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."

Comments

Update on Old News

[AKAImBatman]

Just to be clear, this isn't new news. The CEV (Crew Exploration Vehicle) program has been designed from the beginning with orbital, trans-lunar, and lunar landing phases. What this article is about is an update on those existing plans. The bright side to this is that NASA is making real progress on the CEV program as opposed to making it a "miracle technology" that just need money poured into it as they have been so guilty of in the past. (Not that the CEV program doesn't need money. They need LOTS of money.)

The big changes since the inception of the program have been:

• The death of the Orbital Space Plane idea, and the birth of the CEV concept.
  
• The plan to use less expensive and potentially reusable capsule technology instead of today's combined engine/habitat technology.
  
• The death of the "Spiral" plan of development. Griffin has made it clear to congress that he plans to trim the fat and do this in whatever way makes sense, not according to a military development schedule.
  
• As a result of the abandoning of the spiral plan, NASA believes that they can have the Orbital phase hardware completed by 2008 instead of 2011.
  
• A great deal of research is being done on the use of Nuclear Engines for the later trans-Mars phase.
  

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.)

Re:Update on Old News

[Profane MuthaFucka]

The death of the "Spiral" plan of development.

I had to look up the term, so I'll save someone else the trouble to describe what spiral plan is. (info from Wikipedia)

Spiral One (CEV Earth Orbit Capability)
Spiral Two (Extended Lunar Exploration)
Spiral Three (Long Duration Lunar Exploration)
Spiral Four (Crew Transportation System Mars Flyby)
Spiral Five (Human Mars Surface Campaign)

Basically it's a progressive development of the basic vehicle into 5 different vehicles with different and increasing capabilities. It comes from the military development experience.

The proposal to eliminate this phased approach comes up because the military development experience doesn't appear to match NASA's requirements and procedures. There are steps in there that are probably unnecessary (spiral 2 and 4). The phases do not necessarily build on each other.

The new plan abandons spirals entirely, in favor of blocks and stages. If that sentence elicits a 'WTF' from you, just read on:

Stage I, Block I is a LEO vehicle for taking over space station construction from the Shuttle.
Stage II, Block II is an interplanetary vehicle built in the same shape as the Block I vehicle. That vehicle will be able to fly to the moon, Mars, La Grange points, and so forth.
Stage III, no block, are lander modules that will work on the moon, mars, or both, with the Block II spacecraft.

So, it turns out that despite the screwey naming of the stages and blocks, the plan is actually quite a bit different that the spiral plan described. Maybe Wikipedia has just confused these Stages and Blocks a bit.

The only problem that I have with all this is the use of the SRB as a basis for a man-rated space launcher. That's a big WTF to me, and I really wish they'd go with an all-liquid fuel booster.

Not really that much money

[fsh]

Here's a link to NASA's 2004 Budgetary Analysis, done about a year ago (there should be a new one out sometime soon).

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.

Re:Modern technology

[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.