The ending of manned space flights by NASA could signal that the United States no longer seeks to lead the world in pushing past technological boundaries, said a former astronaut.

Dunbar

Bonnie Dunbar, a veteran of five space shuttle flights, on Friday visited Medtronic’s Spinal and Biologics world headquarters in Memphis, where she spoke to an employee group called Women Aspiring with a Vision for Excellence (WAVE).

The new century brings new challenges, she told The Daily News.

“This is not the century of just us and the Soviet Union,” Dunbar said. “You have many nations who are launching their own satellites. We now have three nations who have launched humans – China being the third one, (and) India getting ready to do so and Europe (is) talking about it.”

Only four shuttle missions remain in operation. President Obama has proposed turning over space exploration to commercial companies and plans to reveal more about his plans for NASA at an April 15 conference in Florida.

The president has received criticism for his proposed NASA budget for 2011, which halts manned space flights. Last week, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, introduced legislation that would increase the space agency’s budget by $1.3 billion and postpone the halt of manned space flights.

“It is the responsibility of decision-makers to determine can the U.S. have a continuous presence in space?” Dunbar said. “Is the private sector well enough along in their development and in their risk mitigation to take on that role? But I still don’t think you want to let go of the government role in exploration.

“That means you’ve got to have a continuous program going on. Once you stop it, you can’t start it in five years. You lose those people. You lose that momentum.”

The U.S. funds NASA on a year-by-year basis, which makes it difficult to define and pursue identified goals.

“The vision is multiyear,” Dunbar said. “The problem is that the budgets are not. I think it is important if you are going to maintain leadership and have

long-term investments, that you go back to the model that was used by President Kennedy, which was to get to the moon within a decade. We did it in less than 10 years, but there were resources there to do it and we had realistic building budgets, not flat-year budgets.”

However, Americans should not expect every NASA endeavor to have automatic success, because failure is part of the process with scientific research, she said.

Sheryl Shaw, who heads the WAVE group at Medtronic, and Anne Abbadessa, a design quality engineer, helped organize Dunbar’s visit. Dunbar came at the invitation of SWEnet, the professional network of Society of Women Engineers who work at Medtronic.

Besides being an astronaut, Dunbar has an undergraduate degree in ceramic engineering and a doctorate in mechanical/biomedical engineering.

One of Medtronic’s products, the LIFEPAK 1000 defibrillator, has been deployed on space flights for use in case an astronaut has a heart attack on board. The device is manufactured by a Medtronic subsidiary in Redmond, Wash.

Other devices have been born from manned space flights, Dunbar said.

“You want to stay ahead,” she said. “The technologies you build for putting people into space have given us remote sensing satellites. They have given us communication satellites. They have given us technology that this company uses.

“For example, we put electrodes on astronauts, but we didn’t have the remote sensing capabilities, so we had to build it as part of the space program. It is now used in fetal monitoring. That kind of investment across the board has benefitted all of us, and we can’t afford to interrupt that.”