High-profile criticism : Obama under fire over space plans

End of the space shuttle era has left America’s human spaceflight program in an “embarrassing” state, says Armstrong.

WASHINGTON: High-profile critics fear President Barack Obama’s commercial overhaul of human spaceflight is going nowhere and could mark the end of half a century of US supremacy among the stars and planets.

 “We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future,” Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, warned lawmakers at a recent hearing. The end of the space shuttle era has left America’s human spaceflight program in an “embarrassing” state, Armstrong said, arguing that NASA needs a stronger vision for the future and should focus on returning humans to the Moon and to the International Space Station. With the US space shuttle programme now mothballed after its last flight in July, the United States is forced to depend on Russia’s Soyuz capsules to ferry astronauts to the orbiting research laboratory until at least 2015. Obama canceled the Constellation programme that aimed to return humans to the Moon by 2020.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 3^rd, 2011.