Obama’s Vision for NASA Bolsters Space Science

President Obama's new direction for NASA as outlined in his speech at Kennedy Space Center last Thursday -- if successfully implemented in the coming years -- will help us better pursue fundamental questions about the universe: are we alone? Can we avert lethal space debris?

For starters, the fact that the President is actually increasing NASA funding should be evidence enough for critics that his administration sees our space program as a fundamental asset to American innovation, technology, inspiration and reassertion of our pioneering spirit. It would be tempting for any other president today to cut back NASA as yet another sacrificial lamb in these anxious and tough-talking times where the Government is accused of overspending.

What's ironic is that Obama was born the same year, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy set landing humans on the moon as a decadal goal. This was done purely to overshadow the Soviet Union and not in the spirit of exploration and discovery at a $25 billion price tag (in 1960s dollars).

Here we are nearly 50 years later and Obama, as previous U.S. presidents have tried, has rearranged the space race Monopoly board once again: Go directly to Mars, do not stop at the moon. Along the way the U.S. must be technologically innovative so that we get more than Tang and Velcro as spinoffs (which by the way were consumer products before NASA was even formed).

WIDE ANGLE: Why was NASA's moon mission scrapped?

The new heavy lift rocket booster Obama expects by 2015 (a retooling of the Bush administration's Ares V) will be able to place immense space telescopes, over one hundred times more powerful than Hubble, one million miles beyond the moon. And, they will be serviceable by a Constellation-derived manned space capsule. These telescopes will carry out an inventory of inhabited nearby exoplanets and at last establish that life is a fundamental condition of the universe.

A several month-long human round trip to an asteroid will test the sea legs of astronauts for interplanetary journeys. And, asteroids are something we have to take very seriously in coming up with an Earth defense strategy, so that we don't wind up going extinct like the dinosaurs.

WATCH VIDEO: With thousands of asteroids, comets and other near-Earth object buzzing by our planet, Jorge Ribas finds out how we can avoid the same fate as the dinosaurs.

A survey crew at an asteroid could do any number of clever experiments to characterize asteroids' physical properties. They could even set up a precision radio tracking device -- like the strobe light harpooned onto the white shark movie monster "Jaws." The world's population would be mesmerized in a way it hasn’t been affected since the glory days of project Apollo.

Obama set Mars as the ultimate manned spaceflight goal. But, even according to his timetable, I can't imagine a landing on Mars before 2040. However, interest in Mars will be greatly accelerated if a robotic sample return mission brings back to Earth Martian microbes. It might even trigger another Space Race. As I have previously written, we will want to send a drilling crew to the Red Planet to dig of deep core samples to time-travel back into Mars’ biological evolutionary history.

But in all practicality the limits of human exploration and colonization don't extend more than .00004 light-years from Earth -- the distance of the asteroid belt. The outer solar system is too cold and has lethal radiation for creatures of flesh and blood.

Therefore, under the mantras of "exploration," and "inspiring the next generation," we should not discriminate between manned and unmanned exploration of the cosmos. NASA has already taken us over 13 billion light-years toward the horizon of the universe through the eye of the Hubble Space Telescope and the other Great Observatories.

NASA has taken us billions of years into the past with an armada of autonomous orbiters and rovers reconnoitering Mars. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is photo mapping the entire moon down to a resolution of a few feet. There is very little left for human explorers to do there, other than see if they can simply survive on the moon.

Students in every elementary school class I talk to are simply enthralled by what we are learning from these unmanned missions. They are equally fascinated by archival Apollo footage of astronauts bouncing along in 1/6th gravity on the moon’s surface. But there is nothing enticing about showing today’s space explorers doing microgravity somersaults on the International Space Station.

Obama's new NASA aims for not being distracted by the "low-ground" of doing simple lab experiments low Earth orbit, or pulling off a very retro "Apollo-on-steroids" program. Instead, Obama wants to focus on developing bold new technologies to take humans to the planets relatively safely.

Given our rapidly expanding view of the universe, I expect there could be game-changers for NASA along the way to 2035 (Obama's target date for a manned Mars flyby). The biggest wild card would be the discovery of intelligent life off the Earth which, statistically speaking, could happen by 2035 if our basic assumptions are correct.

Images (from top): Obama finishes his speech at KSC on Thursday, a Delta IV Heavy blasts off, artist's impression of astronauts on Mars and an asteroid mission (NASA).