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.

Re:Update on Old News

[infinite9]

10,000 kittens slain

That's a lot of masturbation.

Mars on hold...

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to Mars by 2015?

Modern technology

[ucblockhead]

Nice to see that with modern 21st technology, we can make it to the moon in only thirteen years, as opposed to the long eight year program it took forty years ago.

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.

Re:Modern technology

[oni]

We could be on the moon by the end of the month if someone was willing to pay for it and if we could accept risk.

When someone died in an accident in the '60s we the American people dusted ourselves off and got back on the horse. After the Apollo I accident, an investigation was performed and a report was presented in only three months. And then NASA went back to work going to the Moon. After Challenger, "OMFG! We should just cancel the space program! OMFG! OMFG!" And then years later we finally started flying again and years after that another, completely unrelated accident and, "OMFG THESE THINGS ARE DEATH TRAPS!"

One of the reasons we don't do things like go to the Moon anymore is that we're wimps. We don't accept risks and we crucify people who do.

The other reason is money. The cost of the Apollo program in 2005 dollars was nearly $200 billion, and that doesn't include the other programs like Gemini etc. Now we're going to do more (more as in, it's got to be 99.999% safe this time because we can't accept any risk at all) and we're going to do it for less. It should be a little cheaper because of modern computers etc. But not *that* much cheaper! Rockets are rockets. They haven't changed much in 50 years. They should still cost about the same.

And again, the culture is really whimpy now. The space program was a point of national pride back then. These days people are embarrassed to show any pride in their country - it's not fair that we have a space program and Zimbabwe doesn't. Plus, if you dare to spend $1 on science there will always be a crowd of idiots screaming, "OMFG some kid is poor* we can't spend this money on science until after every other problem on earth is solved!!!"

*poor in this case means that his family only has one TV and doesn't even have Tivo and somehow they managed to buy enough food to become morbidly obese but we still call them poor because otherwise we'd have to ask if maybe their lifestyle is influenced more by behaviors than by money or opportunity.

What a waste

[A nonymous Coward]

They have no reason for going to the moon. At least Apollo had a reason, the space race against the evil commies, but this time, not even that much. No doubt we'll go there a few times and stop again.

Moon colonies would be great, from a science fiction point of view, but without an actual practical reason that involves real colonists with real practical uses, this new moon plan will be just another short sighted waste of time and money. I'd rather that money was spent on technology that had actual uses for most people. Don't preach to me about spin-offs. There would be just as many spin-offs from orbital hotels or quiet and environmentally friendly hypersonic transports or practical electric cars with batteries to go 500 miles.

Re:What a waste

[AKAImBatman]

Don't preach to me about spin-offs.

Okay. How about I preach about lowering the costs of space transport? How about I preach about the billions of tons of cheap ore that could result? How about I preach about the free energy obtained from solar mirrors focused on space engines? How about I preach about a future where dangerous and toxic industries can be moved off the Earth? How about I preach about a future where man can thrive across the solar system, guaranteeing safety from little things like asteriods? How about I preach about a future where the power of the Sun is harnessed to power trips to other star systems? How about I preach about a future where truely inexpensive science probes can be launched to finally reveal the remaining secrets of the universe? How about I preach of a future with unimaginably technology that results from the science done?

How about we get off this rock and finally do something other than IM each other about Britney Spears or Paris Hilton? How about it?

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.

It's not going to happen.

[Colin Smith]

Set a date, any date, as long as it's two or more presidencies away and you basically don't have to come through with your promises, even better, someone else will take the blame.

Basically there isn't the political will to do something like this so they kick it into the long grass and allow schedules to slide, costs to rise until it becomes too expensive and has to be cut.

They're talking 100 billion anyway. They'd be better offering a 100 million prize for an orbital vehicle, half a billion prize for a lunar orbiter, a billion or two for a lunar base etc.

The Plan

[halcyon1234]

"to put humans back on the Moon by 2018."

... where they will be greeted by the Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Russians, Canadians, and every college student with a "Build Yourself An Interplanetary Space Craft" kit ordered from craigslist.

Mod Parent +100 :)

[Quiet_Desperation]

"OMFG some kid is poor* we can't spend this money on science until after every other problem on earth is solved!!!"

That's the one that causes me to have the blood pressure of a morbidly obese chain smoker. Some day people are going to wake up and realize that, well, we are NOT going to solve all the problems here on Earth. Ever. We'll be lucky to solve half. We can't solve problems when society refuses to recognize the true causes, which in many cases is "people are stoooopid." We need to focus on the big ones like energy, somehow eradicating the memes that make people vote for monsters or fly planes into buildings and getting the educational system out of the hands of the ideologues, be they on the Left (feed good education) or the Right (anti-science).

Anyway, it looks like the private space sector might actually be showing some life, so f*ck NASA. I'm updating my resume to send out to Rutan's company and maybe a couple others. I'm going to be there, baby!

Re:Unmanned space flight mafia

[October_30th]

send a robot with a scanning tunneling electron microscope, a chemistry package, a DNA sequencer, and 10 other instruments related to the science of microbes, and then study the collected data remotely.

And how many such probes have we have sent out? How much have we missed out by not having people out (desk jockeys with joysticks don't count) there deciding what to probe with the existing hardware we have actually managed to land?

Quite frankly, as a professional scientist, the argument that computers and probes make better scientists than us human beings offends me. It's like saying that once you've mastered how to use a chemistry package or a DNA sequencer, you're a scientist. That's just technique. Science is intuitive art.

PS. It's Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM).