Awful mood for NASA jubilee: Is China headed for the moon?

[Yalmuk]

Another space race? but what can NASA do? Orion is not ready until 2015 and politics prevent them buying russian soyuz capsules at this moment...

Washington - NASA celebrates its 50th anniversary Wednesday, but the US space agency is hardly in the mood for partying.

Even NASA boss Michael Griffin, who is usually rather a cold technician, recently sounded the alarm. After all, the agency's greatest triumphs, notably the first moon landing, took place almost 40 years ago.

In public, Griffin restrains himself, but in private, he bluntly expresses his concern that US dominance in space could soon give way to China.

It was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that gave the United States its greatest national triumph since the end of World War II.

The images of July 20, 1969, are unforgettable: astronauts in their cumbersome but shiny suits before a grey lunar background, their footprints in the moon dust and the Stars and Stripes staked against a sky in which floated planet Earth.

These images are proudly engraved in the nation's conscience. Space, and particularly manned missions to space, became part of the American ethos of a pioneering spirit mixed with a desire to push limits. The men who dared to travel to space at the time were hailed as modern heroes.

However, times have changed. Griffin's fear that the Chinese could beat NASA in the second race to the moon would indeed be a real nightmare for the United States.

The North American giant space apparatus is planning to send another astronaut to the moon by 2020, as a stepping stone to Mars, but the work on the new Orion spacecraft is going slower than planned because of budgetary problems.

'A Chinese landing on the moon prior to our own return will create a stark perception that the US lags behind not only Russia but also China in space,' Griffin wrote in an internal document that was made public, to the US government's great displeasure.

No country has made as much progress as China in recent years in relation to manned space missions. Its advance has come as the United States has seen its budgets for space exploration shrink.

'We spent many tens of billions of dollars during the Apollo era to purchase a commanding lead in space over all nations on Earth,' Griffin recalled while complaining that NASA's budget has been cut by about 20 per cent since 1992, once inflation is taken into account.

'We've been living off the fruit of that purchase for 40 years and have not ... chosen to invest at a level that would preserve that commanding lead,' Griffin charged.

The US space outlay really started with the 'Sputnik crisis' of October 1957 when the Soviet Union became the first country to launch a satellite into space.

In the Cold War setting, the blow showed that the Russians - so often derided in science and technical matters - were capable of delivering surprises and outdoing the Americans.

US president Dwight Eisenhower reacted promptly by founding a space agency, and NASA started work on October 1, 1958. It initially had 8,000 employees but has seen that number grow to about 18,000 today.

The first leader among NASA engineers was Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who helped German dictator Adolf Hitler develop the V2 rocket that reduced British cities to rubble and ashes in World War II.

Braun transferred the secret missile plans of the Nazis to his new employers at NASA. His cooperation was at first kept secret, and many US citizens were shocked when the German's involvement became known.

The Soviets initially retained their lead in the space race. On April 12, 1961, they launched the first human being into space, Yuri Gagarin. John Glenn followed as the first American in space on February 20, 1962.

It was the young US president John Kennedy who first set 'the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.'

The Apollo programme was launched. Never before had the United States successfully undertaken such a Herculean scientific and technical task. In the middle of the Cold War, it established the dominance of the United States in space and technical matters, seemingly for good.

And yet, the triumph of the moon landing was the zenith of its effort, and that was 40 years ago.

The Vietnam War, a lack of funds and growing doubts about the expense and purpose of manned space missions put a brake on this drive.

Accidents like the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in January 1986 and the Columbia catastrophe of February 2003, which caused the deaths of seven astronauts each, also contributed to damping down enthusiasm.

Shuttles more generally turned out to be flops. Initially, the reusable vehicles were supposed to make space missions cheaper. However, the bills did not decrease, and the complicated shuttles instead ate up the bulk of the NASA budget for decades.

Finally, NASA decided to retire the two-decades-old ageing shuttles for good by May 2010 and focus instead on returning to the moon with a view to using the Earth's natural satellite as a jumping off point for further space exploration.

In meantime, the US will lack its own transportation to the International Space Station, built largely with US money and effort, for at least five years and will have to beg a place in the considerably smaller and less comfortable Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Years ago, such a Russian monopoly in space would have been unthinkable for the United States, and so while it celebrates its birthday, NASA must fight off the sombre mood of being left somehow behind.

The new US space capsule Orion is not set to be operational before at least 2015.

To rekindle enthusiasm around space, President George W Bush talked of the new goals of putting a US astronaut back on the moon by 2020 and on Mars by 2037.

In the meantime, Congress is about to pass several laws that would allow NASA to support Russia's Soyuz space programme in order to keep US access to the space station and to demand that NASA keep shuttles serviceable enough to be resurrected if need be, the Washington Post reported Saturday.

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