BOB ZUBRIN: Obama Wrecks The Mars Program: The president’s plans for NASA are completely flawed. “NASA’s Mars-exploration effort has been brilliantly successful because, since 1994, it has been approached as a campaign, with probes launched every two years, alternating between orbiters and landers. As a result, combined operations have been possible, with orbiters providing communication links and reconnaissance guidance for surface rovers, which in turn can conduct investigations on the ground to verify and calibrate orbital observations. Thus, the great treks of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, launched in 2003, were supported from above by Mars Global Surveyor (MGS, launched in1996), Mars Odyssey (launched in 2001), and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO, launched in 2005). But after serving ten years in orbit, MGS is now no longer operating, and if we wait until the 2020s to resume Mars exploration, the rest of the orbiters will be gone as well. Moreover, so will be the experienced teams that created them. Effectively, the whole program will be completely wrecked, and we will have to start again from scratch.”

If this were part of a program of budget cuts designed to address the ballooning national debt, I’d say it was just the price we have to pay. But there is no such program of cuts. This money is just being shifted to benefit a more highly-placed constituency. I disagree with Zubrin about the manned space policy, though — on that one, I think Obama’s doing fairly well.