NASA formally unveils plans for going back to the Moon!

[AA Institute]

NASA today unveiled an ambitious blueprint for returning American astronauts to the moon by 2018 using new rockets based on shuttle propulsion technology and a new reusable crew vehicle Administrator Mike Griffin described as "Apollo on steroids."

Full story:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0509/19exploration/

Flight plan graphic:

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/125171main_flight_plan_graphic.jpg


AA

 

[Brian G Turner]

Sorry to sound cynical, but the fact that NASA can barely get a craft into orbit means that plans to get to moon sound like outright media spin and naive optimism.

I'd love to say I was being overly-cynical, but check out when NASA expects the replacements for the shuttle to be ready for...

 

[Foxbat]

I'm all for going to the moon and anywhere else that takes our fancy. It will no doubt take some time and I just hope I'm still around to see it happen

 

[Rane Longfox]

You would have thought, so long after the original trip, it would be easy by now

 

[dreamwalker]

You would have thought, so long after the original trip, it would be easy by now

yer

if star trek was written now, it'd be set 10,000 years in the future instead of a few hundred

 

[Salazar]

We don't even know that NASA got to the moon before, those shows that show you the fake stuff the Moon Landing got to me

 

[lazygun]

Onwards and upwards.

 

[littlemissattitude]

We don't even know that NASA got to the moon before, those shows that show you the fake stuff the Moon Landing got to me

*sigh* Of course NASA got to the moon before. I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person, but sheesh....

As far as the new plans go, its great if they are really willing to put their money where their plans are. But I just keep getting the horrible feeling that this is going to be just like No Child Left Behind...they'll mandate it and then refuse to appropriate a sufficient amount of money to carry it out.

 

[dreamwalker]

Its something I also fear.
2018 is very distant planning as compared to the space race days where things where planned in months, instead of decades

 

[NikG]

I find it depressing that there's still the Saturn V rocket on display that could probably be set up to take us back to the moon within half a year using sufficient safety checks.

The more depressing thing is that the ability to get to the moon means we would have been able to get to the La Grange points and harness the suns power. I remember calculating the energy for the L5 point as being around 670 times the energy consumption of the planet and we could have done this with the technology back then and some risk taking.

I thought humans were more ambitious than that. Imagine if our ancestors walked out of Africa and found a whole continent, walked back and told all their friends, "ah there's some land there, it looks alright, but I'm too lazy to walk back."



Hopefully NASA will stop being moronic and work with other space services, they don't seem to realise that the cold war ended and their no longer fighting the Russians and we would probably be on the moon in a year or two if they just worked with the ESA and RASA who have a much better launch site in French Guiana.

 

[Clangador]

I must point out NASA has to have enough funding to get there in the first place. I think it's more the American leadership that has failed than NASA.

 

[littlemissattitude]

I think there's actually enough blame for both NASA and the government to shoulder some of it. The government has never really been willing to give enough money to space exploration to do it right. This was exacerbated from those on both the left and the right who complained that the money for NASA could have going for their pet projects. But NASA has, I think, been afraid to ask for what they really need, fearing that they would be shut down altogether. It seems like ever since the moon goal was reached, there have been too few people willing to stand up and say, "We really need to do this." There is the Planetary Society, of course, but even they haven't been loud enough and obnoxious enough for anyone in the government to really listen to them. There is also the fact that there is a split within the space exploration community between those who advocate that people need to go into space and those who feel that all further exploration should be unmanned only. All of these factors have contributed to NASA and other initiatives to space exploration being underfunded.

Not that the billions of money NASA has spent are really necessary. I read somewhere recently that the whole Space Ship One enterprise only took about double the X Prize money of $10 million to accomplish.

 

[AA Institute]

I must point out NASA has to have enough funding to get there in the first place. I think it's more the American leadership that has failed than NASA.

Well said, and I concur. That old saying: "No bucks = no buck rogers!"

But there may be hope for younger, more vibrant and thrusting companies with leaner, meaner attitudes and entrepreneaurial flair to jump onboard along the way:-

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0511/21spacedev/

 

[ScottSF]

maybe once the private sector gets a good enough profit insentive for going to space, then the real race will be on. Oooh they could have a space station that looks like a big coke can. . . burp.

 

[Carolyn Hill]

I find it depressing that there's still the Saturn V rocket on display that could probably be set up to take us back to the moon within half a year using sufficient safety checks.

I agree, Nik. Your comment makes me think of Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn. Maybe we SF fans have to haul that Saturn V rocket out and launch it, like the fans do in the book. (OK, I'm not serious. But sometimes . . . )

 

[BookStop]

Maybe these folks'll do it first.

http://spaceadventures.com/

 

[El_L1]

Support Independant Moon Shots and Moon Stations!

 

[j d worthington]

The only real qualm I have about independent ventures of this sort is their viability. By which I mean: any way you approach it, it is an extremely expensive endeavor, and we don't want a repeat of what happened during the early days of aviation, where everybody and their dog either flew a plane, or had an aviation company, and the number of crashes threatened for a good while to put this new type of transportation out of business altogether, as people were (at the time, quite justifiably) rather skittish of the odds of surviving a flight. We need to make damned sure that the safety factors are (as much as is feasible) well taken care of to prevent a reaction against space flight (something we've already seen with the shuttle disasters, and the -- at best -- ambivalent public feeling from those). Otherwise this very important possibility may be shut down before it gets very far at all. Space, after all, is a completely unforgiving environment, and if we want to encourage independent travel out there, we're going to have to keep that in mind.

 

[Paige Turner]

Oh, J.D., you alarmist. What could go wrong?

 

[lou.mor432]

I agree with the concept j.d. But maybe that's why NASA first landed on the moon, there was no thought for the dangers, or loss of human life. Everyone wanted to be involved in the spacerace back then.