No money for Mars, Obama's space panel says (News Feature)

By Anne K Walters Aug 13, 2009, 1:12 GMT

Washington - Humans can forget about returning to the moon or travelling on to Mars unless more money than is currently planned for is spent, an independent panel reviewing the US human space flight programme said Wednesday.

The panel created by President Barack Obama is tasked with reexamining all aspects of manned spaceflight, including the planned retirement of the space shuttle next year and plans to return humans to the moon by 2020.

The 11-member panel of former astronauts and aerospace experts will meet with White House officials and NASA policymakers on Friday and write its report by the end of the month.

The report will not offer firm recommendations, but instead outline a number of options that address when to phase out the ageing space shuttles, what to do with the International Space Station (ISS), how to get the next generation spacecraft into orbit, how to get astronauts into low Earth orbit and where humans should travel next in space.

But a review of all options found that no future exploration - whether to the moon, Mars or elsewhere - could be accomplished under the current spending plan of about 9 billion dollars per year on exploration. At least 3 billion dollars more per year is needed to meet current goals, former astronaut and committee member Sally Ride said in a presentation on the costs.

'If Santa Claus brought us this programme tomorrow, our next step would have to be to cancel it,' said Jeff Greason, a committee member and CEO of XCOR Aerospace.

Former Lockheed CEO Norman Augustine, who is the panel's chairman, told reporters he was surprised that no options would fit within the current budget.

'One of the things that's troubled NASA the most in recent years is having objectives that they don't have the resources to match and we don't want to contribute to that, so we're telling it like it is,' he said.

But the panel doesn't want to give up on eventual plans to send humans to Mars. In discussions at their last public meeting on Wednesday, the members made clear that it should be the ultimate goal of all human spaceflight.

But they ruled out heading straight there, opting instead to tell policymakers to either establish a base on the moon as a jumping off point to Mars, as is currently planned, or instead to turn NASA's attention towards exploring elsewhere in deep space, with stops on a nearby asteroid or other object, views of the sun and flybys of Mars before eventually stopping on the moon and then Mars.

The panel also wants NASA to extend the life of the space shuttle programme until at least 2011 to prevent the remaining construction flights to the ISS from being rushed.

Current plans call for the retirement of the shuttle by the end of next year, leaving astronauts reliant on Russian Soyuz craft for transport to the ISS and the scrapping of the station itself in 2016.

Alternately, the shuttle could continue to fly through 2015, albeit on a much reduced schedule.

The panel also wants to focus on development of commercial vehicles to transport astronauts to the ISS. Most of the options they are proposing include extending the station's mission until at least 2020.