Obama scraps Nasa Moon mission in favour of private 'space taxis'

The Falcon 1 rocket was created by company Space X, founded by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. It launched a satellite into orbit. Private companies such as this could take over launching astronauts into space from Nasa

Farewell Orion? The Contellation space programme looks set to be scrapped. There had been plans to use the Orion module to ferry astronauts to the ISS, like in this artist's impression

Shuttle Atlantis crew member Randolph Bresnik works on the space station. New plans call for commercial firms to resupply the station.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin is pictured on the Moon in 1969. It seems certain that Nasa's plan to return Man to the moon by 2020 will be scrapped

American dreams of putting another man on the Moon were dashed last night as President Obama announced a spending freeze to help combat a £1trillion U.S. budget deficit.

Nasa's plan to launch a series of new manned Moon missions was one of 120 government-funded programmes to be shelved.

The Constellation Project, started by former President George W Bush, was supposed to restore America's reputation as a pioneer in human exploration and anticipated landings on Mars by the middle of the century.

It envisaged new rockets and a new crewship called Orion to put astronauts on the lunar surface by 2020. Nasa had already spent $9.1 billion (£5billion) on the programme. The space agency will have to spend a further $2.5bn to close it completely.
But the White House said Constellation was too much like the 1960s Apollo mission and would require large budget increases just to get astronauts back on the moon by 2030.

The writing was on the wall for the space revival after Nasa announced last autumn that 'no plan compatible with the 2010 budget profile permitted human exploration to continue in any meaningful way'.
The Obama administration is hoping that private enterprise will step in to fund the Moon mission.

However, one congressman said the plan was a 'death march' for human space flight.

Unveiling his budget for next year, the president blamed the record debt on inheriting two costly wars and a financial crisis he was forced to combat with hundreds of billions of taxpayer cash.

Mr Obama said the U.S. must stop spending cash 'like Monopoly money' if it is going to bridge the growing budget gap.

He insisted his budget, which includes tax rises for the wealthy, will cut into the deficit over the next decade.
We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don't have consequences, as if waste doesn't matter, as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money,' he said yesterday.

'We won't be able to bring down this deficit overnight,' he added, saying the budget included boosts for education and job creation programmes.

The projected deficit amounts to almost 11 per cent of America's gross domestic product, nearly four times the annual deficit that economists generally consider sustainable.

Republican critics seized on the grim forecast. Senator Judd Gregg, who sits on the Senate Budget Committee, said the U.S. was sinking into a 'quagmire' of debt.

President Obama outlined a dramatic new mission for NASA on Monday, getting the agency out of the rocket-launching business in favor of an aggressive expansion of research and development that would steer the agency away from the launch pad and instead put its engineers in the laboratory, where they would design futuristic vehicles capable of going beyond the moon.

As expected, his budget plan would cancel NASA's Constellation program and its goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020. The troubled rocket program, crippled by funding shortfalls and technical problems, ultimately would cost taxpayers at least $11.5 billion as it is, including $2.5 billion to terminate it.

Instead of pursuing Constellation, NASA would pay for commercial rocket companies to resupply the International Space Station over the next decade while its own workers develop new engines and rockets that NASA officials hope will enable a vast expansion of its future manned-space efforts.

"Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year, people fanning out across the inner solar system, exploring the moon, asteroids and Mars nearly simultaneously in a steady stream of firsts," said NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden.

It would be a decade or more, however, before NASA again sends astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, a prospect that is certain to draw strong opposition from NASA's defenders in Congress.

One, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), called the budget a "death march" for American spaceflight.

Bolden said ending Constellation was necessary to ensure NASA had the money to spend nearly $11 billion over the next five years on new technologies, including $3.1 billion to develop heavy-lift rockets that could carry new spacecraft beyond Earth orbit.

Currently, he said, the 5-year-old Constellation program is burning through billions of dollars and falling further behind schedule. The program couldn't get American astronauts back to the moon until at least 2028, he said.

"So as much as we would not like it to be the case . . . the truth is that we were not on a path to get back to the moon's surface," Bolden said.

"And as we focused so much of our effort and funding on just getting to the moon, we were neglecting investments . . . required to go beyond."

Obama's plan calls for NASA to get $19 billion in 2011 -- about $300 million more than this year's budget -- with small annual increases after that.

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