Houston, we have a cashflow problem: return to the moon in doubt

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Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon, 20 July 1969. Photograph: Neil Armstrong/NASA/Corbis

Nasa's plans to land astronauts back on the moon by 2020 are about to disappear into a giant black hole, according to a panel of space experts appointed by Barack Obama.

Less than a month after the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's first lunar landing, the group will tell White House advisers today that the space agency simply does not have enough money to do it again.

Without a significant increase in funding – unlikely with the federal deficit approaching $1.3tn – Nasa will almost certainly have to scrap the next-generation Ares I rocket that has already cost more than $9bn to develop.

The longer-term part of the agency's $81bn Constellation project – to land humans on Mars by the middle of the century, touted by George Bush in his 2004 vision for space exploration – will remain in the realms of science fiction, at least for now.

"This is a big surprise," said Edward Ellegood, a space policy analyst at Florida's Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. "Up until this point Nasa, privately at least, was confident that Constellation was a little behind schedule but on track. Now this changes everything. That it no longer fits within the budget is disturbing."

The pessimistic outlook for America's manned spaceflight programme comes from a panel of experts and former astronauts led by the retired Lockheed Martin chairman Norman Augustine and appointed by Obama to analyse Nasa's spending and operations. The group has come up with broad-based scenarios for the future direction of the agency in a report to be published next week and outlined to presidential staff at a briefing in Washington today. Among the options are to extend the working life of the ageing space shuttle fleet beyond next year's scheduled retirement until 2015, while developing a cheaper transport to the moon; pressing ahead with Constellation as quickly as existing funding allows; or creating a new, larger rocket that would allow exploration of the solar system while bypassing the moon.

None of the options meet Nasa's stated goal of returning to the moon by the end of the next decade, or even leaving lower Earth orbit for at least another two decades, because the space agencies existing annual budget of about $18bn is spread too thinly, the panel says.

Nasa is committed to seven final shuttle missions by next summer, maintaining the international space station until at least 2016, developing Ares and myriad unmanned scientific projects.

"It will be difficult with the current budget to do anything that's terribly inspiring in the human spaceflight area," Augustine said.

Nasa's budgetary woes are also hampering efforts to keep an eye on asteroids that might travel too close to Earth. The agency needs about $300m to expand a network of telescopes and meet the government's target of identifying, by 2020, at least 90% of the giant space rocks that pose a threat to Earth. Congress has not come up with the money and is unlikely to, according to the National Academy of Science.

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