Panel: No moon or beyond for NASA without new funds (click here)
...After a summer of public meetings and deliberations, the committee, led by former Lockheed Martin chairman Norman Augustine, also endorsed the international space station but offered less support for NASA's Constellation program to develop its next generation of rockets....
...The panel's review found a serious gap between the goals outlined by President George W. Bush in 2004 — to return to the moon by 2020 and eventually send humans to Mars — and the amount of money provided for the task.
And far from finding a way to shorten the gap in America's ability to launch astronauts beyond orbit, the panel said a more realistic time frame is probably seven years, at least.
“The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory,” the panel wrote in its summary report, submitted to the White House and NASA on Tuesday. “It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.”
The panel found that, without $3 billion more annually beginning in next year's budget, NASA would be able to do little more than fly the shuttle through early 2011, extend the nearly completed international space station's lifetime through 2020 and begin planning a heavy-lift rocket that could blast humans and the equipment they would need to the moon....
...Discovery and its crew undocked today (click here) (Tuesday) from the space station, in preparation for their return to Earth Thursday evening. In the meantime, they will be flying more or less in tandem with the station....
