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  • This December 1968 file photo provided by NASA shows Earth as seen from the Apollo 8 spacecraft. The images provided by the NASA mission were the first to show the planet in its entirety. Associated Press

    Panel: NASA seems lost in space
December 5, 2012

Panel: NASA seems lost in space

Seth Borenstein Associated Press

WASHINGTON — NASA, the agency that epitomized the “Right Stuff,” seems lost in space and doesn’t have a clear sense of where it is going, an independent panel of science and engineering experts said in a stinging report Wednesday.

The one place the White House wants to send astronauts — an asteroid — doesn’t seem to be getting the engines firing at NASA, they said.

“More than two years after the president announced the interim goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025, there has been little effort to initiate such a mission,” said the report by a panel of the distinguished National Academy of Sciences.

In another withering passage, the panel said NASA’s mission and vision statements are so vague and “generic” that they “could apply to almost any government research and development agency, omitting even the words ‘aeronautics’ or ‘space.’”

The report doesn’t blame the space agency; it faults President Barack Obama, Congress and the nation for not giving NASA better direction.

The space shuttles were retired in 2011 and are now museum pieces.

Few people are paying attention to the International Space Station, and American astronauts have to rely on Russian spaceships to get there and back. Meanwhile, rocket-building is being outsourced to private companies, and a commercial venture plans to send people to the moon by the end of the decade.

Academy panel member Bob Crippen, a retired NASA manager and astronaut who piloted the first space shuttle mission, said he has never seen the space agency so adrift. He said that includes the decade between the end of the Apollo moon landings in the early 1970s and the beginning of the shuttle program.

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