The Gap in Human Spaceflight - Working Group 2

The next decade, ushered in by the next US president and his new administration, will be crucial to space exploration.  Indeed, during the next decade, the Space Shuttle will have to be retired, the International Space Station made a visible success, and humans returned to the moon.  CSIS's Space Initiatives believes that there will be no global space exploration without the right US leadership.  Space Initiatives put together a select working group to provide objective, bipartisan, and pragmatic insights into this complex set of issues.  The first working group sought to define the foreseeable gaps and explore the consequences of these gaps for the future of human spaceflight.  A second working group meeting, on December 8, 2008, evaluated scenarios for mitigating the gaps, keeping in mind budgetary, political, foreign policy, and technical objectives and constraints.