NASA has new hopes, challenges with moonshot
Forty years after the first humans walked on the moon, NASA is trying again to reach the Earth's nearest celestial neighbor.
As envisioned, the new lunar lander will have room for four astronauts and supplies for seven days.
(Credit: NASA)It's not just about retracing 40-year-old footsteps in the lunar dust, though. This time, NASA wants its moonshot to become an outpost and eventually a Mars shot too, if Congress and others can be persuaded to part with the necessary money.
The new attempt is well past the idea stage. Two spacecraft are freshly launched on scouting missions to map the moon and see whether permanently shaded areas in craters on its south pole really do contain ice, a substance that could make living on the moon vastly easier and that could in theory even be turned into new rocket fuel.
And, with a program called Constellation now in its third year, NASA wants to land people on the moon in 2020 and then create an outpost--a "toehold on the frontier," according to John Connolly, head of engineering for the bigger Altair lunar lander.
It might well be that overcoming the Earth's gravity is easier than overcoming the financial constraints of a nation in economic recession.
"Given the current budget, if nothing changes, it's going to be very challenging" to meet the goal of reaching the moon by 2020, said John Olson, director of NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate Integration Office.
The current budget plan is uncertain: the Obama administration in May ordered a review of human space-flight programs that considers the goal of "fitting within the current budget profile for NASA exploration activities."
Why go back?
There's no more Cold War race spurring the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to outdo the Russians, but the overall reason to go to the moon and beyond remains the same: inspiration and science.
"The most important attribute we got out of Apollo is it taught us nothing was impossible," Olson said of the first trips to the moon. Monday will mark the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's lunar landing.
The new program, with aspirations to bring people not just to the moon but also Mars and the asteroids, is "motivating the next generation of students and researchers and engineers and scientists," Olson said.
Forty years ago, NASA sent astronauts to the moon 's equator. Now the agency wants to go to its south pole, where there may be ice in shaded craters.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)NASA also takes pains to point out its economic influences--jobs, spinoffs, and money infused in the country's industrial base. The agency is seeking a 6 percent budget increase to $19.3 billion for fiscal 2010, Olson said. Elements of the Constellation program are under way in 11 states.
What's got Larry Taylor excited, though, is that "scientifically, there's a lot to learn." A former NASA geologist who worked on the Apollo missions and now a professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Taylor is interested in questions about the origins of the moon--the history of massive impacts and upwellings of the moon's initially molten interior during the early years of the solar system. Prevailing opinion today holds that the moon was a byproduct of a Mars-sized object hitting Earth in the solar system's more turbulent beginnings.
These reasons weigh against the fact that it's expensive to get to the moon.
"You're not going to see any moon mission in my opinion," predicted Charles Pellerin, who as NASA's former director of astrophysics led the Hubble Space Telescope project. "The price to go back to the moon is probably at least a doubling of NASA's budget."
He prefers robotic exploration to human exploration. And if he controlled NASA's purse strings, he'd spend the budget to study the science behind the Earth's climate, the origins of life, and new physics informed by investigation of the universe's distant past. The Hubble showed visible light from far away--and therefore long ago--but he'd like to see the same views in X-ray, gamma ray, and infrared light.
"There are phenomena throughout the universe that have physics you can't even conceive of on the Earth," Pellerin said. "Quasars release more energy in one second than the sun does in 30,000 years. How's that work?"
How do we get there?
But of course a lot of folks can get more excited about humans exploring than about astrophysics, and it's for them that NASA likes to send people into space. So how does the new and improved moon program work?
The same way the old one did, in part. "The physics of moving around the solar system hasn't changed," Connolly said. But there are many significant differences from the grander aspirations.
The Ares I and Ares V rockets both are required to get rockets into orbit. The Ares I can get 22 metric tons into low Earth orbit, compared to 25 metric tons for the Space Shuttle, in part to service the space station. The Ares V can get 53 metric tons to the moon by itself and 65 when paired with an Ares I.
(Credit: NASA)"We designed the transportation system so we could fly folks to Mars eventually," Connolly said. Chiefly, that means that the system can lift more mass into space, whether to build a lunar outpost or to head to Mars.
To lift more weight, there are two rockets, Ares I and V, instead of Apollo's one rocket. The smaller Ares I is designed to carry the crew--as many as six, four of whom can land on the moon. The more powerful Ares V is for carrying the Altair lunar lander and anything else destined for the surface of the moon, such as a pressurized vehicle or a lunar dwelling.
The two rockets' contents will be united in orbit around the Earth, then the cargo in the tip of the Ares V, called the Earth departure stage, will carry the crew and lander to the moon, according to the plan. As with Apollo, the lander will make the descent to the moon while some crew remain above in an orbiter.
The lander itself looks as awkward as the original Apollo landers, including the four splayed legs. But it's bigger, with enough resources to keep four people on the lunar surface for a full seven days, compared to two for Apollo.
On the way back, the bottom half of the lander stays put on the moon while the ascent stage docks with the orbiter in orbit about 100 kilometers above the lunar surface. The crew is reunited, the ascent stage is discarded, and the crew return to Earth, eventually plunging through the atmosphere in a conical capsule
For Mars, things get more complicated, though details are not pinned down yet. The lunar missions are designed to let engineers work out the issues. Even under the optimistic schedule, a Mars return is set tentatively for 2030.
Meanwhile, in 2009
NASA's present work is designed to lay the groundwork for a manned moon mission with two spacecraft that were launched June 18.
First is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has begun mapping the lunar surface from the very low elevation of 50 kilometers, or about 31 miles. NASA plans to release its first images of proposed landing sites on Friday.
But the rocket could carry a little more payload, so piggybacking on the trip is the second craft, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (Lcross). This craft will come to a deliberate and dramatic end October 9, when first the Centaur rocket that carried it and the LRO to the moon smashes into a crater at a speed of 1.55 miles per second, then Lcross itself follows shortly after.
The LRO and Lcross spacecraft are the colorful objects at the tip of this rocket. LRO has begun mapping the moon in detail, and Lcross will watch as the 5,000kg trailing Centaur rocket system smashes into the moon. After studying the resulting debris, Lcross itself will collide.
(Credit: NASA)Lcross sports three cameras, said Rusty Hunt, one of the mission's flight directors, to closely watch the debris from when the 5,200-pound, 41-foot Centaur rocket hits the moon. NASA expects a plume 6.2 miles high, and Lcross will send a real-time stream of observational data to Earth.
Various Earth-bound telescopes and the Hubble will watch the plume, too. And because the plume will be visible from Earth with modestly powerful telescopes, NASA hopes amateur astronomers will send in their own photographs to help analyze the position and visibility of the plume.
So why the south pole?
The Apollo missions landed on the moon's equatorial regions, a navigationally simpler task. But there are good reasons to visit the polar reasons when it comes to human habitation resulting from the fact that some rises are in permanent sunlight and some crater interiors are in permanent shade.
Scientists have found the physical signature of hydrogen in the polar regions, leading them to believe it's possible there is ice hidden in the shade. The ice, likely the leftovers of eons of comet impacts, is useful for human consumption and, more grandly, for producing rocket fuel by splitting it into the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen that are today's rocket propellant of choice. And, of course, oxygen is necessary for breathing.
"If we can find water, it greatly enhances our ability to set up a long-term outpost or permanent moon base," Hunt said. Scientifically, "it'll help to fill in gaps about the early evolution of the moon and the earth-moon system and solar system if we can say yes, indeed, there's water there."
Lunar high ground on the polar regions benefit from permanent sunlight, too. That makes for an easier, balmier climate and means rotating solar panels can track the sun at all times with ease, Connolly said.
August panel results
The present moon missions stem from an initiative former President George W. Bush outlined in 2004. Five years later, LRO and Lcross show some evidence that NASA is making progress.
The budgetary hurdles are formidable. The first clues about funding are scheduled for August, when the head of the Obama administration's human space-flight review, retired Lockheed Martin chief executive Norm Augustine, presents his panel's options.
In the long run, though, Olson is optimistic not only about revisiting the moon, but making it to Mars, too.
"I don't think we're yet ready from fiscal or technical capability to go to Mars," Olson said. "But I'm confident we'll eventually get there."
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
"NASA also takes pains to point out its economic influences--jobs, spinoffs, and money infused in the country's industrial base."
So, these supposed spin-offs couldn't be generated better, cheaper, and faster when there is a real economic need without tax money, right? Ridiculous.
This isn't a waste of money.
The sooner we can put people into permanent off-world colonies safely, the sooner we can really evolve as a species (and not have to worry about such things as ending up like dinosaurs - one asteroid later). It also helps relieve population pressure, ecological pressures, industrial pressures, you name it...
While these missions certainly won't reach the larger goals directly, they do help to get us going in the right direction.
It always seems to me that the "Whiners" are the ones who don't want those without to get any help even when they need it.
- Jesus of Nazareth, c. 32 AD.
This is not to say "screw 'em, they're always gonna be there", but to note that there will always be, on a relative scale, folks who have less than the norm. The true goal of social programs should be to provide for basic needs (food, shelter, a clean environment, and access to basic education), and for those demonstrably unable to provide for themselves, the basics + caretaking. This means not providing a goldmine that can be exploited, or to foster a population of otherwise able-bodied social leeches (aka the US Welfare program before the mid-1990s). In short, provide a hand-up, not a hand-out.
Keeping the social entitlement programs to an absolute minimum and focusing only on those who really do need the help, in turn, helps free up funds and people to provide for humanity's more long-term needs - like what NASA is up to.
Eventually, there will be no need for NASA (or its role will be reduced to that of the FAA), but for now, someone needs to do the basic grunt-work of space exploration and (eventually) help get us to colonization.
I believe government is fundamentally, and by nature, utterly unresponsive and incompetent (see Post Office, Amtrak, et al). The lone area where they actually accomplish what they set out to do is the military, and by extension the space program.
I say the rest of the federal spending is where the waste of money is and we need to seriously look at the fraud and waste there.
...not by themselves, they won't. Now with the proper vehicles and propulsion tech...
"but we are completely ill-adapted, biologically, to live off the surface of this planet."
Pretty much everything a human needs to live healthy, happy, and long can be built, even without a planet to put it on. There have been a rather large number of books written on the subject, using stable and tested physics, tech, economics, etc. Start with "The High Frontier" by Gerard K. O'Neill... which proved it to be possible even with 1970's-era technology.
"The energy and resources to provide a livable habitat in space are astronomical, in the pure sense."
Actually, once a critical mass of people and equipment are out of Earth's gravity well, the rest falls into place. Water (the absolute most prime ingredient for life) is actually quite abundant throughout the solar system, even in readily-available water-ice form. With water you can get oxygen, fuel, water, and shielding - things that tend to make up the majority of any spacecraft's weight. Minerals for chemistry (organic and not) are rather plentiful if you know where to look, and plan for enough time to get them.
The initial costs are expensive, yes. There's no doubting that. OTOH, Hoover Dam was prohibitively expensive, and yet it (still) serves to provide a substantial chunk of Los Angeles' electrical power. Columbus' voyage was very pricey, even by the economies of Spain's time... yet here we are sitting in North America, which is (as a whole) currently the largest economic, technological, and cultural engine on the planet. You really don't want to know how much money was thrown into the tech and materials that went into today's rocketry, yet I bet you'll complain if your in-dash GPS decides to die off, or ESPN (or whatever your favorite channels) went off-air (even if you use cable TV, your cable TV company doesn't ;) ).
65 million years ago, pretty much all of the dominant life forms on Earth was wiped out by a smallish asteroid slamming into what is now known as the Western Hemisphere. Statistically, we're a bit overdue for the next one (and there's a few candidates that are due to come awful close...) One good, hard pandemic of any serious caliber (no, not that pathetic Swine Flu hype - think "Ebola with some longevity"), and we're dead. The Earth's magnetic field has been decreasing by a measurable percentage over the last century, and there's apparently no slowdown... once it's gone, so too is our cosmic ray shielding, then eventually our atmosphere and water vapor.
Oh, but wait - it gets even better, because we don't even have to wait for a couple hundred thousand years. How about we hang around for the next ice age, due (roughly) within the next 10k years at the most? I'm sure it'll be loads of fun watching billions of people clamor for the produce of what little arable land is available, once the major breadbaskets of the world get covered with a mile-thick sheet of ice.
Of course, we could just wait a mere hundred or two years, and it is very likely that humanity will (as usual) erupt in a global (or even inter/intra-continental) conflict, but this time someone's got a weapon type that makes the word "thermonuclear" seem ever so weak by comparison...
...suddenly it tends to start making sense to put our collective species' eggs into more than one fragile basket, doesn't it?
Of course, as you've said - this stuff is hard, and people aren't initially designed for living off-Earth. After all, we have to get enough folks up there, the equipment and materials will be pricey (at least at first), and there's a lot of tech that would certainly make things easier to do large-scale...
So why not develop and test them now, instead of waiting for a crisis (when it'll be way too damned late to do anything either meaningful or redundant enough for humanity to survive long-term)?
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080310-mm-grb-us.html
social programs do work, the unenployed/illiterate/infant death/childhood death/malnutrition/and homelessness numbers have all gone down since fdr, they arent gone because we arent in a position to eliminate them. one solution is communism, the other is us actually getting our **** together and helping, neither of which is going to happen.
politics was created to mend our inadequacies and therefore will always be a reflection of the worst part of ourselves
Politics (and politicians) suck.
And Jimmy Carter's Nobel prize had nothing to do with NASA, so that is a red herring. Is there any chance that you could actually stay on topic? Probably not....
let take cars as an example, i don't think u can stick a v8 into a yaris, no? well, at least I think there is always room for improvent for chasis let it be cars, planes, computers, or space shuttles...
of course I know u mean a shuttle that stays in space but we still need to send people and supply up there so from earth to space is... pretty much the same thing in the end, unless u were refering to the space station.
side note what i do think is doable is setting up a lauch/landing pad on the moon and leave a vehical in orbit of the moon for purely that purpose, that would reduce the complexity of creating a new lunar landing vehical everytime, considering the lower gravitational pull of the moon. or at least i think the electrical propulsion system used in those high speed railways should provide some of the thrust needed for lauch.(aka lots of solar panel as a result)
The initial claim was made elsewhere. The cite:
Lewis, J. S., Mining the Sky, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1996.
NASA countered that it did have them on microfilm, but would not elaborate as to whether or not they were complete or accessible.
So, are you done with the 'tude?
http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_five_000313.html
I disagree. Before we spend hundreds of billions to go to the Moon and Mars, we should first figure out how to greatly reduce the price to get to low Earth orbit (currently more than $10,000 per pound). Nasa should focus on building a fleet of fully reusable space craft that can be reflown in as little as a few hours with not much more than re fueling.
Bring the cost of a launch to under $100,000 and then we can talk about trips to Mars and beyond.
This is why it took new companies to meet the xprize.
It will take a year to get to and return from Mars and the cost will be far more then anything we have ever payed for a trip to the Moon, to fly the shuttle or to build the Space Station. We best get it right the first time by practising with a base on the Moon. My guess is we will be spending some time there as much as a year. We'll be sending a base to Mars and that will require experience not just money..
You all enjoy your cellphones,GPS, televised live events and HD TV. Thank NASA for that.
So while they have been launching all these satellites into space they have not been advancing manned exploration and launch vehicles.
No kidding they have not made a splash!
When I was a kid... all kids were interested in the math and sciences... driven by the future of manned spaceflight to the stars.... because of what we accomplished in getting to the moon.
What is wrong wih the space program is the lack of will by our politicians and yes public... expressed by their lethargy and punctuated by their own self -involvement and need to be provided for.
Manned space exploration, defense,huge engineering projects is what the government is for... to accomplish tasks to great for one state.
Instead we get government now that pays for fillng in potholes...and labeling it 'stimulus'.
Cut back these social entitlements... I am of Hispanic background.. grew up in meager means. Yet today I am successful enough to care for my parents.... hard work = character. Did not need a government handout either.
Lets get back to space...lets show our youth how the chance to grow is limited only by our imagination.
Stop looking inwards.... and look to the future for a return investment.
With the dubious successes NASA has had, I would not vote to extend them funds for this folly.
1) send mining missions to Near Earth Asteroids, many of which contain a trillion dollars worth of minerals, and are actually quite simple to send to the Earth
2) mine minerals on the Moon which can be sent to the Earth by Rail Gun, due to the low escape velocity of the Moon
3) manufacture materials in the low gravity and vacuum of the Moon that can?t be made on the Earth ? a potential trillion dollar industry
4) mine Helium 3 and other substances that cannot be done on the Earth economically
5) establish a base from which any potential asteroid or comet collisions with the Earth can be detected and prevented (just 10,000 years ago a comet or asteroid devastated North America and wiped out the Clovis People.)
6) build a sun shade at the L1 point between the Sun and the Earth (easily launched by rail gun from the Moon), this would provide an emergency protection against Runaway Global Warming, allow increased sunlight after a massive Volcanic explosion (two in the 1800?s) that cause worldwide crop failures due to dust & SOx released into the upper atmosphere, protect against catastrophic droughts caused by industrial emissions or deforestation ( such as the last major African drought was believed to be caused by emissions released by European Industry ) ? certainly a potential value exceeding 10?s of trillion dollars
7) launch the materials to Terraform Mars, certainly it is entirely within our ability to make Mars habitable to Terrestrial Life. Establishing a new world ecosystem, essentially the progeny of the Earth, would be the greatest ENVIRONMENTAL ACHIEVEMENT since the pre-Cambrian Explosion. It would make all the damage Humans have done to the Earth?s Ecology a comparative triviality.
Undoubtedly, there is dozens or even hundreds of other high value applications that I haven?t mentioned or that nobody has even thought of yet.
Pres. Kennedy said it best when he said that the US needed to go to the moon "and do the other things" not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Humanity needs to go to the moon and Mars and beyond because exploration is who we are.
But the Cold War is indeed over, and the time for wasteful national monopoly is as well. what needs to happen is the creation of a UN space agency (it could be a branch of UNESCO, or a separate agency), that can take the budgetary contributions of numerous spacefaring nations, pool them, and take humanity to Mars, and not just the United States. The Europeans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Indians and Canadians, all have expertise and funding. Why not unite the brains and the bucks? After all, visiting another world ought to be something we do as a world, not another chauvinistic exercise in nationalism (and on a taxpayer by taxpayer basis, it would probably be cheaper).
BTW, by far the largest expendature of the US Government is not social programs. It's the military. We're going to spend billions putting human foot prints on Mars when millions here die untimely deaths due to lack of medical insurance or the greed of insurance companies? Amazing...
- by July 22, 2009 7:38 PM PDT
- Excellent article, but I couldn't help but notice--Pellerin advances the argument for robotic exploration by saying wants to see Hubble-like pictures in X-ray, gamma ray, and infrared? He has just dam*ed robotic exploration (or, in fairness, the author might have erred). Those Great Observatories were launched--Chandra, Compton, and Spitzer. No one outside the space/science community has heard of them because, unlike Hubble, they weren't launched by manned spacecraft and were never repaired/upgraded by astronauts.
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