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Space Leaders Work To Replace Lunar Base With Manned Asteroid Missions
Jan 18, 2008
By Craig Covault
Some of the most influential leaders of the space community are quietly working to offer the next U.S. president an alternative to President Bush's "vision for space exploration"--one that would delete a lunar base and move instead toward manned missions to asteroids along with a renewed emphasis on Earth environmental spacecraft.
Top U.S. planetary scientists, several astronauts and former NASA division directors will meet privately at Stanford University on Feb. 12-13 to define these sweeping changes to the NASA/Bush administration Vision for Space Exploration (VSE).
Abandoning the Bush lunar base concept in favor of manned asteroid landings could also lead to much earlier manned flights to Mars orbit, where astronauts could land on the moons Phobos or Deimos.
Their goals for a new array of missions also include sending astronauts to Lagrangian points, 1 million mi. from Earth, where the Earth's and Sun's gravity cancel each other out and spacecraft such as replacements for the Hubble Space Telescope could be parked and serviced much like Hubble.
The "alternate vision" the group plans to offer would urge far greater private-sector incentives to make ambitious human spaceflight plans a reality.
There would also be some different "winners and losers" compared with the Bush vision. If the lunar base is deleted, the Kennedy Space Center could lose additional personnel because there would be fewer Ares V launches and no lunar base infrastructure work that had been assigned to KSC. On the other hand, the Goddard Space Flight Center and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration near Washington, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, would gain with the increased space environmental-monitoring goal.
Numerous planetary managers told Aviation Week & Space Technology they now fear a manned Moon base and even shorter sorties to the Moon will bog down the space program for decades and inhibit, rather than facilitate, manned Mars operations--the ultimate goal of both the Bush and alternative visions. The first lunar sortie would be flown by about 2020 under the Bush plan.
If alternative-vision planners have their way, the mission could instead be flown to an asteroid in about 2025.
Participants in the upcoming meeting contend there's little public enthusiasm for a return to the Moon, especially among youth, and that the Bush administration has laid out grandiose plans but has done little to provide the funding to realize them on a reasonable timescale.
Planners say the Bush plan is beginning to crumble, with only companies that have won major funding still enthusiastic about the existing plan.
"It's becoming painfully obvious that the Moon is not a stepping-stone for manned Mars operations but is instead a stumbling block," says Robert Farquhar, a veteran of planning and operating planetary and deep-space missions.
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.
The society is co-hosting the invitation-only VSE replanning session with Stanford. A lot of people going to the meeting believe "the Moon is so yesterday," says Friedman.
"It just does not feel right. And there's growing belief that, at high cost, it offers minimal engineering benefit for later manned Mars operations."
Under the alternative VSE, even smaller, individual lunar sorties would be reduced, or perhaps deleted entirely, says Noel W. Hinners, who had extensive Apollo lunar science and system responsibility at Bell Laboratories before heading all of NASA's science program development. He also led Lockheed Martin Spaceflight System.
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Jan 18, 2008
By Craig Covault
Some of the most influential leaders of the space community are quietly working to offer the next U.S. president an alternative to President Bush's "vision for space exploration"--one that would delete a lunar base and move instead toward manned missions to asteroids along with a renewed emphasis on Earth environmental spacecraft.
Top U.S. planetary scientists, several astronauts and former NASA division directors will meet privately at Stanford University on Feb. 12-13 to define these sweeping changes to the NASA/Bush administration Vision for Space Exploration (VSE).
Abandoning the Bush lunar base concept in favor of manned asteroid landings could also lead to much earlier manned flights to Mars orbit, where astronauts could land on the moons Phobos or Deimos.
Their goals for a new array of missions also include sending astronauts to Lagrangian points, 1 million mi. from Earth, where the Earth's and Sun's gravity cancel each other out and spacecraft such as replacements for the Hubble Space Telescope could be parked and serviced much like Hubble.
The "alternate vision" the group plans to offer would urge far greater private-sector incentives to make ambitious human spaceflight plans a reality.
There would also be some different "winners and losers" compared with the Bush vision. If the lunar base is deleted, the Kennedy Space Center could lose additional personnel because there would be fewer Ares V launches and no lunar base infrastructure work that had been assigned to KSC. On the other hand, the Goddard Space Flight Center and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration near Washington, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, would gain with the increased space environmental-monitoring goal.
Numerous planetary managers told Aviation Week & Space Technology they now fear a manned Moon base and even shorter sorties to the Moon will bog down the space program for decades and inhibit, rather than facilitate, manned Mars operations--the ultimate goal of both the Bush and alternative visions. The first lunar sortie would be flown by about 2020 under the Bush plan.
If alternative-vision planners have their way, the mission could instead be flown to an asteroid in about 2025.
Participants in the upcoming meeting contend there's little public enthusiasm for a return to the Moon, especially among youth, and that the Bush administration has laid out grandiose plans but has done little to provide the funding to realize them on a reasonable timescale.
Planners say the Bush plan is beginning to crumble, with only companies that have won major funding still enthusiastic about the existing plan.
"It's becoming painfully obvious that the Moon is not a stepping-stone for manned Mars operations but is instead a stumbling block," says Robert Farquhar, a veteran of planning and operating planetary and deep-space missions.
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.
The society is co-hosting the invitation-only VSE replanning session with Stanford. A lot of people going to the meeting believe "the Moon is so yesterday," says Friedman.
"It just does not feel right. And there's growing belief that, at high cost, it offers minimal engineering benefit for later manned Mars operations."
Under the alternative VSE, even smaller, individual lunar sorties would be reduced, or perhaps deleted entirely, says Noel W. Hinners, who had extensive Apollo lunar science and system responsibility at Bell Laboratories before heading all of NASA's science program development. He also led Lockheed Martin Spaceflight System.
>
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