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Faced with daunting cuts in federal budgets and waning political support,
NASA has declared a ‘pause’ in its ambitious plans to revisit the Moon and
to send its astronauts on to Mars. ‘We deeply believe that we are going
back to the Moon and Mars, but not yet. We’re not ready,’ said Daniel Goldin,
head of NASA, after unveiling the agency’s budget proposal for 1994.

The $14.6 billion blueprint for spending designed to meet the Clinton
administration’s demands to curtail the growth in NASA’s costs, effectively
kills off the Space Exploration Initiative. President Bush launched this
initiative but it never had much support in Congress.

The proposed budget also puts an end to a range of programmes to develop
technology for use in space exploration, such as new rockets for launching
spacecraft and nuclear reactors to provide electricity for Moon bases.

Instead, NASA will focus on developing smaller and cheaper robot spacecraft
that could be sent to other planets as a prelude to human exploration of
the Solar System. ‘Technically speaking, we are not yet ready to return
to the Moon or go to Mars. We haven’t established that humans can live and
work in these extremely hostile environments for long periods of time,’
said Goldin. ‘We haven’t done the pre-cursory robotic scouting missions
that are necessary.’

NASA now sees planetary exploration as a goal that can be achieved only
in partnership with other countries. ‘When we’re ready to do it with another
nation, then we’ll step forward and propose it,’ Goldin said.

The budget also drastically cuts the amount that will be spent on the
space station Freedom, to about $7.1 billion in 1994, down from $15.1 billion
in 1993. Clinton has ordered NASA to redesign the space station to halve
its estimated cost of $31 billion. The redesigned station will stay in
orbit for only 10 years rather than the 30 originally planned. NASA is examining
three alternative designs and will choose one in June.

‘President Clinton has given us a very tough challenge,’ Goldin said.
‘He has asked us to make significant cuts in NASA’s spending over the next
five years, while also making our programmes much more relevant to America
and the people on our planet.’

Some programmes do relatively well in the new budget. Clinton wants
to see more money spent on aeronautical research, a part of NASA’s mission
that is largely ignored. The money would fund research in technologies
for both subsonic and supersonic aircraft.

The 1994 budget includes $40 million to begin work on Gravity Probe
B, a spacecraft that will test predictions made by the theory of relativity.

John Gibbons, the president’s science adviser, said this week that the
space station had to be pruned so that its burgeoning costs did not snuff
out all other NASA programmes. The new arrangement will ‘scale it down to
the point that it leaves NASA with something to do in addition to building
the space station’, said Gibbons.

‘At the rate it was moving, there would have been little room for aeronautics
work, little room for space science, little room for other technological
innovation,’ he said.