President-elect Obama will have to decide the fate of the costly U.S. space program amid a global recession and skyrocketing deficits. Obama faces a decision at the end of April on whether to continue the Space Shuttle initiative, which NASA otherwise plans to shut down. Congress last fall set a deadline for the new administration to decide this spring on whether to reverse course and continue the program, still the only way NASA has to transport Americans into space. Extending the program would come at a high cost; two shuttle flights a year cost $3 billion, according to outgoing NASA administrator Michael Griffin. That’s even more expensive with a $1.2 trillion fiscal-year deficit as a backdrop. Those who wanted to end the shuttle program said its continuation is shifting money from the Constellation program, the Bush administration’s plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 with an eye toward eventually sending them to Mars and other planets. Constellation’s estimated price tag is $100 billion, and it has been repeatedly delayed due to inadequate funding. As a consequence, the United States now faces a gap of five years between the planned retirement of the shuttle and Constellation, which will not be ready to fly earlier than 2015. In the meantime, American astronauts and cargo will have to ride on other nations’ rockets, particularly Russia’s. Obama must also make a decision on whether to provide funding for the Constellation program this spring. On the campaign trail, Obama stirred up criticism when he suggested that he would delay the Constellation program by five years. But later Obama backtracked and offered some support for the program, calling it a “vital new program” in a space-policy white paper. It’s unclear how the widening budget deficit and continued economic crisis will affect his views on the space program, which has often been a source of deep national pride for Americans. At the same time, NASA and the space program have always had their critics, who question spending public money to send rockets to the moon and Mars while the nation faces other needs. Criticism intensified earlier this decade after the 2003 Columbia shuttle accident killed seven astronauts.

I think we should fix things at home before we go out exploring. Maybe it's just me. We don't really have the money to do it right now (or the war in Iraq...). Of course, we could restart it when things are a tad more stable.

The way I look at it, these days, what's another 3 or $4 billion to waste? We throw away that much in a week in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we're going to start printing money to bail out the banks and the auto companies, why not throw a few billion at NASA? Besides, if we don't, we'll just have a bunch of over-educated, unemployed white collar scientists wandering around that we'll have to pay for somehow.