National Harbor, Maryland, USA: 23 June 2010.
Senior managers representing space agencies in Canada (CSA), China (CNSA), Europe (ASI, CNES, DLR, ESA, UKSA), Japan (JAXA), Korea (KARI), Russia (Roscosmos), Ukraine (NSAU) and the United States (NASA) met at the National Harbor, Maryland, on June 23, 2010, to discuss their interests in globally coordinated human and robotic space exploration. Consensus was reached that significant progress has been made since their joint release of the Global Exploration Strategy (GES) in May 2007 and that steps can and should be taken to enhance their efforts to promote coordination and cooperation to enable a long term space exploration vision that is both sustainable and affordable.
The agency senior managers acknowledged the valuable work of the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG) — the GES implementing body — during the last three years, and welcomed the development of the first ISECG reference architecture, focused on human lunar exploration. They reached consensus on expanding their work to all key exploration destinations and the critical building blocks required to reach these destinations as part of a “global exploration roadmap” – a key part of an evolving international architecture effort. Senior managers discussed the importance of early dialog focused on near-term opportunities for cooperation, such as robotic precursor missions and utilization of ISS as an exploration test bed. The senior managers agreed on holding further strategic discussions at the senior management level and to review the progress of ISECG as products are developed and delivered.