Chile Miners: NASA to the Rescue

Oct. 14, 2010— -- The vastness of space is very different from the claustrophobic darkness of a Chilean mine. But when 33 men became trapped in the earth, Chile's government asked for help from NASA, an organization whose specialty is leaving the earth.

The Chile experience has been a ray of light for NASA, whose people may feel they sometimes are trapped in darkness themselves. While the agency has expertise that helped in the mining drama -- for instance, how to take care of people in confined places (like astronauts) -- its primary mission (where to send those astronauts next) has been muddled, the subject of acrimonious debate between the Obama administration and members of Congress.

The space agency provided Chile with two doctors, a psychologist and a team of engineers who provided advice on how to design the miners' escape capsule -- the cramped tube, nicknamed "Phoenix," that was used to pull the men, one by one, from the ground.

Clinton Cragg, a former Navy submarine commander who now heads a NASA troubleshooting team, went to the mine site, returned to NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, and assembled a team to draw up safety guidelines for Phoenix.

"You try to think of everything you can think of that can go wrong, and you try to put something in the design to mitigate or deal with that," he said in an interview with ABC News.

"There's been a certain amount of incredulity: Why would NASA be involved in a mine accident?" said Roger Launius, the agency's former chief historian, who now is a senior curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. "But as an agency with broad experience, it makes sense that they'd be asked to help out."

Experts say NASA can be very, very effective when its mission is clear. It sent astronauts to the moon only eight years after John F. Kennedy ordered them to try. Its robotic probes have explored the planets.

But since the glory days of Apollo, the space program has struggled to find clear goals for its astronauts. Their future has been hotly debated this year -- one reason a success in Chile has been so welcome.

After the space shuttle Columbia and its crew were lost in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered that NASA end the shuttle program by 2010 and start a new one, called Constellation, to send astronauts back to the moon and eventually on to Mars.

The Obama administration now has canceled Constellation, which was running behind and over budget.

In a compromise signed just this week, it agreed with Congress to mount an expedition to a passing asteroid in the 2020s, and perhaps go to Mars after that.