Is America's space effort due for a major course correction? Or is staying the course and sticking with NASA's five-year-old plan to return to the moon the best strategy?

In the wake of an independent panel's report on future spaceflight, the answers to those big questions about the nation's next giant leap ... or smaller step ... in outer space are now being debated in the White House and on Capitol Hill. And although projecting the outcome is murky business at best, the countdown is ticking down toward multibillion-dollar decisions that need to be made.

In short, the gearheads have had their say. Now it's up to the politicians.

If it were up to the gearheads - that is, the review panel headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine - the space effort would likely be in for an extreme makeover. Although their mission was only to lay out the options for future exploration, rather than recommend which option to take, the way the options were framed in their 155-page report suggested a dramatically different path for NASA:

• The space agency would give more consideration to buying rides into low Earth orbit on other people's spaceships, and give more thought to its own Ares I rocket project, which went through a largely successful test flight last week.
  
  
• The International Space Station and the space shuttle fleet, which a now-departed NASA chief once said were serious mistakes, would be given a reprieve - and the station would remain America's main base in space for the next decade.