NASA Begins Planning the First Human Mission To Cislunar Space (blastingnews.com)

MarkWhittington writes: With the first launch of the heavy-lift Space Launch System drawing nigh (for no later than November 2018), NASA is already trying to plan the first crewed space mission beyond low-Earth orbit for the early 2020s. However, budget uncertainties plus a couple of congressional mandates are causing uncertainty for the launch manifest for the SLS.

Comments

Re:Rocket to Nowhere Lives Up To Its Name

[ShanghaiBill]

Apollo 9 astronauts spent 10 days orbiting the Earth with a LEM, right? I mean, what a fucking waste! They should have just gone to the Moon.

If they had gone to the moon and succeeded, we would have saved billions of dollars. If they had failed, and died, we would have lost 3 expendable people, at a time when dozens of Americans were dying everyday in Vietnam, and over a hundred were dying everyday in traffic accidents.

Reminds me when of Apollo 8

[k6mfw]

when they completed TLI burn and as a child watching it on a B&W TV (over the air reception with rabbit ears), the news commentator said "and that's the burn that will take them to the Moon." In that instant everything changed. Going LEO is like a short walk to the corner drugstore. At mission control in Houston the earth/moon trajectory plot was put on the big board, one of the controllers said, "finally we're going someplace!" And that was only 7 years of going around and around in LEO. However, I wonder if the same were to be repeated again, the "magic" may not be there (think of earth rise photo returned by the crew that lead to Earth Day, EPA, NOAA, etc.). Now these days we got a bunch of religious zealots, deniers, SJWs, but the pics and vid are HD.