Our nation has entered a time of severe fiscal constraints in the face of trillion-dollar-per-year federal deficits. While NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) is a well-intentioned program, we cannot afford to provide NASA with the extra $4 billion to $5 billion per year needed to make an SLS-based exploration strategy work. As a result, the human deep space exploration program is on the verge of collapse, which will have severe economic consequences for Texas as well as the nation.

Unless something changes soon, the current situation will further degrade and could easily destroy critical human space exploration expertise at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) that we will never regain. Unless something changes soon, many thousands of high-wage Texas jobs will be lost forever.

The current national human exploration strategy, which is based on development of the SLS, is economically unaffordable. The SLS-based strategy is unaffordable, by definition, since the costs of developing, let alone operating, the SLS within a fixed or declining budget has crowded out funding for critical elements needed for any real deep space human exploration program. Most of these critical elements would be managed by JSC. They include the crewed lunar lander, a multi-mission space exploration vehicle (MMSEV), a deep space habitat, a lunar surface rover and other lunar infrastructure. The development of these critical elements has been delayed until the mid-2020s and the 2030s, so real human exploration beyond Earth will not begin until the late 2020s or 2030s.

This is not only politically unsustainable - it is technically unsustainable.

At present, JSC has only a few significant jobs: completing the development of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, operating the International Space Station (ISS) and supporting the Kennedy Space Center-led commercial crew program.

Consider just two of JSC's strategic capabilities: Mission Control and Operations and Engineering and Development. The more famous of the two - Mission Control and Operations - was created by JSC engineers and is a unique capability. With the space shuttle retired, ISS assembly complete, and the first crewed Orion flight a decade away, JSC's Mission Control has much less to do. Supporting increasingly routine ISS operations requires no more than several hundred people at Mission Control, a small fraction of recent levels of 2,500 personnel.

This Death Valley of actual spaceflight operations and development also threatens JSC's crown jewel, the engineering organization that undergirds these more visible achievements. JSC's world class engineering and development capability created the concepts, designs and development for every American human spacecraft that has flown to space. JSC's unique multi-discipline systems engineering and spaceflight technical expertise - built up over five decades - is the envy of the world's space agencies and aerospace industries.

With ISS complete, with no significant funding for the deep space habitat or MMSEV, and with the cancellation of the crewed lunar lander and other lunar surface systems, there is minimal development work for JSC's engineering teams. They are now limited to helping complete the half-finished Orion and supporting KSC on commercial crew.

With no clear destination and no money to pursue one, there are not enough projects to inspire and train the next generation of managers and designers who will, presumably, be needed a decade from now to start developing actual exploration hardware. This is a going-out-of-business strategy.

For all these reasons, the current NASA exploration strategy is a plan for the withering or even destruction of JSC, and with it the stagnation and decay of the Texas space industry.





Kraft is former director of NASA's Johnson Space Center and former director of JSC Mission Control; Moser is former director of JSC Engineering, and former director of NASA's Space Station Program.