Warns Of U.S. Slipping To "Second Or Third Rate Status" In Space

The first man to walk on the moon says President Obama's proposal to radically alter the nation's manned space program is "devastating."

In an open letter obtained by NBC News and widely disseminated, Armstrong, along with former astronauts James Lovell and Gene Cernan, said "For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature."

President Obama plans to outline his goals for NASA at an event to be held Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is believed he will revive the Orion spacecraft as well as the Ares launch vehicle designed to boost it to space.

Orion and the Ares launch systems were mentioned specifically in the letter. "Although some of these proposals (in the NASA budget) have merit, the accompanying decision to cancel the Constellation program, its Ares 1 and Ares V rockets, and the Orion spacecraft, is devastating," the three wrote.

"America’s only path to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station will now be subject to an agreement with Russia to purchase space on their Soyuz (at a price of over 50 million dollars per seat with significant increases expected in the near future) until we have the capacity to provide transportation for ourselves. The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope. It appears that we will have wasted our current ten plus billion dollar investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded."

However Buzz Aldrin, who accompanied Armstrong to the lunar surface in 1969, has openly supported the President's move. "A near-term focus on lowering the cost of access to space and on developing key, cutting-edge technologies to take us further, faster, is just what our Nation needs to maintain its position as the leader in space exploration for the rest of this century," Aldrin wrote in February. "We need to be in this for the long haul, and this program will allow us to again be pushing the boundaries to achieve new and challenging things beyond Earth. I hope NASA will embrace this new direction as much as I do, and help us all continue to use space exploration to drive prosperity and innovation right here on Earth."

FMI: www.nasa.gov