ScienceInsider

by Andrew Lawler

NASA should consider extending space shuttle launches into 2011 rather than ending the program next fall, flying the international space station at least until 2020, and boosting spending on its flagging technology programs. That’s the verdict of a blue-ribbon panel which today released its full report on the future of the U.S. human space flight effort.

The panel, chaired by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, released its summary conclusions 7 September, but the full detail backing up that document is now available.

At a 1p.m. press briefing at Washington, D.C.’s National Press Club, panel members suggested that NASA’s replacement for the space shuttle may be the wrong ship going to the wrong destination. Instead of moving ahead with a government-built Ares-1 rocket with a capsule on top called the Orion, Augustine and Edward Crawley, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer and panel member, said that NASA instead might rope in private industry for a joint effort to build a less ambitious vehicle that could be ready by 2016—rather than 2017 or later than Ares is likely to fly. That cheaper rocket could take astronauts to the space station well before its demise, which now is slated for 2016.

by Richard A. Kerr

Before being arrested Monday and charged with trying to sell classified information to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli intelligence agent, planetary physicist Stewart Nozette was on a mission. Fifteen years earlier, he had gotten a whiff of ice hidden in the unbearably cold shadows of polar craters on the moon. Today, he heads one instrument team and co-leads another probing for lunar ice. Early signs of ice were promising.

by Jeffrey Mervis

President Barack Obama spent time yesterday looking at the stars—both real and those in the scientific firmament.

In a formal ceremony in the East Room of the White House, the president honored this year's winners of the National Medal of Science and National Medal of Technology. A few hours later he stepped outside into the clean, crisp evening and, dressed more casually, invited some 200 middle school students to join him to look through a sea of telescopes assembled on the White House lawn.

by Richard A. Kerr

Just days after expressing “great confidence” that they had found the best possible target for next week’s planned crash into the moon, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission team has retreated from its first choice. Yesterday, NASA quietly posted the targeting switch from crater Cabeus A to nearby Cabeus proper.

The goal of crashing LCROSS’s spent upper stage is to kick up any subsurface water ice into the view of the trailing LCROSS spacecraft. (The mission is only distantly connected to last week's much ballyhooed finding of molecular water on the lunar surface.) But continuing analysis of remote sensing from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was pointing to stronger signs of subsurface hydrogen—presumably in the form of water—in the permanent shadow inside Cabeus than in similarly cold shadow in Cabeus A, according to the NASA statement. At the same time, topographical observations from the orbiter and the Japanese orbiter Kaguya were showing that ground-based astronomers could after all glimpse impact ejecta through a gap in the high rim of Cabeus. Impact still will be as planned at 7:30 a.m. EDT on 9 October.

In a response to lawsuits by environmental groups, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will review a controversial decision on ozone pollution limits made in March 2008 and propose a new standard by December.

Conservation and animal welfare groups asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries to expand the protected habitat for the 400 or so remaining North Atlantic right whales to include more of their nursing grounds in the Gulf of Maine to their calving grounds off Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.

The advocacy group Oceana expects that the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council will approve a plan to ban destructive bottom-trawling in almost 60,000 square kilometers of deep-sea coral from North Carolina to Florida.

Norman Augustine got an earful on Capitol Hill yesterday from members of the House of Representatives who were unhappy with his commission's recommendations over how the United States should invest in space flight. Today, he faced Senators in what appeared to be a less contentious afternoon hearing.

(Picture Michaël CATANZARITI)

by Jeffrey Mervis

Delivering its summary report yesterday to the White House and NASA, the Augustine commission surprised no one by declaring that the U.S. human spaceflight program is "on an unsustainable trajectory." But while its call for a bigger agency budget, its qualms about going to Mars, and its support for commercial involvement received most of the media attention, the report also flags an issue largely neglected during its 2 months of hearings.

That issue is international collaboration, and it's an obvious way to tackle both the budget shortfall and the need to tap what is increasingly a multinational enterprise. "If the United States is willing to lead a global program of exploration, sharing both the burden and benefit of space exploration in a meaningful way, significant benefits could follow," declares the 12-page summary. Working with partners abroad is likely to get more attention when the commission's chairman, Norman Augustine, and the NASA administrator testify next Tuesday before the House of Representatives science committee.

The blue-ribbon panel reviewing NASA's human space flight program says it will give the White House a written summary of its findings on Tuesday, 8 September.

The panel, chaired by Norman Augustine, a retired aerospace executive, began meeting in June and held several public sessions. Last month, it briefed Obama Administration officials on various alternative directions for NASA's human efforts in a post-space shuttle world. Its final report was expected to be completed by the end of August, but the group is still writing up its detailed results.

—Andrew Lawler

A spokesperson for the Office of Science and Technology Policy said today that the White House has not received a report from the panel reviewing NASA's plans for human space flight (the so-called Augustine commission). The panel has until mid-October, according to its instructions from the NASA Administrator, but members had talked about submitting their report earlier.

—Jeffrey Mervis

See an update to this item here.

The much-ballyhooed report on the future of the U.S. human space program was submitted today to the White House. Or so rumor has it. The so-called Augustine report is the latest in a series of analyses of pressing issues affecting the research community—scientific integrity and biosecurity being the others—that the Obama Administration has chosen to keep under wraps. The pattern of asking experts to study an issue and then not disclosing their recommendations seems at odds with the repeated promises of President Barack Obama to maintain a culture of openness in government.

NEW DELHI—India’s maiden moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, has come to a shuddering and unexpected halt. On 29 August, the Indian Space Research Organization lost all contact with the spacecraft after a catastrophic failure of its electronics, said ISRO Chair G. Madhavan Nair.