The New Moon Race

An anonymous reader writes "News.com has a pictoral and editorial look at the quickly-heating second race to the moon. A Japanese orbital probe is expected to reach orbit of the satellite sometime today, just one of the dozens of projects now aiming to exploit Earth's orbital partner for scientific and business gains. 'The next lunar visitor may come from China. The Chang'e-1 spacecraft is scheduled to lift off near the end of October. It is slated to study the moon's topography in 3D and also investigate its elements. Chang'e-3 is a soft lunar lander that is scheduled to fly in 2010 ... If all goes as planned, the United States and India will have astronauts on the moon by 2020, China by 2022, and Japan and Russia by 2025.'"

Comments

Sad?

[atari2600]

Did you even read the article?

China is expected to launch its first lunar exploration satellite later this month; India has plans for a moon launch in April 2008; the next U.S. moon mission is slated for 2008; and Russia could be flying private citizens around the moon and back as early as 2009. All of those countries are making plans to land a spacecraft on the moon by 2012--with astronauts and cosmonauts to follow soon after. Reports say Germany is also interested in joining the space community. Meanwhile, Google is offering $30 million to encourage private teams to land a rover on the moon by December 2012.

New energy sources...plain old space exploration progress...a moon base...the possibilities are endless and all you can come up with is "depressing"? Maybe you should consider therapy.

Re:Apollo's archives

[andy1307]

Maybe the original set is really really dirty.

And this Is Sadder

[Anonymous Coward]

> The fact that we're racing to the moon again is a depressing statement about what we've been doing recently, though I guess any progress is better than none.

It's more depressing than that.

1957: Soviets launch Sputnik.
1969: Americans land humans on the moon.

2007: Slashdotter reports "If all goes as planned, the United States and India will have astronauts on the moon by 2020, China by 2022, and Japan and Russia by 2025." 2020: Americans return to the moon.

The first time around, it took us 12 years to do it from scratch, with tooling recovered from WW2 V-2 rocket bases, and computers less sophisticated than present-day wristwatches. We're now talking about maybe being able to do it in 13 years.

It's not just a lack of progress. We're going backwards.

Re:And this Is Sadder

[frup]

I see it as more an issue of budgeting than progression. If the evil moon goblin terrorists had attacked New York, well I bet you the moon would be painted blue white and red by now.

Re:And this Is Sadder

[rufty_tufty]

*sigh*

What is different this time is it is done how things should be.
Let me give some examples:
* the capsules this time will be a much more friendly environment - just like the shuttle your average school teacher will be able to ride in it. This is very different from the apollo capsules which ran with weird atmosphere capabilities that limited the time you could spend there and were hellish places to work
* The capabilities will be much greater - they're not stuck to equitorial landings this time, they can go to the poles too.
* The lander will have an airlock - no more depressurising the entire capsule for every moonwalk - sounds a small thing but it is a big improvement in terms of safety and workability.
* It's desiged using modern NASA safty requirements - that's a big shift.

Look at it this way, suppose it took 2 years to create the first unix (from spec to first product to customer). Could you in 2 months produce a full unix system to current requirements (starting from a blank-ish sheet with just the specification - no code reuse). I doubt it, yet this is what you are asking nasa to do when you bemoan the fact it is taking a similar length of time to update their design.

Look in this day and age it often takes several years to specify, design and produce a new IC, and that's re-using IP - These guys have a whole system to build pratically from scratch and it is safty critical too!
This stuff doesn't happen overnight - well not in any engineering project I'd entrust my life to anyway.

As an example of how expensive and timeconsuming aerospace engineering is take the 787 program $10-12 Billion, and approx 5 years. This is for a slight upgrade to a well established design/aeroframe(some new materials redesign of avionics).
I don't think you realise just how hard rocket science is.

Beyond the Moon, Looking Toward Mars

[Polemicist]

With the world currently racing to return to the moon, a goal which the US has already accomplished years ago, I think it would be wise to turn our sights instead to Mars. It would be a far greater test of our ability to expand into the universe, being the first possible human habitation on another PLANET.

Unfortunately, with the current emphasis on returning to the moon, funding for possible Mars missions has been siphoned off (since NASA's budget is definitely not large enough to work toward both goals at once). The Mars mission would also be of great value scientifically, since the rovers currently exploring the planet cannot accomplish as much as a actual human in the same timespan, and being the first country to set foot on another planet would be an event worthy of space history books.

Robert Zubrin and David Baker have already outlined an inexpessive, easy to prepare mission plan, which also minimizes the risk to the astronauts [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct]. The plan calls for Earth Return Vehicles (ERVs) to be launched unmanned with rockets no larger than were needed for Apollo, followed by a second with astronauts onboard. The ERVs would then make fuel for the return trip out of the martian atmosphere, saving payload costs from earth. If anything went wrong, we would also only lose the machines, not any astronauts, which should be a major selling point for NASA in light of recent tragedies.

The pricetag: $55 billion for an 18 month stay on the planet, and it would leave one ERV on the planet's surface, enabling a continuous cycling of astronauts to and from Mars, a truly worthwhile investment.