran spacecraft builders will be retired by 2020. The youngest person to walk on the moon, Harrison Schmidt, will be 85 and the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong, will be 90.
Obama's education plan includes new standards [USAToday]