Obama, who met Dec. 16 with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, hasn't said when or how he'll announce his new policy.

The announcement likely will come by the time the president releases his fiscal 2011 budget in early February, because he must decide how much money the space agency should get.

In determining NASA's future policy, Obama must decide whether to increase the agency's budget to pay for goals such as sending astronauts to the moon or Mars in missions that could be decades away.

By Bill Ingalls, AFP/Getty Images NASA Administrator Charles Bolden speaks during a luncheon co-hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Women In Aerospace on Dec. 9 at the Ritz-Carlton in Arlington, Va.

"The next authorization will really set the path of NASA for the next 10 to 20 years," said Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, which oversees space policy and research.

In an October report, the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Committee said NASA's current funding puts it on an "unsustainable trajectory" to undertake ambitious missions. It urged Obama to increase the agency's budget by $3 billion a year — above the nearly $19 billion per year it receives now — to finance circumnavigating the moon and Mars, landing on one of Mars' moons, and landing on or docking with an asteroid during the next 15 years.

The question is whether Obama will embrace one of those options or any of the others the committee suggested.

Besides top NASA officials and members of Gordon's committee, other key figures offering Obama advice will be Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Nelson, who flew aboard the shuttle in 1986, is perhaps NASA's most vocal supporter in Congress. He acknowledged that only the president can inspire the nation to support the space program and find the money that the "severely underfunded" agency needs.

"He's going to have to put the juice to the program," Nelson said at a Sept. 16 hearing on the spaceflight committee's report.

At his confirmation hearing in February, Holdren said research and development related to space exploration is crucial to national defense, civilian and military communications, weather forecasting and the study of the land and oceans.

At his initial meeting with Bolden, Obama described his passion for NASA by recalling that his grandfather took him to Pearl Harbor to wave at Apollo astronauts aboard an aircraft carrier that had picked them up after splashdown. During the past six months, Obama has hosted a White House stargazing party for students, a teleconference with the International Space Station and two shuttle crews in the Oval Office. He also has telephoned the shuttle and met with the crew of Apollo 11.

Jansen is a reporter in the Gannett Washington bureau