Model of NASA's Orion spacecraft
UPDATE: Presidential panel says NASA’s manned-flight future is bleak
Orlando Sentinel
The panel said it would take at least $3 billion more per year for NASA to have a “reasonable chance” of getting to the moon or elsewhere in the solar system before 2030. And while committee members seemed to support more money, it’s not clear where, in a time of trillion-dollar-plus federal deficits, the cash would come from.
Ultimately, the panel agreed on four broad options, which it will present to White House budget officials tomorrow. They include:
- Pressing ahead with the Constellation program as quickly as funding allows;
- extending the life of the space station until 2020 and using commercial rockets to get there while working on future exploration rockets;
- flying the shuttle until as late as 2015 while working on a shuttle-variation design that could get to the moon; and
- developing a new large rocket to explore the solar system.
However, the panel acknowledged that none of those options would extend flights beyond the space station in the next decade without more money.
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