We won’t be boldly going anywhere without more cash, says Nasa

Nearly two years ago, President George W Bush told Nasa to help finish the international space station, return to the moon and then prepare for a manned flight to Mars.

But that vision is crumbling as the US space agency realises it does not have the money. Nasa administrator Michael Griffin revealed that the agency faced a US$3 billion-$5 billion ($4.3b-$7.3b) shortfall in its space shuttle programme alone over the next five years.

In addition to the troubled shuttle programme, Nasa has pledged to help finish the space station by transporting heavy components on the shuttles, and to develop a new launch vehicle and spacecraft to take astronauts to the moon and eventually to Mars.

Yet a storage hangar at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida is overflowing with space station modules and building trusses waiting for shuttle rides to orbit.

The three-ship shuttle fleet, which faces retirement in 2010, remains at least six months away from another flight, following a second round of safety upgrades stemming from the 2003 Columbia disaster.

Research programmes aboard the space station have slowed to a trickle, while dozens of projects have been cancelled outright as Nasa scrambles to save funds.

Without a significant increase in spending, Griffin has met Bush's vision of space exploration with a plan aimed at just one goal - landing men on the moon by 2020.

"The story that's emerging is something like what we had back in 1972, when we started with this grand vision, but the product that resulted is very compromised," said Howard McCurdy, a space history professor at American University.

Then, Nasa was fighting for a Mars mission, a space station and a shuttle to ferry crews and cargo from Earth to space. It ended up with only the shuttle.

"A lot of the technology and research to go to Mars are being put off for the purpose of getting to the moon, which was just supposed to have been a training ground for Mars.

"The means is becoming the end," McCurdy said.

US Rep Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat and a senior member of the House Science Committee, voiced a similar concern during a hearing last week in which the panel quizzed Griffin on what had been happening at Nasa.

"Should simply getting to the moon under the administration's timetable be the nation's goal?" Gordon asked.

"I am very concerned that this administration may not be willing to pay for the vision that it presented to the nation 21 months ago.

"And I fear that the approach being taken ... may make it very difficult to sustain the initiative beyond 2008," Gordon said.

Nasa plans to salvage as much money from existing programmes as possible to pay for the development of a new spacecraft, but it will not be enough, Griffin said.

"Nasa simply cannot afford to do everything on our plate today," he said.

- REUTERS