Challenges to US space sustainability

Abstract With space now crucial to such a wide range of activities on Earth, the USA must ensure the sustainability of its efforts, a task that involves technological feasibility and political will. Near-term challenges include US human access to space and the Shuttle transition, funding NASA sufficiently in a time of recession, and rebuilding the country's space industrial base. Longer-term challenges will be better protecting the space environment (including the electromagnetic spectrum) from overcrowding and the effects of space weather and NEOs, and defining responsibilities for distributing climate change data and recognition of property rights for the commercial development of in-space resources. As an aid to dealing with these challenges the USA must ask itself whether there is a human future in space and seek to answer the question in the course of human and robotic exploration beyond Earth.