Bài viết của tờ THE HILL, đăng từ năm 2017 và có tựa đề là:
Khi ông Neil Armstrong, phi hành gia đầu tiên lên đến cung trăng, cùng ông Gene Cernan, người cuối cùng đến cung trăng, và Jim Lovell, người anh hùng của Apollo 13, đã gửi một lá thư lên án việc giết chết dự án ‘Chòm sao’–Project Constellation, Obama biết là ông đã gặp vấn đề. Cho nên, đi cùng với phi hành gia Buzz Aldrin của phi thuyền Apollo làm chỗ dựa chính trị, Obama đã đi xuống Kennedy Space Center để đưa ra một tuyên bố rất lớn về không gian. Là nước Mỹ sẽ đi đến Hỏa Tinh, vào khoảng chừng đâu đó trong vòng 30 năm nữa và sẽ ghé một tinh cầu gần trái đất trước đó. Chúng ta sẽ không lên mặt trăng vì chúng ta đã đến đó rồi.
How Barack Obama ruined NASA space exploration
The kicker was that both options would cost an extra $3 billion a year for NASA to execute. For the Obama administration, which was not shy about spending money in areas that it cared about, this price tag was too dear to bear.
The government’s response was formulated in secret. The results of these private deliberations were rolled out in the 2011 budget request that was released in February 2010. Project Constellation would be canceled, root and branch. Instead, NASA would conduct studies of heavy-lift rockets, deep-space propulsion, and other technologies that it was said, in the fullness of time, would make exploring space cheaper and easier.
Congress, which had not been consulted, reacted with bipartisan fury. The Obama administration made two critical errors. It had not consulted with Congress or anyone else when it developed its plans to kill Constellation. The White House also blatantly pulled a bureaucratic dodge that was apparent even to a first-term member of the House from the sticks. To kill a popular program, one studies it to death. Nowhere in the Obama plan was there a commitment to send astronauts anywhere. Clearly, the White House had no intention of doing space exploration. President Obama had expressed an antipathy to American exceptionalism, and nothing speaks to that quality than American astronauts exploring other worlds.
When Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, Gene Cernan, the last man on the Moon, and Jim Lovell, the hero of Apollo 13, sent an open letter condemning the cancellation of Constellation, President Obama knew he had a problem on his hands. So, with Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin in tow as a political prop, Obama went down to the Kennedy Space Center to make his big space announcement. We would go to Mars, sometime in the next 30 years and visit an Earth-approaching asteroid before that. We would not go back to the moon because we had already been there.
Of course, Obama was no more interested in exploring space than he was before. The Journey to Mars, as NASA eventually called it, was set so far into the future, the mid-2030s, as to be meaningless. Mars was the bright, shiny object to distract people from the vacuous nature of Obama’s space policy.
Congress mandated the development of the Orion spacecraft and the heavy-lift Space Launch System, with designs meticulously spelled out to deny NASA any wiggle room to play slow walk games. These bits of hardware will be available around the end of the decade along with commercial vehicles.
Obama wasted eight years that might have been spent getting Americans beyond low Earth orbit. The Journey to Mars has been the ObamaCare of space exploration–expensive, unsustainable, and not designed to do what it is alleged to do. Part of the mandate of the current president to make America great again will be to turn that situation around and America back toward the stars.