The outside panel examining NASA's human spaceflight plans has heard analysis suggesting the U.S. could be out of the human-spaceflight game until 2019, a nine-year gap after the shuttle retires at the end of next year.

That is based on NASA's current plan and budget profile, says Gary Pulliam, Aerospace Corp. vice president for civil and commercial operations, who presented the findings at an Augustine panel hearing last week in Huntsville, Ala.

"When you look back in history, and you look at the inception of the Constellation Program, it was doable," Pulliam said. "It was within what we see as historical bounds ... But things happen. Budgets begin to get reduced, and that has a dramatic effect." The Aerospace Corp.'s intensive three-week analysis for the Augustine panel's launch vehicle subcommittee evaluated the near-term Constellation vehicles - the Ares I crew launch vehicle and the Orion crew capsule it will carry - and several alternatives that might be able to get U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station in a comparable time.

Ares I carries an initial operational capability (IOC) of March 2015 at NASA. But Pulliam said Aerospace Corp. evaluators believe budget cuts alone would add another year and a half to that date. Technical issues would add another two years on top of that, and a proposal to continue operating the International Space Station (ISS) for five years beyond its planned 2016 deorbit could stretch the gap by six more months.

"Not all of these things have to happen," Pulliam says. "The committee can be influential in helping NASA restore some of that budget."

Closing the gap isn't the only assignment President Barack Obama gave Augustine. The panel must also recommend options for flying out the shuttle and continuing to operate the International Space Station beyond its scheduled deorbit in 2016. A panel headed by former astronaut Sally Ride proposed two options for extending the shuttle - flying one more shuttle mission in 2012 with the sole remaining external tank available to the shuttle program, or restarting the external tank line at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans and flying one or two shuttle flights a year through 2014.

The one-flight option would cost an estimated $1.5 billion, according to Ride's briefing charts, while the more ambitious approach would add another $2.7 billion, or $4.3 billion over the current baseline. But it would make it much easier to sustain meaningful research on the orbiting laboratory with the shuttle's commodious up- and down-mass capabilities.

Ride's subcommittee was clear that it makes no sense to deorbit the ISS in 2016, gaining only five years of utilization after 25 years of development. That would take as much as $14 billion more than currently budgeted. Long-range funding for NASA already has plunged dramatically over the past four years, dropping from $108 billion in fiscal 2006 to $81.5 billion today.

"NASA does not have the budget or the ability to simultaneously develop new systems and continue operating existing ones, hence the gap in access to the International Space Station," said Princeton astrophysicist Christopher Chyba, a member of the Augustine sub-group that studied missions beyond low Earth orbit. "In fact, it's unclear that NASA has the funding for any scenarios that do anything important beyond low Earth orbit prior to 2020."

International Space Station photo: NASA