Ten years after astronauts first moved into the International Space Station (ISS), they finally installed a picture window on the ISS. The window is the largest of its kind installed as part of the shuttle Endeavor’s recent ISS mission. With four more shuttle flights to go before the fleet retires, what are Nasa’s plans for the future? This future may be shaped by a string of recent decisions by the US government on Nasa’s space shuttle alternative?

The Obama administration, in a recent proposal, made sweeping changes to Nasa’s future space flight programme while increasing the agency's overall budget. Obama’s plan is to currently cancel the Constellation programme, the fleet of rockets and hardware being developed to replace the aging space shuttle programme. Under the new proposal, the Obama administration would instead want to call on commercial vendors to fly astronauts to orbit. Speaking on a teleconference, Nasa deputy administrator Lori Garver said: “We’re certainly not canceling our ambitions to explore space.”

“We’re canceling Constell­ation,” he added. Garver highlighted the importance of the new approach by calling Constellation’s stated goal of a moon landing in 2020 “wishful thinking.” By stepping back from that unrealistic timeline, she said, the US would be free to undertake more ambitious exploration. “We had lost the moon,” Garver said, “and what this programme does is give us back the solar system.”

Nasa administrator Charles Bolden expressed support for the new budget request, saying that he was “excited” to present the president's proposal, which would add an extra $6 billion to Nasa's total outlay over the next five years. Bolden said he and Obama agreed that Constellation was in an untenable position. “The truth is, we were not on a sustainable path to get back to the moon’s surface,” Bolden said. He applauded the decision to delegate the development of launch capabilities to commercial providers while, he said, “Nasa firmly focuses its gaze on the cosmic horizons beyond earth.”

Starting in 2005, the US government and Nasa have spent close to $9 billion developing the Constellation programme’s Ares rockets and the Orion crew capsule. These were originally supposed to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. The thought process behind Constellation came about after the 2003 Columbia disaster. The Constellation programme would have in turn provided a safer, longer-range successor to the space shuttle, which is slated for retirement ahead this year.

But Constellation’s costs have increased and its timeline has badly slipped. An independent panel convened by the Obama administration and chaired by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine estimated last year that the Ares rocket system would not be ready for manned missions before 2017, with a lunar return sometime in the mid-2020s, even under the most favourable circumstances. By scrapping the troubled programme, along with its focus on a moon landing, and leaning on the private sector, the agency thinks it will actually accelerate efforts to lift astronauts beyond low earth orbit, the farthest reach of the shuttle.

Sally Ride, the first US woman in space and a member of the Augustine commission, which cast Constellation’s future in a fairly unflattering light, called Obama’s budget request "a significant vote of confidence for Nasa.” The proposal, Ride added, “puts Nasa on a sustainable path towards the future.”

The main concern with using technologies from commercial vendors is a question of safety and standardisation. Bolden, also a former astronaut, vowed that harnessing the commercial space flight companies for manned launches would not diminish Nasa’s commitment to safety and standards. Bolden spoke of losing friends in both the Challenger and Columbia accidents on safety accounts, the latter of which occurred exactly seven years to the day before the Obama government’s decision. “No one cares more about safety than I,” Bolden said. “I give you my word that these vehicles will be safe.”

The writer is doctoral candidate, Carnegie Mellon University, USA and Knowledge Editor, Financial Chronicle