Human spaceflight program needs additional $30 billion, panel finds: Augustine committee recommends two exploration plans.

NASA's program to send astronauts back to the moon and on to Mars won't get off the ground unless the federal budget for human spaceflight is ramped up by $30 billion over the next 10 years. That's one of the conclusions of a panel commissioned by President Obama to review U.S. human spaceflight activities. The White House released an executive summary of the committee's report on September 8.

Critics have charged that the initiative to send astronauts back to the moon, a plan which President George W. Bush began five years ago, has never had sufficient funding. The independent panel, headed by Norman Augustine, retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp., now agrees, saying that without more money human exploration can't continue in "any meaningful way."

Alan Stern, who stepped down last year as NASA's associate administrator for science, says, "The frankness of this report was refreshing."

Over the next 10 years, NASA plans to spend about $108 billion to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020. The committee says an additional $30 billion is needed over that time frame. That increase would allow one of two possible exploration programs recommended by the panel. The first would adhere to the path outlined by President Bush, to explore exclusively the moon in preparation for landing on Mars. The second possibility would be for astronauts to visit sites in space other than the moon before going to Mars.

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The idea that we could circumnavigate Mars for an additional $30 billion is "enticing" and harks back to human spaceflight strategies first proposed in the 1990s--but for a cheaper sticker price, says Howard McCurdy, a public policy expert at American University in Washington, D.C.

Currently, NASA relies on its fleet of space shuttles to send astronauts into space. However, to save money, NASA plans to retire the fleet at the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011. A small crew exploration vehicle is in development.

With the consultation of independent experts, the committee finds that such a crew vehicle won't be ready to take people into space for at least seven years after the shuttles are retired. That's two years more than NASA had estimated.

"There has not been this long a gap in U.S. human launch capability since the U.S. human space program began," the committee notes in its summary. "The only way to significantly close the gap is to extend the life of the shuttle program" beyond 2010, the committee writes.