US plans to return to the moon by 2020 were brought back to Earth today as President Barack Obama cut funding in his 2011 budget request for the next generation spacecraft designed to carry astronauts there, according to dpa. The so-called Constellation programme of spacecraft and rockets that were a throwback to the Apollo programme of the 1960s were intended to return NASA to its glory days of manned spaceflight, but faced huge funding shortfalls and likely years of delay. Obama ordered an independent review of the manned space programme over the summer, in which a panel of aerospace experts and former astronauts concluded that the current financing of space exploration simply won't allow NASA to reach its goals. A review of all options found that no future manned exploration - whether to the moon, Mars or elsewhere - could be accomplished under the current spending plan of about 9 billion dollars per year on manned space missions. At least 3 billion dollars more per year would have been needed to take astronauts out of low-Earth orbit, where they have been confined since the 1970s. That kind of funding was unlikely in a budget focussed largely on trimming costs. Instead, the administration has proposed an additional 6 billion dollars over the next five years - or about 1.2 billion dollars a year - in a competition to encourage commercial aerospace operations to compete to transport astronauts into orbit, in a kind of space taxi service. Obama's budget still must be approved by Congress, where space- friendly lawmakers are likely to put up a fight for a programme that has already spent billions on development and is seen as important for national pride. NASA is winding down its nearly three-decade-old space shuttle programme and is set to retire the ageing space "trucks" in late 2010. Just five more flights remain, aimed at preparing the orbiting International Space Station (ISS) for life without the shuttle, the only craft large enough to transport major parts to the station. After the shuttle is retired, US astronauts will be forced to rely on Russian transport to the ISS, which is nearly complete and where scientists hope to turn the focus from construction to experimentation. The administration hopes the commercial spaceflight efforts could lessen reliance on the Russian transporters.
