Joint Project Proposes Human Outpost on Moon
Experts representatives of the United State’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have been meeting for the past six months in a detailed assessment of potential programs and technologies. Hopefully, in the near future these assessments will support a human outpost on the Moon.
On July 7 and 8th, an ESA sponsored Integrated Architecture Review was held at ESA’s ESTEC facility in Noordwijk, in the Netherlands. A briefing by NASA and ESA experts of the NASA/ESA Comparative Architecture Assessment intended to assess the degree upon which both agencies’ lunar exploration architecture concepts could complement, augment, or enhance the exploration plans of one another.
Through this process, technical teams of both NASA and the ESA engaged in a series of “joint, qualitative assessments of the potential scientific and exploration benefits that arise from collaboration between the ESA capabilities under study and NASA’s Ares I and V space transportation systems and lunar surface exploration architecture concepts” according to ESA.
Current plans to study lunar surface exploration architecture concepts by NASA to support humans returning to the Moon by 2020 are going on, consistent with the principles of Global Exploration Strategy. This strategy offers a special framework which will coordinate 14 participating member agencies into one planned unit for the overall coordination of space exploration. NASA will pursue an “open architecture” approach in order to maximize opportunities for international and commercial participation, calling for the transportation of astronauts and hardware to the Moon using specific vehicles:
• Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles
• The Orion crew exploration vehicle
• The Altair lunar lander
On the other side of the board at a conceptual stage is ESA, studying scenarios and associate architectures for human space exploration forming a plan which will build upon extensive human space flight experience, contributing to the International Space Station Program with several scenarios including:
• Potentioa future of an automated Ariane-5 based lunar cargo landing system
• European developed communication and navigation systems
• ESA developed human rated systems:
o Ariane 5 crew transportation capability and orbital outposts
• ESA developed dedicated lunar surface elements
o Habitation
o Mobility systems
Findings of this study include many things, such as a significant mutual interest in the “potential development of lunar cargo landing systems, communication and navigation systems, lunar orbital infrastructures, and lunar surface systems such as habitats or mobility systems. The study also identified the significant value to gained from redundant human crew transportation capability” according to the ESA website.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 6:04 am and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns, The Gear to Get There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
