Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan write in an op-ed in USA Today that President John F. Kennedy would be “sorely disappointed” if he knew the current state of the U.S. human spaceflight program. Today is the 50th anniversary of JFK’s “moon speech” that launched the Apollo program.

Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the Moon; Cernan was the last. Lovell commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission.

The three former astronauts argue that the entrepreneurial companies that are promising to build new crew space transportation systems may find that the systems cost much more and take longer to develop than they expect: “Entrepreneurs in the space transportation business assert that they can offer such service at a very attractive price – conveniently not factoring in the NASA-funded development costs. These expenditures, including funds to insure safety and reliability, can be expected to be substantially larger and more time consuming than the entrepreneurs predict.”

“America’s leadership in space is slipping,” they warn, adding that “NASA’s human spaceflight program is in substantial disarray with no clear-cut mission in the offing….After a half century of remarkable progress, a coherent plan for maintaining America’s leadership in space exploration is no longer apparent.”

NASA is giving up on trying to communicate with its Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Spirit. The beloved robot was last heard from on March 22, 2010.

Spirit is one of two MERs that landed on Mars in 2004. Its sister, Opportunity, continues to explore the Martian surface.

Spirit got stuck in a sand trap when one of its wheels stopped working and stranded it in a position where its solar panels could not be recharged from the Sun. Essentially it froze to death.

“With inadequate energy to run its survival heaters, the rover likely experienced colder internal temperatures last year than in any of its prior six years on Mars. Many critical components would have been susceptible to damage from the cold,” NASA said in a press release.

The mission was designed to last three months on Mars and thus vastly exceeded its design lifetime.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library chose today, the 50th anniversary of JFK’s speech to Congress that initiated the Apollo program, to finally release a 1963 tape of a meeting between the President and then NASA Administrator James Webb.

During the September 18, 1963 meeting, President Kennedy expresses reservations about the Apollo program, especially that if it was not linked to military purposes it would look like a “stunt.” He also asks what part of it would be accomplished while he was President assuming he was reelected (his second term would have ended on January 2, 1969 if he had lived and been reelected). Administrator Webb tells him that the landing on the Moon would not be accomplished by then, though a fly by would be, but something very important to the nation would be achieved during Kennedy’s presidency.

“But I will tell you what will be accomplished while we’re President and it will be one of the most important things that’s been done in this nation. A basic need to use technology for total national power. That’s going to come out of the space program more than any single thing,” says Webb.

Kennedy asks if the same thing could be accomplised less expensively using “instruments.” Webb replies no, adding later: “And I predict you are not going to be sorry, no Sir, that you did this.”

NASA announced this morning that it will hold a media teleconference at 4:30 pm EDT today to “discuss the selection of a future science mission that will usher in a new era in planetary exploration.”

Jim Green, Director of the Planetary Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, is the primary participant.

The event will be live streamed at http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio.

The Senate defeated the House-passed FY2012 budget resolution this afternoon, as expected. According to the New York Times, the vote was 40-57, with five Republicans joining Democrats to reject the plan developed by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI).

The Ryan plan has been deeply criticized primarily because of the changes it would make to Medicare. Yesterday a Democrat won a congressional district in upstate New York usually held by Republicans. It was a special election to replace a Republican Congressman who resigned amid scandal. Many commentators credit the Democratic win as backlash against the proposed Medicare changes.

Senate Democrats recently decided not to put forward their own budget proposal, but to use the House-passed version to put Republicans on record as supporting the Ryan plan or not. It is part of the political theater ongoing as Republicans and Democrats square off on how to reduce the deficit. According to the most recent reports, the two sides are about $1 trillion apart (reflecting spending over 10 years), with Republicans wanting to balance the budget by cutting government spending, and Democrats preferring to balance it by both cutting spending and raising taxes.

UPDATE: This article is updated with information from the media teleconference that was held this afternoon and adds a link to the press release. To hear a replay of the teleconference, call 800-756-2728.

NASA announced this afternoon that it will launch a sample-return mission to an asteroid in 2016 as the next in its New Frontiers series of planetary exploration spacecraft.

The mission’s ungainly name is OSIRIS-ReX for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer. In a press release, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said that the mission is a “critical step” in meeting President Obama’s objective to “extend our reach beyond low-Earth orbit.” Robotic missions will “pave the way for future human space missions,” he added.

OSIRIS-ReX will take four years to reach its destination, a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) designated 1999 RQ36. After mapping the surface of the 1,900 foot diameter asteroid to determine the best spot from which to extract samples, a robotic arm will reach out to collect two ounces of material. The sample will return to Earth in 2023 in a container similar to what was used for NASA’s Stardust mission that returned samples of a comet. It will land at Utah’s Test and Training Range and then be taken to NASA’s Johnson Space Center near Houston, TX.

The mission is expected to cost $800 million, not including launch costs. During a media teleconference this afternoon, NASA Planetary Science Division Director Jim Green said that he will not know the cost of the launch vehicle until closer to the launch date, but he anticipates that the total mission cost will be about $1 billion.

Michael Drake of the University of Arizona in Tucson is the principal investigator for the mission, which will be managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The spacecraft will be built by Lockheed Martin.

During the media teleconference, Drake said that the arm that will collect the sample has been designed by Lockheed Martin and tested already. He said that 60 grams of material is the minimim amount of sample needed for scientific studies and in all the tests at least that amount was collected. The arm, which he described as similar to a pogo stick with an elbow, will “kiss the surface” of the asteroid and most of the sample will be collected in the first second; the entire sample collection period is just 5 seconds. Animation of the mission is available on NASA’s website.

In response to questions about what was learned from the challenges encountered by Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft, Drake said that the primary lesson was that the Japanese did not allow enough time to study the asteroid once the spacecraft arrived to help ensure the sample collection succeeded. Hayabusa did return a very small amount of asteroid material, but not as much as anticipated. OSIRIS-ReX, by contrast, will spend almost a year at the asteroid and take a step-by-step approach to proximity operations. The spacecraft will repeatedly move near to the asteroid and back off. Once it is 30 meters from the surface, it will match the asteroid’s rotation rate and “once we’ve got that right” the sample will be collected.

Drake and his team are interested in this carbon-rich type of asteriod — as compared to the stony-type visited by Hayabusa — because they hope it contains organic material from the time the solar system formed. In response to a question about how he will handle contamination issues, especially since the objective is to find and return organic material, Drake said that the sample return hardware will have “witness plates” so that if contamination occurs from spacecraft outgassing, for example, at least scientsts will know what it is. He called it contamination-knowledge as compared with contamination control. The witness plates will be stored with the samples at Johnson Space Center.

NASA’s media teleconference today about its decision on the design of the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle for sending astronauts to deep space destinations in the future provided little new information.

Doug Cooke, NASA’s Associate Administration for Exploration, said that the Orion spacecraft has been deemed the best approach to building a spacecraft for human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) and there are no major changes to the contract with Lockheed Martin. Orion was originally designed for President George W. Bush’s Constellation program and work has been underway since 2006. He said that NASA had spent about $5 billion on Orion so far, but did not know how much more the program will cost or how much an individual Orion spacecraft will cost. He could provide no details on the schedule for test flights or flights with crews aboard other than agreeing with a questioner that it probably would be after 2016, the date specified in the 2010 NASA Authorization Act.

When asked why it had taken the agency so many months to make this decision to essentially continuing doing what it has been doing, Cooke said that NASA had looked at alternatives and the process took place under funding constraints resulting from the delay in NASA obtaining its FY2011 appropriations. The studies of alternatives, such as whether to use composites for the pressure vessel or a different type of abort system, were done internally, he said.

The Orion spacecraft will land in the ocean, and NASA continues to look at the pros and cons of making the entire vehicle or some of its systems reusable considering the deleterious impact of salt water on them.

Cooke did clarify that the idea of a “lifeboat” version of Orion that was announced by President Obama during his April 15, 2010 speech at Kennedy Space Center is not part of this program. That lifeboat function is associated with crews aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and this vehicle is being designed for deep space missions, he said, adding that it could be used as a backup to commercial systems for transport to or from LEO, but it would be an inefficient use of the system. Russia’s Soyuz serves as the lifeboat now, he said, and commercial vehicles will provide additional lifeboat capability in the future.

Emphasizing that decisions have yet to be made on the Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle (HLLV) that presumably would launch Orion, Cooke said that he could not provide schedule information because the schedule had to be determined in an integrated manner within available budgets. “Everyone’s interested in schedules, and so are we,” he said, but the agency is not at a point to determine them yet.

The audio of the press conference can be heard by calling 866-452-2114, or 203-369-1218 for international callers, one hour after it ended (which would be approximatelly 5:15 pm EDT). It will be available until June 7.

The House Appropriations Committee approved the top-line allocations for each of its 12 subcommittees today. These so-called “302(b) allocations,” referring to a section of the law that created this process, are based on the amounts approved by the House in the FY2012 budget resolution for various government functions.

The Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee, which includes NASA, received an allocation of $50.237 billion. That is $3.09 billion less than the subcommittee appropriated for FY2011 and $7.438 billion less than what President Obama requested for FY2012.

In addition to NASA, the subcommittee funds the Department of Commerce, of which NOAA is a part; the Department of Justice; the National Science Foundation; the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP); and several other offices and commissions. The subcommittee is scheduled to markup the CJS appropriations bill on July 7 at which time it will become clearer as to which agencies and programs have to absorb the cuts. Full committee markup is scheduled for July 13.

By contrast, the Defense subcommittee is allocated about 10 times that amount — $530.025 billion. That figure is $17 billion more than FY2011. However, it is almost $9 billion less than the President requested. The Defense subcommittee is scheduled to markup its bill on June 1, with full committee mark on June 14.

The committee approved the allocations by a vote of 27-21, with all Democrats and one Republican, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), opposing it according to the National Journal (subscription required).

The Senate has not passed a budget resolution yet, and is not expected to do so. Neither chamber passed one last year and a different method was used to determine how much the subcommittees could spend.

For more information on the budget process and the steps involved in passing legislation, see our What’s a Markup? fact sheet. The Congressional Research Service also has a handy report that provides more detail on the congressional budget process.

NASA issued a press release a few minutes ago in advance of the media teleconference announced yesterday where NASA is going to “discuss an agency decision that will define the next transportation system to carry humans into deep space.” The press release is only about the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), not the Space Launch System — or Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle — that has been so contentious.

The press release reports what has been widely known in space circles for months, that the MPCV will be based on the Orion spacecraft originally envisoned for the Constellation program. That’s not particularly newsworthy.

The press conference will be streamed live at http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio at 3:30 pm EDT. We’ll be participating, so check back here after it’s over to see if there was anything newsier.

Three members of the International Space Station (ISS) crew are on their way back home at this minute. Soyuz TMA-20 undocked from ISS and the deorbit burn was fired at 9:30 pm EDT. Landing in Kazakhstan is expected at 10:26 pm EDT.

The three returning astronauts are Russian Dmitry Kondratyev, American Cady Coleman, and Italian Paolo Nespoli.

Three other ISS crew members remain aboard the space station, and the space shuttle Endeavour remains docked there.