Ever since its announcement, President Obama's new approach to space policy has been controversial. Today, the White House plans to make public a paper that attempts to further explain the new policy by putting it in a broader context.
The paper will reaffirm the traditional U. S. position that space should be open to all nations, while at the same time maintaining American leadership in space. Doing the second, as usual, is seen as a way of guaranteeing the first. American leadership will be pursued differently, however. U. S. policy will be to encourage the development of a commercial sector that will be able to make a profit from space operations. U. S. policy will also be to seek international cooperation in space.
The obvious next big step in manned spaceflight that could reasonably be done as an international project would be the establishment of a lunar base. Whether the Obama administration would participate in such an effort while maintaining its thrust of having NASA develop technologies that will support a sustainable manned space exploration effort remains to be seen.
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