s longer than [NASA administrator Charles] Bolden predicts. What Glenn objects to is the gap between the shuttle and a future spacecraft. While the Soyuz is reliable, Glenn said NASA should always want an alternative in case of a “hiccup” in the Soyuz plans.
“Throughout the history of the manned spaceflight program we’ve always had another program to transition into […] we had that and it got canceled and we don’t have anything,” launch manager Leinbach told his fellow workers at Kennedy Space Center. “Frankly as a senior NASA manager I would like to apologize that we don’t have that.”
The future is not all bleak, though, according to NASA administrator Bolden. During a press conference at Kennedy Space Center held on July 7, according to Space.com,
Private spaceflight firms will pick up NASA’s slack before too long, ferrying humans to low-Earth orbit and back relatively cheaply and efficiently, [said Bolden].
And handing off that taxi service to commercial companies, Bolden added, will free the space agency up to do what it was meant to do: explore further afield in our solar system. So the nation is not abandoning human spaceflight, despite a pervasive public perception to the contrary, he said.
NASA is pouring money into the commercial industry while still hammering out a design for a heavy-lift rocket. David Mindell, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, told me in an interview last week that there is a lot of anxiety about the ending of the shuttle program and part of the problem is that NASA’s leadership is not doing a good job at articulating clearly to congress and the public what they are trying to do.
Mindell believes that it is time for the shuttles to retire because “we can’t afford two space programs.” He adds that the shuttle became an unambitious program, while a lot of other exciting things are happening in commercial spaceflight. “SpaceX is doing things NASA tried to do at one-third the cost; private space will deliver something,” he said.
A detailed plan for NASA’s future will become clearer when Congress releases the agency’s 2012 budget. According to Mindell, there is still one fundamental question that NASA needs to clearly answer, “why send people at all?”