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Numbers see no hope of sending humans past space station until at least 2030.

WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama named a panel to review NASA’s manned space program, his aides said privately they were hoping the group would recommend scrapping NASA’s troubled Ares I rocket program and finding another, cheaper way to get humans back to the moon.
But the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee came to a troubling conclusion this week: NASA’s current budget offers no hope of sending humans past the international space station for 20 years or more.
And that confronts the administration with an enormous dilemma: how, in an era of trillion-dollar deficits, to find money to reinvigorate human space exploration and avoid pulling the plug on a program that just celebrated the 40th anniversary of its first lunar landing.
“The public was promised a Cadillac, or at least a Buick,” said one administration science official not authorized to speak for the White House. “There is some concern that we could end up with an Edsel.”
Shaping the future of America’s space program began Friday, when members of the committee presented their preliminary findings to NASA chief Charlie Bolden and White House officials. Initial reports indicated the group agreed to retire the space shuttle in 2011, extend the space station until 2020 and use more commercial rockets. They also liked the idea of exploring deep space — rather than landing on the moon.
On Wednesday, the panel said Constellation, NASA’s current back-to-the-moon program, is running $50 billion over the current budget through 2020. But the alternatives presented Friday are almost as expensive, requiring $20 billion to $30 billion more than the current budget through 2020.
The outcome was not entirely unexpected.
Even before Obama took office, officials had serious doubts about Constellation, particularly its Ares I rocket, which is expected to shake violently as it climbs through the atmosphere.
They especially questioned a rocket designed in part to take crew to the space station that wouldn’t be ready until 2015 — the same year the complex was supposed to be abandoned.
“I might not have a technical background, but I can read budget and schedule charts, and I can tell you that there are things that don’t make sense,” Alan Ladwig, now a presidentially appointed policy adviser at NASA, told Florida space boosters last December.
But Obama officials were reluctant to kill the Constellation program by decree. They preferred that an independent panel come to what they saw as the only logical conclusion: that Ares I was, as one put it, “infeasible.”
But they didn’t expect that NASA’s budget would leave no room for another rocket capable of flying beyond the space station.