NASA Hedges Their Bets On Return To Moon

With budget cuts in the works for everyone these days, NASA has decided to float an alternate plan for returning to the moon that is just a little bit cheaper than the current proposal. Of course, the new option would be very reminiscent of the old Apollo space capsule instead of the tricked out shuttle currently planned. "Officially, the space agency is still on track with a 4-year-old plan to spend $35 billion to build new rockets and return astronauts to the moon in several years. However, a top NASA manager is floating a cut-rate alternative that costs around $6.6 billion. This cheaper option is not as powerful as NASA's current design with its fancy new rockets, the people-carrying Ares I and cargo-lifting Ares V. But the cut-rate plan would still get to the moon."

Comments

Um, why?

[hoarier]

Why send people? (The article doesn't explain.) 6.6 G$ would indeed be less than I'd wildly guess it would cost to send humans; but it's still a lot of moolah, and presumably a lot of that would be for a human-required payload. How about devoting just one measly little gigabuck to robot design, and then sending robots instead?

Re:Um, why?

[squoozer]

I couldn't agree with you more. Sending humans to the moon just seems to be a willy waving exercise presumably to impress the Chinese. To be honest I'm not sure that going back to the moon is all that useful at all at the moment. There are far more interesting moons that we could be sending probes too.

About this point in the discussion of the space program we see the people who think we need to get the human race off this planet so that if / when something bad happens to Earth we have a "backup" for our species. They, of course, have not the slightest clue how difficult (probably impossible with current technology) it would be to live on the Moon or Mars. Just look at the attempts humans made at colonizing the Americas and Australia - it didn't go well at first and those places had air, water, soil, animals etc.

Re:Do it well or don't do it at all

[MichaelSmith]

A flight to Titan in ten years would be about as difficult as going to the moon in 1965. Sometimes it can be hard to get relatively easy projects off the ground because the return is too small. I think the next mission should go to Titan. Don't go back to the moon. Its been done.

Go Fever

[tjstork]

We don't need another Apollo-like mission to the moon. We've already done those enough. It's just going to cost money without any substantial new information

I think the point is that every iteration of Apollo would get cheaper if we kept doing new revisions. I agree that NASA should have more money. I'm a Republican paleoconservative and I have no problem paying the taxes to support NASA. Building up knowledge of space requires practice. I think NASA has missions and the track record that the private sector has yet to match.

We need a 2nd generation shuttle design as well.

And we also desperately need a practical nuclear powered spacecraft.

Re:Outsource it

[WindBourne]

That is because we had dems most in charge from 1933 until 1980. Since 1980, we have been going downhill. We will see what happens from here on out. The hard part will be that over the last 30 years, esp. the last 8, we have LITERALLY throw away our manufactuering capabilities. In fact, the entire west has been all too happy to let it go (though less so in EU). We need it back.