With all of the discussion about future U.S. efforts in human spaceflight precipitated by final flight of the space shuttle , too little attention has been given to how international cooperation might factor into that future. I guess that is appropriate, given the iconic nature of the shuttle as an exemplar of U.S. capability. But it is worth noting that the STS-135 mission was international in character. It was enabled by a Canada-built remote manipulator and an Italian-built logistics module; the mission provisioned a 15-nation International Space Station. Also, for the time being, the U.S. will have to depend for a few years on cooperation with another country, in this case Russia, for astronaut access to the ISS. International cooperation is an integral part of today’s spaceflight enterprise; it should come even more essential to future human exploration.

By following the reasoning of the 2009 Augustine Committee , the Obama administration has imposed unneeded constraints on future space planning. The committee concluded that future NASA budgets could only support the development of a new heavy lift launcher and a new spacecraft for deep space expeditions, not also a vehicle to land on another planetary surface, especially the moon. This led the committee to propose a "flexible path" for exploration that bypassed the moon on its way to other distant destinations. The Obama administration embraced this perspective, and President Obama on April 15, 2010, announced that reaching a near-earth asteroid by 2025 should be the initial goal of the next round of human exploration, and that a return to the moon would not be a high priority U.S. objective.