The Sun-Solar System Connections discipline is central to the science of exploration. The new 30 year strategic plan for the Sun-Solar System Connections theme within the NASA Earth-Sun System Division will open up the frontier to space environment prediction, build understanding of our home planet in space, and safeguard our outbound journey into the solar system and beyond. The strategic planning process is revisited every three years, but has special significance this cycle in view of the new NASA Vision for Space Exploration, with its emphasis on future human exploration of the Moon and Mars. This initiative has developed within the context of diverse new discoveries. Solar flares and eruptions are coming to be understood as features of the solar magnetic dynamo. Heliospheric storms have been found to blow away our upper atmosphere, to build up hazardous radiation zones, and to deplete our protective UV shield of ozone. Reconnection has become a fact that is accessible to direct as well as remote observation. Evidence has been found of water ice in lunar polar shadows and Mars rovers have found evidence of a primordial ocean of liquid water that has evidently been lost to space. Outside our solar system, over 100 new planets have been detected, at least one of which exhibits spectral signatures of profound interaction with its stellar wind. Young stars have been found to emit X-rays long before they fully ignite, suggesting that electromagnetic plasma processes are at work very early in their development. Interstellar clouds are held to have influenced the development of planetary atmospheres. In these new developments can be seen the evolution of a new cross-disciplinary science that might be called "Astroplanetology" because it embraces stellar-planetary system development in general, yet is based on exploration of our own own star, planet, and solar system.

International Living With a Star (ILWS) is an inter-agency coordinating group with participation from all major space science nations of the world. The objective of ILWS is to "stimulate, strengthen, and coordinate space research to understand the governing processes of the connected Sun-Earth System as an integrated entity." As a coalition of space agencies, the primary role of ILWS is to help the scientists do the best science possible. Today, many nations possess unique space capabilities which can help the advancement of our science, and a chief concern of ILWS is to integrate these contributions into the global effort of understanding the Sun-Solar System Connection, and its effects on space weather in geospace, interplanetary space, and other planetary environments. In this talk, I give a brief introduction to ILWS.

ESA''s Solar Orbiter mission will determine in situ the properties of fields and particles in the unexplored near-Sun heliosphere in three dimensions, investigate remotely the fine-scale structures and events in the magnetically coupled layers of the Sun''s atmosphere, identify through near-corotation the links between activity on the solar surface and the resulting evolution of the inner heliosphere, and observe the polar regions and equatorial corona from relatively high latitudes. At its 107th meeting on 7-8 June 2004, ESA''s Science Programme Committee confirmed the place of Solar Orbiter in the Cosmic Vision programme, with the objective of a launch in October 2013 and no later than May 2015. We review the current status of the preparations for the mission, including the key findings from the recent industrial and ESA internal assessment studies.

Solar Probe will make the first and only planned direct measurement in the solar atmosphere that shapes the harsh solar system environment and ultimately impacts our solar system. It will be humanity’s first visit to a star and will explore a previously inaccessible region of the inner heliosphere. The 2003 Space Science Enterprise Strategy called for study of a Solar Probe to "fly through the solar atmosphere to answer fundamental questions that can be answered in no other way". The mission received highest priority in the National Academy of Sciences’ decadal research strategy in solar and space physics in 2002. Significant advances have been made in the areas of solar and solar wind science, instrument technology, mission resources, and the mission environment since the previous Solar Probe Science Definition Team reports of 1989, 1995, and 1999. Therefore, with the strong support from the international community, NASA formed a new Science and Technology Definition Team (STDT) to develop an exciting and achievable new mission concept for Solar Probe. This talk reviews the status of the STDT’s efforts and the present mission concept.

NASA has recently formed a Science and Technology Definition Team (STDT) to define the Sentinels mission, the heliospheric element of the integrated LWS program. The objective of the Sentinels is to discover, understand and model the connection between solar events such as flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and heliospheric and magnetospheric events, such as Solar Particle Events (SPEs), that can adversely impact life and society; in particular, NASA's exploration initiative to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The primary objective of Sentinels is to provide the observations necessary for an understanding of the physics of the Sun/inner heliosphere processes that affect the solar system, so the requirements for eventual predictive capability can be defined. I will describe the preliminary scientific planning to implement the Sentinels program with a phased approach combining multiple inner heliosphere spacecraft for in situ measurements and near-earth and farside spacecraft for solar imaging.