Below The Beltway

NASA’s ambitious plans for space exploration are in danger of being drastically curtailed:

WASHINGTON — Where to in space? A blue-ribbon panel charged by the Obama administration to review the United States’ human spaceflight program has narrowed the options to seven.

In three meetings last week, subcommittees of the panel presented possibilities for space flight after NASA retires its space shuttles, coming up with 864 permutations, said Edward F. Crawley, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a panel member.

“All we have to do is get it down to three by next week,” Dr. Crawley said Wednesday, drawing laughter at a meeting at the Carnegie Institution.

“That’s not a joke,” he added.

Three of the options under consideration will stay within the reduced budgets the administration is proposing for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration over the next decade. One essentially continues the current program of returning astronauts to the Moon — developed by the Bush administration after the loss of the shuttle Columbia in 2003 — but gives up on the goal of getting there by 2020.

A second extends the International Space Station beyond its planned demise in 2015 to at least 2020, but pushes lunar exploration even further into the future. The third makes a priority of sending astronauts out of low-Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo program ended more than three decades ago.

This last option would dispose of the space station as scheduled in 2015 and eliminate the Ares I rocket that NASA has been designing to take astronauts into orbit. Instead, the agency’s limited money would be diverted toward developing a larger Ares V rocket, powerful enough to travel to the Moon. But to save money, landing there would be pushed off into the unspecified future.

It was, I suppose, inevitable.

In an era of $ 1 trillion per year deficits and a national debt that has zoomed past $ 11 trillion and is headed for heights unknown in the history of man, it’s difficult to justify spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year on space exploration. Still, if the government is going to waste my tax dollars, I’d rather see them wasted exploring the universe than doing any of the other myriad of useless things the United States Government does on a daily basis.