President Obama is set to announce his 2011 budget on Monday, February 1, and reports accross the Web suggest it won't be good news for NASA.

According to CBS News and the Los Angeles Times, sources in the White House have said that the president's budget will not allocate the money needed for NASA to return humans to the moon as outlined in the agency's Constellation program.

Instead, according to these unnamed insiders, the White House wants to concentrate on Earth-science projects like climate change research and the development of new technology--possibly a heavy-lift rocket--that could someday enable human exploration of asteroids and the inner solar system. Reportedly, the White House also wants to invest money in commercial companies for spacecraft that can ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, which is expected to remain in Orbit until at least 2020.

Many of these ideas were raised in final report of the Augustine Panel, a committee commissioned to review NASA's Constellation program. The panel's report suggested that the White House should abandon the development of Ares I, NASA's next rocket to carry crew, and should rely instead on the commercial sector. It also outlined plans that would skip the moon, and send robotic missions to Mars or Lagrange points.

The Augustine Panel said that an additional $3 billion a year was required for a "worthy" human spaceflight program. There is speculation that NASA will get less than $1 billion. However, the Obama administration still has to get its budget through Congress, and it could face opposition there.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting that NASA is preparing a technical evaluation of its human spaceflight program, which would "survey all the available rockets and spacecraft, consider different strategies for reaching future destinations and recommend a framework on how to proceed." But the study will not be conducted until NASA's budget has been determined.

According to the NYT, the administration might also turn to other nations to aid in space exploration, perhaps giving the European Space Agency the job of building a lunar lander. Michael Griffin, former NASA administrator, told the NYT that would be a mistake. "I can't imagine the situation where the United States doesn't want to have end-to-end capability to reach the lunar surface," he said.

In the next couple weeks the Obama administration will make a decision on the future of U.S. human spaceflight. Now, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), an independent panel that has been evaluating NASA's safety performance and advising the agency since 1968, has published its annual report, which questions the safety of using commercial launch vehicles to put astronauts in space.

In 2009, an independent committee, the Augustine Panel, was commissioned to review the current U.S. human spaceflight program and to provide recommendations to the administration. The panel's final report implied that NASA should abandon its new rocket, Ares I, which is being built to ferry astronauts into orbit after the space shuttles retire. Instead, the panel said NASA should rely on the commercial sector to carry both crew and cargo into low Earth orbit.

ASAP states that NASA's program for the development of commercial systems, called Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), is absent of a human-rating process. So far, the agency has only awarded contracts to two companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, for the development of systems to carry cargo. ASAP is also concerned about NASA's lack of assessing the safety of these systems.

According to the ASAP report, "switching from a well-designed, safety-optimized system to commercially-developed vehicles based on nothing more than unsubstantiated claims would seem a poor choice. Before any change is made to another architecture, the inherent safety of that approach must be assessed to ensure that it offers a level of safety equal to or greater than the program of record."

Ares I-X lift off. Credit: NASA

After a drama-filled wait, NASA's new rocket finally took to the sky this morning. The rocket, called Ares I-X, launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, its mission to gather critical data for the agency's next line of moon-bound rockets.

The event marked the first time that a new vehicle has launched from the complex in 30 years and the first test flight since the Apollo missions. The historic flight was spectacular, despite the vehicles uncertain future. A recent report from an independent committee reviewing NASA's future plans for human exploration did not favor the development of Ares I.

Ares I-X is a prototype rocket composed of real and simulated systems and includes over 700 onboard sensors designed to gather data on vibrations, temperatures, acoustics, loads, pressure, and more.

The maiden flight lasted a mere two minutes, during which time the rocket traveled through the toughest parts of the atmosphere where a launch vehicle is most vulnerable to failures. At an altitude of 45 kilometers the rocket's two stages separated. The first stage, composed of four solid rocket boosters and a dummy fifth, will be recovered-- these boosters used a set of large parachutes to drop into the Atlantic Ocean. The mock second stage broke apart and will not be recovered.

Bob Ess, Ares I-X mission manager told Space.com that the test flight gathered huge amounts of data. "It's reams and reams of data that will take at best months to go through and understand."

The teams plan to release periodic reports over the next three months to share the results of the fact-finding test flight. "We'll come back and tell the agency and the public what we learned," Ess said.

Credit: NASA