Managers and engineers at NASA are scrambling to put some meat on the bones of the dramatic policy shift proposed by President Barack Obama in his Fiscal 2011 budget request, working with limited guidance to cancel the Constellation Program of human space-exploration vehicles and begin finding a private route to space.

The closely held policy change left even the most senior agency managers at a loss for words as reporters questioned them about details .

“We will be working with OMB [Office of Management & Budget] and OSTP [Office of Science & Technology Policy] to understand details of all this,” said NASA’s Doug Cooke, associate administrator for Exploration Systems, the day after the budget came out. “. . . We’ll be looking at what areas we want to invest in in terms of propulsion and the technologies. It’s not something that we have totally nailed down.”

At midweek, Cooke and his staff were beginning to focus on how to wrap up Constellation’s preliminary design review for the early Ares I/Orion missions to the International Space Station (ISS), and then put it on the shelf “for somebody. It may be the historians; it may be another program,” says Administrator Charles Bolden.

The budget request kills Ares I—the crew launch vehicle designed to carry U.S. astronauts to low Earth orbit (LEO)—and the Orion capsule that would ride atop it to the ISS, the Moon and perhaps even Mars. Unlike most other federal agencies under the Obama budget freeze, NASA will receive a $6-billion increase over five years compared with the current budget runout, but the money will go to help develop a commercial route to the ISS for U.S. and non-Russian international astronauts.

To kick off that effort, the agency unveiled its plans to spend $50 million in stimulus package money already appropriated on new commercial human spaceflight technology (see p. 23 ). In the months ahead the agency will plan competitions for more expensive activities, including human-rating existing launch vehicles like the Atlas V and Delta IV. It also wants to boost funding by $312 million in Fiscal 2011 to Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Orbital Sciences Corp. for their existing commercial cargo deliveries to the space station.

As expected, the budget extends U.S. funding of the ISS by five years, to 2020, and would add $2 billion to the station budget through 2015 to make fuller use of its unique facilities. The administration rejected calls for more shuttle flights beyond the five planned.

Advocates say commercial crew transport could be flying crews to the space station as early as 2016 if the plan is approved. That would be earlier than the estimates for Constellation developed by the human spaceflight review committee headed by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine.

Funds freed by killing Constellation will go to a variety of programs aimed at preparing the U.S. to push beyond low Earth orbit, including an exploration technology program apparently designed to meet criticisms that Constellation slighted new technology in favor of heritage hardware such as the shuttle solid rocket boosters that form the basis for the Ares I first stage.

“We believe the technology shortfall we face is so fundamental that incremental changes or tinkering on the margins will not be sufficient to address current and future needs,” says Bolden, who emerged after a period under wraps as the public face of the new space policy. “Rather, a fundamental rebaselining of our nation’s exploration efforts is needed. We must invest in fundamentally new innovations for space technology.”