A Mars Odyssey

See part one for the first half of this article.

Japan, not to be outdone by its much larger neighbor, has sent numerous craft into space including a module of the International Space Station (ISS). The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has recently announced plans to send a manned mission to the moon as early as 2025 and begin building a base of their own by 2030. Whether JAXA will go it alone or team up with another agency has yet to be determined, but the desire clearly is there. JAXA’s mission is innovative in that it plans on heavily integrating nanotechnology in the as-yet unnamed program. The agency’s earthbound initiatives include a Mach-5 hydrogen fueled plane that would travel from Tokyo to Los Angeles in little more than an hour.

The Russian Aviation and Space Agency (also Roskosmos or RKA), NASA’s one time rival and now partner, not only put the first man into space, but also, have been to the moon many times. Recording the first ever pictures of the dark side of the moon in 1959, among many other space firsts, is in the planning stages of building a power plant on The Moon to harvest helium-3. Pioneers of space tourism, they plan to offer a 2-week stay on the ISS and a tour of The Moon for only $100 million by 2014. RKA (also with a spiffy star-fleet-like logo) is working behind the scenes to get in on the Constellation Project and assist with the proposed moon base construction to ensure it is up and ready to go by 2024. That might be long shot, though the agency has been increasingly well funded from oil revenues and their budget may top NASA’s within the next 10 years if funding trends continue.

Suffice it to say, NASA’s decision to go to the moon may very well bring a crowd, and the technology that all mankind could enjoy as a result is tantalizing. Moreover, UN treaties have outlawed ownership of The Moon in documents similar to those that protect Antarctica from becoming a colony for anything but science. One way or another, humans will be on the moon in some capacity well before mid-century, and like science itself, it will likely be a league of nations.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 2:10 am and is filed under Mission History, 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.