With the release of his fiscal year 2011 budget, President Barack Obama dramatically broke one of his campaign promises.
Obama had said during the campaign that he would "endorse the goal of sending human missions to the moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars." But the proposed budget he presented to Congress would shift course significantly.
Obama's proposed budget would cancel Constellation, the successor system for the space shuttle, after NASA has already spent $9 billion on the program. And along with canceling Costellation, Obama offered an alternative road map for human space exploration over the next decade or more.
"NASA's Constellation program – based largely on existing technologies – was based on a vision of returning astronauts back to the moon by 2020," the president's budget says. "However, the program was over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation due to a failure to invest in critical new technologies. Using a broad range of criteria, an independent review panel determined that even if fully funded, NASA's program to repeat many of the achievements of the Apollo era, 50 years later, was the least attractive approach to space exploration as compared to potential alternatives. Furthermore, NASA's attempts to pursue its moon goals, while inadequate to that task, had drawn funding away from other NASA programs, including robotic space exploration, science, and Earth observations."
The budget proposes swapping Constellation for reliance on the still-developing commercial space sector to carry cargo and crew into orbit "with significantly lower operations costs than current systems." Contrary to his campaign promise, the budget does not mention a 2020 target date, and it dismisses the idea of humans actually landing on the moon, in favor of robotic missions "to scout locations and demonstrate technologies to increase the safety and capability of future human missions and provide scientific dividends." The budget avoids specifics about the ultimate target for human missions; the robotic forays would help determine whether landing humans on Mars is a viable goal.
Of course, the president's budget is only a proposal, and the forces supporting Constellation are substantial. They include lawmakers from Alabama, Florida and Texas, the states most deeply involved in Constellation. So Obama's major shift in focus is far from a done deal.
However, the president has made clear his opposition to the idea of landing a human on the moon by 2020, which was the linchpin of Promise 339. So we are moving it from In the Works to Promise Broken.