NASA's moon mission to fade with President Obama's budget

BEIJING, Feb. 1 (Xinhuanet) -- NASA's grand plan to return to the moon is about to vanish with hardly a whimper with the release Monday of President Obama's budget request.

The budget numbers will show that the administration effectively plans to kill the Constellation program that called for a return to the moon by 2020. The budget is also a death knell for the Ares 1 rocket, NASA's planned successor to the space shuttle. The agency has spent billions developing the rocket, which is still years from its first scheduled crew flight.

Obama's budget, according to a background briefing by an administration official on Sunday, will call for spending 6 billion dollars over five years to develop a commercial spacecraft that could taxi astronauts low earth orbit.

Going commercial with a human crew would represent a dramatic change in the way NASA does business. Instead of NASA owning the spacecraft and overseeing every nut and bolt of its design and construction, a private company would design and build the spacecraft with NASA looking over its shoulder.

The administration believes the new funding for the commercial program would create up to 1,700 jobs, which could help offset the expected loss of 7,000 jobs in Florida when the space shuttle is retired next year.

Although the Obama budget gives NASA a boost of more than a billion a year, it's not nearly as large an increase as the 3 billion dollars a year that a president-appointed panel said last year would be necessary for NASA to pursue a worthwhile human space flight program.

The panel favored a new strategy for NASA in which returning to the moon would be just one possible element of a broader capacity to launch astronauts beyond low earth orbit. No human beings have ventured farther than low earth orbit since the last Apollo moon landing in 1972.