spacetoday.net: Aldridge commission warns on sustainability, budget

Posted: Thu, Feb 12, 2004, 12:10 PM ET (1710 GMT)
The commission examining the implementation of President Bush's space plan said that sustaining the proposed initiative for two decades or more is the biggest challenge facing NASA and the administration. The President's Commission on Implementation of US Space Exploration Policy, also known as the Aldridge Commission, held its first public meeting on Wednesday in Washington, introducing the panel and taking testimony from people involved in past studies on the future of the American space program. Commission chairman Pete Aldridge noted that the biggest challenge facing the plan is to "survive multiple presidencies, multiple Congresses, [and] multiple generations." Without it, he warned, this plan could meet the fate of past initiatives, with "spikes and valleys in space budgets subject to the whims of the political leaders of the time." Norm Augustine, who led an earlier study of the future of the space program over a decade ago, warned that such a project can't be done cheaply, saying that even if NASA's budget for the next ten years was devoted entirely to the initiative, it would not be enough. The commission is scheduled to issue its final report in early June, 120 days after the commission started its work.