Launch of NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the first robotic precursor mission under President Bush's plan for moving human space exploration beyond Earth orbit, will be delayed until after Bush leaves office.

Also delayed until late February or early March 2009 is the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), a piggyback payload added by Ames Research Center when LRO was upgraded to an Atlas V-class mission.

Launching in place of the NASA missions on an Atlas V from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., will be a classified DOD spacecraft, sources say. That mission will go in the November time frame originally targeted for LRO/LCROSS.

Project officials at Ames and at Goddard Space Flight Center, where LRO is on schedule in the final stage of integration and testing, have been notified of the change, but NASA declines to confirm the shift.

Northrop Grumman has finished testing the LCROSS spacecraft, with a science payload provided by Ames, and is storing it at its facility in Redondo Beach, Calif.

The orbiter is set to provide mapping and mineralogy data for use by future human explorers on the ground. LCROSS is designed to send the mission's spent upper stage into a deep crater at one of the moon's poles and analyze the debris plume that results from the impact for evidence of water ice that may have accumulated there.

Later the LCROSS spacecraft itself - essentially an instrumented interstage between the upper stage and LRO - will use its hydrazine propulsion system to follow the upper stage down to a second impact, which will be observed by LRO, other spacecraft and telescopes on Earth.