Moonstruck
The next U.S. President will have an offer from a few of the most influential leaders of the space community. The group will offer an alternative to President Bush’s “vision for space exploration”. It includes doing away with a lunar base and concentrate on manned missions to asteroids as well as a renewal emphasis on earth environmental space craft.
To clarify these extensive changes to the NASA/Bush administration Vision for Space Exploration (VSE), top U.S. planetary scientists, several astronauts, and former NASA division directors will meet privately at Stanford University in February. Rejecting the Bush lunar base concept involves several changes. Manned asteroid landings could promote earlier manned flights to Mars orbit with possible landing, by astronauts, on the moons Phobos and Deimos.
To make enthusiastic human spaceflight plans an actuality, the “alternate vision, planned by the group, would invite more private-sector incentives. Space Telescope could be parked and maintained similar to that of Hubble. The new manned missions goals will aim at sending astronauts to Lagrangian points, one million miles from earth. At this location, the earth’s and sun’s gravity cancel each other out and space craft such as a replacement for Hubble. There would be advantages and disadvantages with changes.
With the lunar base gone, additional personnel could be lost as there would be fewer Ares V. launches and there is no lunar based infrastructure work assigned to KSC. However, there would be a gain, with the increased, with the increased space environmental-monitoring goal at Goddard Space Flight Center and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration near Washingto, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. “The prospect of challenging new manned missions to asteroids is drawing far more excitement among young people than a “return” (as in going backward) to the moon”, says Lou Friedman, who heads The Planetary Society, the country’s largest space interest group. “A lot of people going to the meeting believe “the Moon is yesterday”, says Friedman.
It just does not feel right. And there’s the growing belief that at high cost, it can offer minimal engineering benefits for the possibility of a future manned Mars operations. Noel W. Hinners, who had extensive Apollo lunar science and system responsibility at Bell Laboratories, is quoted as saying that under the alternative VUSE, even smaller and more individualized lunar sorties would be reduced, perhaps deleted entirely. Hinners headed all of NASA’s science program development as well as leading Lockhead Martin Spaceflight System. He believes the group should examine dropping all the lunar sorties to accelerate the human push to Mars in the revised VSE proposal to the new administration.
A return to the manned moon operations has become “a bridge too far” in the Bush administration’s VSE, says Wes Huntress, another former planetary mission manager. Major lunar-related contracts for the Constellation Crew Exploration Vehicle Orion command ship, a lunar lander design and Ares V. launcher have yet to be awarded, giving the next administration some breathing room in post-Bush administration VSE contracting.
This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 4:54 am and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. 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.
