New NASA Plans Drawn up for Larger Moon Base
“We want to get scientific return. We want to get information that will help, potentially, space commerce and we want to get international participation early,” Cooke told reporters in a teleconference. “All of these objectives we want to address as early in the flights as we possibly can by getting the outpost up and running quickly.”
According to an article in New York Times by John Schwartz, NASA has announced that is has plans drawn up for a Moon base that includes a pair of small, pressurized rovers that has a range of nearly 600 miles. The goal to have this begin is 2020, about 13 years from now, with the first proposal began last December for a polar lunar base that would be powered by “near constant sunlight on solar panels”.
…but plans for a lunar base was also released by NASA in a National Geographic News article, December 4, 2006, stating plans for the construction for a solar-powered outpost at one of the moon’s poles. This article stated that the base was to be permanently staffed by 2024. But the change has brought about some startling news—rather than putting together a lunar outpost pieced together from a large number of small, “separately launched modules as originally planned”, instead three very large habitats with fewer flights required will build a beachhead on the moon, according to NASA.
NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration system, Doug Cooke, said there was a reason for the newly revised plans of the space agency, which calls for the changed launching of larger habitats to the moon on unmanned cargo flights. The major factor is to be able to begin scientific observations sooner than if the astronauts were to spend most of the time putting together little habitats than a couple of large ones, requiring less sections and hardware, for long-duration expeditions. At the present time, NASA is planning on the moon’s Shackleton Crater near the lunar south pole as the location for the newly planned moonbase, to be used for solar power stations and hunting for water ice.
The Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and the Ares I booster are the means by which NASA is returning to the moon, detailed at the Space 2007 Conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronauts (AIAA) located in Long Beach, California. According to Laurie Leshin, director of sciences and exploration at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight, “There is some great science to do on the moon”.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 4:41 am and is filed under Mission Objectives, 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.
