Sealing towers fate

In the summer of 2010, Congress saved the tower in Mississippi for good.

It happened without anybody mentioning the projects name aloud.

This is a big day for America, said then-Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), as it was about to happen. Hutchison was speaking in July 2010 at a meeting of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

Were doing the right thing for America. For our economy. For our creativity, she said. For our science. And for our security.

Hutchison was announcing a new compromise with the White House, which would finally settle the fight over Constellation. Constellation was dead. Instead, the senators were telling NASA to build something that they had just made up: a Space Launch System (jokers at NASA call it the Senate Launch System).

The new plan for NASA was, as usual, long on how and short on why.

The senators were clear about what they wanted NASA to do: keep some Constellation-era projects going, with all their salaries and spending, and try to integrate them into a new system.

But what was the goal of all that? The moon was off the table. Instead, NASA is now focused on a less impressive rock: an asteroid. Sometime in the 2020s, NASA wants to capture one about the size of a house, and then have astronauts zoom up and examine it. This was not a mission chosen to captivate the worlds imagination. It was a mission chosen to use the leftovers that Congress had told NASA to reheat. (Mars still remains a distant goal: At the earliest, NASA might get there in the 2030s.)

At first, the Senates new plan looked bad for the tower in Mississippi. At best, it now would be a project built on spec: erected in the hope that someday NASA might return to the idea of a giant rocket engine that fired in a vacuum.

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In Mississippi, NASA built $349 million laboratory tower it didnt need