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NASA Plan to Return to the Moon
sjoeboo writes "NASA briefed senior White House officials Wednesday on its plan to spend $100 billion during the next 12 years building the spacecraft and rockets it needs to put humans back on the Moon by 2018.
The U.S. space agency now expects to roll out its lunar exploration plan to key Congressional committees on Friday and to the broader public through a news conference on Monday."
The big changes since the inception of the program have been:
IMHO, Bush's administration has done a reasonable job of making sure that we are on a viable track to returning to the moon and reaching Mars. My hope is that the next President who shows up doesn't dive in and try to change everything. The plan is good. It only needs some nursemaiding, not micromanagement from on high. Thankfully there's a great deal of pressure to replace the Space Shuttle, so the future President may be willing to just let NASA do their job.
(FYI, Wikipedia has been keeping extremely good track of CEV Development as it happens. While Wikipedia is not a news source, this particular article is a good place to go for the latest status of the project.)
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For those who lived in a cave for a while and haven't been here yet.
If you look about halfway down, you'll see that the budget of the CEV is far outweighed by NASA's other activities, as well as being less than the amount budgeted for the Space Shuttle.
fsh
i'm pretty sure they could do that, with money, if they wanted.
but what good would rushing do? they've already been there multiple times. i wouldn't care as much about getting there as to i would about what technology they develope to get there(and perhaps _stay_ there) this time around.
and I'd bet you 200$ that rutan won't make it to there in that time either(chinese could, they got the resources but i'm not so sure about them willing to spend that much to get there just for the sake of getting there).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Bush's Vision for Space Exploration never gave a date for going to Mars. He said the Moon by 2020, and then Mars, well, sometime after that.
fsh
Nah, it's more like modern budgeting. We're simply not willing to put 3-5% of the federal budget behind such a program, like we did with Apollo. NASA *as a whole* now comprises less than 1% of the federal budget.
fsh
They probably could, but why should they?
What pressing reason is there to divert a large portion of NASA's money and manpower to rushing out a lunar vehicle? What would be gained by doing it in 9 years instead of 13? What terrible thing will happen because of that extra 4 years? Why is doing it faster important for anything other than appeasing complainers? There might be a good reason, but nobody's presented it yet.
This isn't a question of "why can't NASA do this"---it's a question of "why would NASA want to do this?"
Remember how space exploration works: "faster, better, cheaper - choose two."
(Right now, it's slated to be cheaper ---0.8% of one year's GDP vs. 8-13%---and better; if you want to swap out "cheaper" for "faster", you'll need to convince someone why it's worth the money. If you want to swap out "better" for "faster", well, just build a really, really big slingshot...)
You say Fascist, I say Communist. You say "brutal", I say "brutal". Once a government gets to a certain point semantics doesn't really help the oppressed. Shall we just agree on the term "brutal and oppressive" ?
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SSMEs more powerful? I think not.
F-1: 1,500,000 lbf
SSME: 400,000 lbf
More efficient, sure. Isp = 452 sec for the SSME, and something like 260 sec for the F-1. But the shuttle engines are most certainly not more powerful.
We need to get off this rock, and every decade we lapse into introversion is a decade later that man's history of exploitation of the solar system is delayed.
The major benefits I can see are:
- ensure survival against earth killer asteroid hitting in say the next 2 centuries
- increase pressure and funding to build independent robotic mining and factories
- draw minds and effort away from fragmented religion, and towards a unified goal of conquering space
- exploit space-based power generation and develop better water extraction and conservation technologies, reducing pressures to start oil wars and water wars
- get advanced physics research off the planet's surface as soon as possible. One possibile reason for the lack of alien contact is that nature holds a booby trap (or a jackpot) that most cultures hit by accident and everything goes boom. We are already close to primordial densities in particle physics and if it is possible to use advanced space-based resources to quickly and cheaply (say with a self-organizing robotic factory) build a ring in space or on the moon that would be excellent.
- add low-noise observatories on the moon. Currently we are just starting to observe in very noisy RF bands for example.
- develop unified educational program based on integrated science and exploratory culture. A free course of study for any child on the planet, instilling a citizen of the world sense of identity, respect and practical knowledge of science, an imperative to stride beyond man's history of intolerance and enter the next phase of our civilization, develop emotional intelligence, and in general train people so that we can achieve 10 times more efficient exploitation of the world's human resources, with 10 times better health and welfare for the world, and international collaboration to develop key technologies more quickly. Sure there is more to this but obviously there is still demagoguery, genocide, famine, disaster, and demonization in the 21st century. We need to get beyond it and work together.
Many of these things can be done on the planet. But the fact is, our societies are still pretty uncivilized and we need a common project to bind politicians and peoples around the world toward the same goal. It seems that broad, continued, well funded efforts for space science and every connected area - including advances in biotech, robotics, and education for example - could be a spark that begins humanity on exponential growth and saves us from nuclear races and preoccupation with trade deficits and resource starvation. People need to have something to work towards, and we need to provide great salaries and lionize people who go into these fields and go to space.