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Above: NASA’s recently-deceased Constellation rocket

The atmosphere surrounding last night’s 10th annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate was a bit heavier than usual. “The Moon, Mars and Beyond: Where Next for the Manned Space Program?” the topic chosen by the directors of the American Museum of Natural History, was announced just before the Obama administration released its controversial NASA budget, which for now cuts out the possibility of an American-led return to the moon (or Mars) in the near future. “What was originally just going to be us putting out opinions now turns out to have huge implications,” museum director Neil deGrasse Tyson told a sold-out audience at the start. (deGrasse Tyson recently shared with Motherboard his own less-than-stellar assessment of America’s new space direction).

Julia Galef reports on the debate at Science:

‘Although moon and Mars missions are often discussed as if they were mutually exclusive alternatives, general consensus among the scientists on the panel was that even if putting a human on Mars were the paramount long-term goal, returning humans to the moon would still be a critical step toward that end. "The moon is a good place to test out the technology for a Mars mission, like life-support systems and transport vehicles. … I think that casting it in terms of ’Do we go to the moon first or go to Mars?’ is not the right question," Steven Squyres, principal investigator on the Mars Exploration Rover project, said after the debate.

Instead, the broader question to which the panelists kept returning was not simply which destination NASA should target first but what will happen if NASA has no clear destination at all.

With the Constellation project scrapped and no concrete timeline set for a crewed Mars mission, Mars Society founder and president Robert Zubrin warned that NASA could get stuck in what he called “technology-driven mode,” pursuing pet projects with no clear purpose. “The only way NASA ever develops useful technology is with a goal in mind,” Zubrin said, citing the example of the Apollo missions. By contrast, he said, operating in technology-driven mode is akin to accumulating individual spare house parts because they strike one’s fancy and then hiring an architect to build a house using the entire eclectic collection.

Having a destination to strive for is also an important end in and of itself, panelists said. When the Bush Administration decided to include the crewed moon mission as one of NASA’s primary objectives, the goal was to inspire excitement and innovation, said Lester Lyles, a retired U.S. Air Force general who served on NASA’s Augustine Commission last year, which was arranged to offer advice on the space program to Obama. “The destination almost didn’t matter,” he noted. Similarly, Zubrin argued, a Mars mission could inspire a million more schoolchildren to go into the sciences. “There’s a number of technical benefits NASA likes to cite from Apollo, some of which are actually true. But the real benefit of the Apollo programs was in intellectual capital,” he said. “Youth love adventure.”

Although the 2011 budget does advocate a crewed Mars mission as a future goal for NASA, the lack of a specific timetable could render the plan ineffective. “One of the great successes of Apollo is that it happened quickly,” said Kenneth Ford, chair of the NASA Advisory Council and founder and CEO of the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition. “Saying we’re going to the moon in 2030 is less inspiring than going there soon.” A surprise guest weighed in on the issue toward the end of the evening, when Tyson revealed that astronaut Buzz Aldrin had been listening to the entire debate remotely and wanted to comment via phone. Laying out his vision for the space program, Aldrin added a vote in favor of timeliness: “I think we need to consider the attention span of the public as well as the term limits of congressmen,” he said.’