In an interview on Wednesday with The Huntsville Times in Alabama, the NASA administrator, Charles F. Bolden Jr., said he planned to meet with President Obama by the end of the year to present the agency’s views on what it should be doing.

Image Norman R. Augustine heads a panel on the future of NASA. Credit... Bob Gathany/The Huntsville Times, via Associated Press

Under NASA’s current plans, developed after the loss of the shuttle Columbia in 2003, the remaining three space shuttles are to be retired next year after completion of the International Space Station. A new series of rockets is supposed to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020.

For NASA to continue operating the space station through 2020, five years longer than currently planned, and still reach the Moon, the current program would require $159 billion from 2010 to 2020, the panel calculated, far more than the $100 billion that the current budget guidance from the Obama administration lays out.

The panel said $100 billion was too little for any plausible push out of Earth orbit, but it said other possibilities were feasible if financing were raised to $128 billion over the next decade.

A prototype of the Ares I is on the launching pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, scheduled to lift off on Tuesday morning. That test flight, with a less-powerful first stage and a dummy second stage, was devised to gather data to aid in refining the design.

The full rocket and the astronaut-carrying capsule on top are not scheduled to begin operation until March 2015. Because of NASA’s budget constraints, the panel predicted that the date of the first flight would very likely slip two years.

The panel did not call Ares I an engineering failure but rather more a casualty of changing circumstances and of budgets one-third smaller than originally planned for. “With time and sufficient funds, NASA could develop, build and fly the Ares I successfully,” the panel wrote. “The question is, Should it?”