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.

Last week the panel charged with reviewing the future of U.S. human spaceflight went before Congress to discuss its summary report (which we covered here).

The Augustine panel took quite a bit of heat from the House Committee on Science and Technology, which was dismayed that the panel had not been more specific in its recommendations. Some chair members were also disgruntled that the panel had provided alternative options to NASA's current exploration plan even though it did not find any evidence of mismanagement or technical problems.

It's clear from the panel's report that NASA needs more money if it is to send humans to other bodies in the solar system--even if the agency uses the commercial sector--and that the Obama administration has some hefty decisions to make on the future of U.S. space exploration in the coming weeks.

The Space Review's editor and publisher, Jeff Foust, has written a nice article here analyzing the one question that needs to be answered for NASA to receive its desired funding (an additional $3 billion per year): Why should the U.S. have a human spaceflight program at all?

The "real reason why we continue to do civil human spaceflight," says Foust, is "because we have for nearly 50 years, starting with that incredible surge in the 1960s when we raced the Soviet Union to the Moon and won."

Foust continues:

If we were to stop doing it, the reasoning goes, we would look weak and lose prestige, regardless of what else we decided to do in space or elsewhere instead of human spaceflight. It's not an exciting argument to starry-eyed space enthusiasts who dream of going to the Moon and beyond, but it does explain a great many things.

In addition, Foust argues that the benefits of "the frontier"--traveling into the solar system--need to be brought back to the people so that civilians understand the value of space travel.

While Foust says it may be too late in the near term for a compelling argument for human spaceflight to be made to the public so that NASA can get the $3 billion (the administration does have more pressing issues like healthcare to deal with), there is hope for the future, assuming the administration gives NASA just enough to sustain its current program.

He concludes:

If NASA's human spaceflight program is to survive, and thrive, its supporters would do well to take that message to heart: to better explain to the public, the White House, and Congress how it is aligned with national interests and provides "better value" (another phrase from [NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver's] speech [at AIAA Space 2009]). To do so may require a shift from the tired old reasons of the past to new ones that put the space agency at the heart of a new mission to open up human spaceflight to a wider range of applications and a greater degree of relevance and importance to all.

A three-week-old mouse weighing about 10 grams is being levitated by magnetic fields, either with a magnet (a) or without (b). Credit: Da-Ming Zhu et al.

NASA engineers have built a device that can suspend mice in the air for hours. The purpose is to understand how zero gravity affects the bone density and muscle mass of astronauts.

The levitation device, built by Yuanming Liu and colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, uses a magnetic field that distorts the movement of electrons in water molecules to let the mice float.

According to New Scientist:

[The researchers] used a purpose-built levitation device containing a coil of wire, or solenoid, cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero so that it became superconducting. Running a current through the solenoid creates a magnetic field of 17 teslas, ten thousand times as strong as a typical fridge magnet and 10 million times that of the Earth.

The researchers have shown previously that the device can levitate water-based items for hours, but were skeptical that it would be able to make a mouse, weighing10-grams, float for long periods of time. Yet, they were able to "fly" the mouse for hours, allowing it to roam freely, and giving it food and water.

The experiment is a significant step to study bone and muscle loss, and even changes in blood flow in zero gravity, which is a common problem for astronauts when they return for space missions or extended stays on the space station. Engineers have built exercise equipment to combat the losses, which can result in long-term health issues, but there has been limited ways to actually study zero-gravity effects on humans on Earth.