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A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen
- desc 7y agoThis could be done, if everyone involved were willing to accept massive risk to the lives of the astronauts (including the astronauts, obviously). By which I mean, after hurriedly building rockets and testing them, finally going ahead with a backup rocket and crew to meet the deadline if the first one blows up on the pad. With the risk of the backup doing the same... If they're simply gambling on technology and engineering these days 'being faster', they're doomed to failure and I hope the individuals involved don't wind up killing anyone.
- Causality1 7y agoWe/our government is completely unwilling to invest the multi-trillion dollar expense of creating a permanent moon colony. In light of that, I believe arguments to the effect of "a moon base would make Mars easier" are baseless since creating that type of installation on the moon would dwarf the cost of a single shot to Mars and back. In light of that, our current moon efforts are nothing but make-work doing things we've already done because Mars is actually hard.
- anchpop 7y agoWhy would a permanent Moon base make Mars easier? Would the idea to build a space elevator or manufacture rockets and fuel there?
- valzam 7y agoAFAIK the main benefit would be lower gravity for launching rockets and easier access (again because of gravity) to mining resources in space. Broadly related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization
- tzs 7y agoIn the (probably very) long term, a permanent Moon base capable of manufacturing and of growing food could be the key to human bases throughout the solar system. Suppose you need to get from planet or moon X to planet or moon Y, using a rocket. The usual way is to start at X and use the rocket to put yourself in an elliptical orbit that intersects both the orbits of X and Y. Then you coast in that orbit until it intersects Y's orbit, and use the rocket to put yourself in Y's orbit. The nice thing about this approach is that it is speedy. If you only can carry enough fuel for limited use of the rocket, I think that this is the fastest way to go. For a manned round trip mission, you have to take the speedy way, at least for much of the interesting parts of the solar system. Round trip to Jupiter, for example, would be several years at least. If you do not care about speed there is a much cheaper way to get from X to Y. Interesting thing happen around various Lagrange points giving unstable orbits around them that can extend for vast distances away from the Lagrange point, and which take almost no energy to transfer to from an orbit that is close to the Lagrange point. So you start in orbit around X, then move to an appropriately chosen X/Sun Lagrange point. This is not very expensive. At that Lagrange point, you nudge into one of those big unstable orbits. Eventually that orbit intersects and unstable orbit for a Y/Sun Lagrange point. A little nudge switches you to that, which eventually takes you to near a Y/Sun Lagrange point. There you can nudge again to get into a stable orbit, and from there it is cheap to get to Y. But this is not fast. We're not talking nice straightforward elliptical orbits. The unstable orbit phase looks more like the path of one of those desktop tops where you have several magnets on a plate with another magnet on a rigid pendulum switching above it, and it looks like its motion is random. It can take a long time for it to get to one of the points where you can do the transfer to the other unstable orbit, and then that can meander a very long time before getting to the Y Lagrange point. Depending on the particular X and Y, this can be anything from a few years to a few centuries. This would be useless for transporting humans, but for long term transport of goods to support humans, it has a lot of potential. Suppose you want to do a big base on Titan, say, and suppose it's 50 years to send things from around Earth to Titan via cheap unstable orbits. (I don't know how long it actually is...this is just for illustration). What you can do is start sending regular supply packages to Titan this way. Send, say, one a month. It takes 50 years for the first one to actually arrive at Titan, and then after that you have one arriving per month. When the supplies start arriving at Titan, then you send the manned mission via the normal fast orbits. Note that since you've got supplies at Titan already the manned mission only has to carry enough food and oxygen and water to last for the outbound trip itself. It does not need to carry anything for the stay on Titan, or for any return trip. Ideally, what you want to do is as soon as you are technologically capable start using the slow but cheap unstable orbit system to start sending regular supplies to all of the places you think you might want to establish manned bases later. Over the next decades and centuries, as supplies start arriving at those places you can then send the manned missions to explore them, followed by the base building missions if you decide you do want bases there. You could send them all from Earth, but doing this right would involve sending a whole lot of them over a very long time, and doing so from Earth would take a lot more energy than doing so from the Moon so it probably becomes a lot more feasible if you can make and launch the supply packages from the Moon. Probably won't ever happen, though, because it requires long term planning on a scale that we no longer seem capable of.
- WalterBright 7y agoBecause most of the technology needed on Mars can be proven on the Moon, which is far, far cheaper to reach and resupply. Establishing a moon base and concentrating on making it self-sustaining is critical to any successful space penetration by humanity.
- netman21 7y agoActually, establishing any self sustaining space colony would do. No need to build it at the bottom of a gravity well.
- WalterBright 7y agoLook at the difference in the size of rocket needed to lift two men to lunar orbit vs earth orbit. It's really not a big deal to blast off from the moon. Gravity has lots of advantages. For one thing, toilets work.
- netman21 7y agoGravity is easy to simulate with spin.
- WalterBright 7y agoThat's not so easy - the station has to be very large to do that, otherwise people get dizzy with coriolis effects. With a large station comes the problem of dropping something sharp/heavy and having it crash through the hull. A large station means every gram of material has to be boosted up out of some gravity well to it. Whereas on the moon, the idea is to use the material already there.
- netman21 7y agoI get all that. But keep in mind that nothing has ever been manufactured on the Moon. Nothing. I love the idea of using Lunar regolith to make stuff. But the first Moon bases will be shipped there. Just like the first space bases. Baby steps.
- redahs 7y agoWhich is rational. The annual product of lunar soil is zero. Extending the margin of production to the moon will lower wages and increase poverty. The only way to get the general public behind the idea of settling other planets is through remote terraforming. If there were robots, domes, mirrors, and synthetic organisms put there first to provide free soil, air, and water to settlers, then the annual product of lunar soil be above zero, and off-planet workers could actually receive wages.
- nine_k 7y agoThe value of having massive amounts of aluminum made from the lunar crust and sun power can be quite above zero. Same with water mined from some lunar craters. With more technology advancement, the oxygen trapped in oxides of lunar soil could also be extracted and put into useful orbits away from Earth surface, hopefully cheaper than brought from Earth. Well, maybe also some dome-grown fruit and vegetables, but not very soon.
- netman21 7y agoPut me in the No Way! column. NASA budget for exploration including SLS is about $3.5 billion. The Apollo mission cost $145 billion. Just not going to happen. Best guess: double budget to $7 billion and spend that much every year for 20 years and we will be back on the Moon.
- bernardopires 7y agoYou mean the entire Apollo program cost $145 billion. This is one mission to the moon with much better technology and lower costs. You just can not compare costs like this.
- thombat 7y agoAccording to the per-year costing in [0], about 80% of the entire Apollo program cost was accrued before the first moon landing. That suggests that even just one mission will come with a substantial price ticket, even if no hardware is built for subsequent missions. [0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3737/1 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3737/1
- avmich 7y agoYes, but analogous 80% of the entire Artemis cost are also already spent and the results are there. Engines, launchers, spacecrafts (Apollo analog maiden LEO flight is expected this spring), electronics, power, communications...
- thombat 7y agoSince the lander and gateway are yet to be built let alone tested (at least Wikipedia still has them as a "concept") it seems too soon to say what the final cost will be. By way of comparison the first full Apollo stack flight was 20 months before Apollo 11, which puts it close to the 60%-spend point, and that was some five years after the LM contract was placed.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoI am extremely pessimistic that the 2024 launch will happen. The linked article gets to most of the main reasons, but man, could you imagine the fallout of a Apollo 1 type incident leading to a loss of the Artemis crew? NASA, as a govt agency, slingshots between "safety above all else" and "launch the bastard"
- njarboe 7y ago'"I am more interested in maximizing the odds of success for this bold undertaking and making it as safe as any human journey into the deep space can be, than I am in having NASA meet arbitrary deadlines," Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson — a Democrat from Texas and the chairwoman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology — said at a recent hearing.' Waiting to make a journey until it is "as safe as can be" means that one never makes the journey at all. This has been NASA's curse since the Challenger explosion. Human space exploration is not going to happen with a "safety first" culture.
- api 7y agoIt all starts when we leave the womb, which is a stupid reckless decision.
- jdkee 7y agoI would reckon it ain't gonna happen by 2024, given the mission critical failures Boeing has had with the Starliner. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/science/boeing-starliner-... Or the SLS system: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/after-a-corrective-action-boeing-back-at-work-on-sls-rocket-core-stage/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/after-a-corrective-a...
- jessriedel 7y agoThe Starliner is for low-Earth orbit and is not part of the Artemis architecture for going to the Moon.
- redahs 7y agoThere's not much reason to settle the moon and mars prior to the remote establishment of an independent food supply. Aggressive remote terraforming through domes, mirrors, foreign microorganisms, explosives, and robots should come first. Establishing automated synthetic systems on these rocks to mimic what nature provides for free on Earth is the hard problem to be solving. Without such systems already place, wages will be extremely low and no one will want to live there.
- rdlw 7y agoViability due to public opinion is a reason. I think that NASA has been successful enough in popularizing the ideals of not interfering with the potential biospheres (or lacks of biosphere) of other planets, 'Planetary Protection', that any plan for 'aggressive remote terraforming' would be met with public outcry, for the sake of preserving areological history.
- LargeWu 7y ago"the ideals of not interfering with the potential biospheres (or lacks of biosphere) of other planets" I think their ideal is to protect planets from interfering with their ecosystems unintentionally. Microbial contamination, for example. Especially Mars, since we don't know what kind of life, if any, existed or currently exists there. Also some of Saturn's and maybe Jupiter's moons. But I think if there were ever a strategic reason and viable option to terraform one of those bodies, which I think is pretty unlikely anyway, NASA would probably consider it. But by that time, I think it's extremely likely that NASA and the USA probably wouldn't exist as we know it anyway.
- rdlw 7y agoNASA states that the first goal of Planetary Protection is to "Carefully control forward contamination of other worlds by terrestrial organisms and organic materials carried by spacecraft in order to guarantee the integrity of the search and study of extraterrestrial life, if it exists." [0] It does seem that unintentional interference is the main concern, but intentional interference almost certainly won't be considered on the relevant timescale, which is now until the first Mars landing, since aggressive terraforming was posed as an alternative to unsustainable Martian colonies. [0] https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection
- thrower123 7y agoElon Musk will land on the moon before NASA does. You can carve that prediction in stone.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoMaybe but it likely won't be any time soon. https://www.space.com/35876-how-spacex-moon-flight-will-work.html https://www.space.com/35876-how-spacex-moon-flight-will-work...
- Taniwha 7y agouh-oh, time to take the secret sound stage in Arizona out of mothballs ....
- temptemptemp111 7y agoExactly
- temptemptemp111 7y agoExcept it was probably filmed in Greenland ;)
- mindcrime 7y agoOkay, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems.
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoI'm never sure when watching that movie if Dan Aykroyd is acting or just being himself.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ifdefdebug 7y agoNASA wants to go to moon in about 4 years (!) but today they can't even lift a human into earth orbit since they discontinued their last spacecraft capable of such a task. Dream on.
- nine_k 7y agoThey can always hire a commercial rocket SpaceX used to be their long-time partner.
- rst 7y agoIt needs more than just the rocket. You also need a lunar lander, and all we have right now are paper sketches of designs that would take more than four years to finish and build, on conventional timelines. (One wild card is the SpaceX Starship, which Elon is talking about having some lunar capability for, on extremely aggressive timelines. But Starship is a risky project in all sorts of ways -- besides which, before trying to take Elon's timelines to the bank, you might want to look at the years of delays before they finally launched Falcon Heavy.)
- rtsil 7y agoMost of the Falcon Heavy delays was because F9 became capable of lifting many of the payloads originally planned for Heavy, which then became (and still is) a solution in search of a problem.
- chasd00 7y agovery true, by the time falcon heavy launched it was more of a novelty than anything else. I'm surprised it wasn't scrapped entirely and the effort redirected to BFR.
- iso947 7y ago> needs more than just the rocket. You also need a lunar lander With blackjack. And hookers. In fact forget the lunar lander.
- warlog 7y agoFirst time for everything.
- fmakunbound 7y agoWould be better to spend that on robotic exploration. More probes to other planets, the Sun, asteroids etc. and space telescopes. Much greater scientific return on the dollar.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoManned programs provide more money to important voter blocs.
- baq 7y agoif you put a scientist with a shovel and a lab kit on the surface of mars, he'd do more science in a week than all the robots we've sent there to date.
- ljf 7y agoBut what would the cost to put a scientist on Mars for a week vs all the robotic missions we've sent so far? Which of those missions does the human mission require as a sunk cost?
- btilly 7y agoNASA's best bet is to bite the bullet, scrap the SLS already, and help pay for SpaceX's development. SpaceX has a publicly announced rocket design that is capable of getting men to the Moon and back. They are working on it for themselves. They are looking for every source of funding that they can get. They already are planning suborbital flights this summer, and already are looking for it to be human rated by NASA. Their announced timeline (which is probably ambitious but that is par for the course) includes suborbital flights this summer, aiming for orbit by 2020, going around the moon in 2022, going around the Moon with a human inside by 2023, and humans on the moon for 2024. They have a record of being ambitious, but also a record of launches. And nobody on the planet in recent years has developed more successful rockets or had more successful rockets than SpaceX. More impressively, nobody has done it so cheaply. So...why isn't Trump talking to Elon Musk yet?
- gfodor 7y agoThe only way to stop SpaceX is to convince the public they are affiliated with a political party, or that space exploration is a political issue. It’s one of the few arenas that hasn’t been enveloped by hyperpartisanship, so I suspect any actual help Trump may be giving SpaceX either doesn’t exist or is widely being kept out of the public spotlight.
- HuShifang 7y agoThere's a reason SLS is nicknamed the Senate Launch System -- Sen. Shelby of Alabama rains fire down on any NASA official who comes anywhere near observing that SpaceX could fulfill any objectives allocated to the SLS. It's as much a pork barrel, to use the political lingo, as it is a rocket -- a steady source of jobs for Alabama and a couple other Southern states for as long as it's in development / production. And no one cares enough to take on Shelby and his allies. So, rational proposals like using SpaceX are sadly political non-starters at the moment.
- m4rtink 7y agoIt really does seems rather un-democratical if just single (albeit voted) representative wields so much power, apparently withou much the others can do about it.
- sandworm101 7y agoNo chance. This isn't the 1950s. We don't just throw people atop rockets anymore. These are vehicles, aircraft. There is absolutely no way any of the current crop of space vehicles could be made ready for a trip to the moon anytime before 2024. Going beyond low orbit, away from the sub-45min return time, is something we haven't done in generations. The craft need to be tested, repeatedly. Each test flight then has to be analyzed before the next test flight. The turnaround for a single test will be many months, even a year. Getting all the bits and pieces together would then take many more years of integration work. Look at the JWST. Look at the F-35. Look at the 737-max. These are complicated systems with layers of dependencies. Our society today simply does not accept the cowboy approach to safety that was the original moon race. The next moon landing will only happen after a decade-long deliberative, iterative, campaign requiring the support of many subsequent governments.
- Someone 7y agoAlso, combine ”NASA says contracts to build a lunar lander could be awarded in late February or March.” with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module#History. For the LM, the contract was awarded in September 1962, and first flight (unmanned) was in January, 1968. So, even Apollo’s aggressive schedule needed more time to first flight than what NASA would have now between awarding the contract and landing humans on the moon.
- onionisafruit 7y agoDid we throw away everything we learned in the apollo program? They won’t be starting from scratch on the design.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoA good chunk of Apollo knowledge isn't very useful for various reasons. 1) The tribal knowledge to even implement Apollo era technology is pretty much gone 2) Apollo flight hardware doesn't exist, probably couldn't even be manufactured without extremely expensive tooling and build up to recreate outdated hardware. 3) Lots of Apollo era designs don't exist on paper. The F1 engine doesn't really even have a standard design, since every iteration was changed to be "better" by throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticked.
- scottlocklin 7y agoHere's a prediction of "back to the moon" by 2018 in 2005: https://www.space.com/1567-nasa-moon-plans-apollo-steroids.html https://www.space.com/1567-nasa-moon-plans-apollo-steroids.h... Face it lads; we, as in the US, ain't going back. Country will fall apart first. Humans might go back some day. The US won't.
- 32gbsd 7y agocarrots and rabbit holes
- proggyboy 7y agowhat a sad little life you live.
- kunglao 7y agoFirst let's get the space suits and things that actually matter ready this time eh? :p
- ChuckMcM 7y agoI agree with most people that it would be nearly impossible without a Manhattan Project style commitment from the Government and I don't see that happening. That said, an interesting thought experiment would be to put a Falcon 9 second stage to 'sleep' on an up coming mission for a couple of weeks and then have it wake up and relight. If that works push it to a month. With a system like that you could Falcon Heavy to launch a return stage into a Lunar transfer orbit and have it go into orbit at the moon. Then launch one into LEO. Finally launch a service module and landing craft rendezvous with the stage in orbit, burn to the moon. Land, take off, rendezvous with the lunar return stage, and fly back. This uses all "known" technology from SpaceX with a new lunar lander but we know that SpaceX has the propulsive landing chops to pull that off. It avoids the currently "unknown" technology of refueling a cryogenic rocket in space. It does require a reasonable launch cadence on SpaceX's part which is why the experiment of can you leave a cryogenic stage around and relight it.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoThey've done extended, multiple relight tests of the second stage as part of their Air Force mission rating tests. I don't think it is anywhere near designed to stay usable after multiple days of staying cold, that is a completely different mission profile from what the second stage was designed to do, aka earth orbit missions. I would expect the stored cryogenics would not take well to it.
- m4rtink 7y agoExactly, the main issue is the liquid oxygen on board - withou either active cooling or very clever isolation, there will not be any left after a while, as it will evaporate. The soviets did experiments with a blok d upper stage that was also kerosene/LOX and were able to push it to a couple days, maybe up to a single week. So really multiple weeks are not doable due to LOX alone withou turning your already mass limitted upper stage to an advanced orbital propelant depot. Also longer term you will start hitting also other issues, such as battery power (might need to add solar panels), stuff getting too cold/hot, long term exposure of electronics to cosmic radiation, lack of ulage fuel, etc.
- areoform 7y agoIgnoring that such bullishness is expected of the current administration's appointees, the devil's advocate can make a convincing case; Q. Can NASA send a crew to the Lunar Surface by 2024? And safely return them to Earth? Yes, they can. Sandworm laid out the mission cost in lives problem, but modern spaceflight already has defined an acceptable margin for loss of crew in most missions - 1 in 270 as set by NASA for its Commercial Crew Transportation System (CCTS) program. The historical mortality rate for astronauts remains at 3.2%, or a Loss of Crew (LOC) rate of 4 in 125 across all vehicles and missions. Let us assume that the political calculus changes and the 3.2% LOC rate becomes acceptable. What's next? What's next would be the design of a navigation system for translunar and cislunar navigation - after Apollo, and the exploration of the solar system, this has become a solved problem. We can run and code an AGC with inputs from far better sensors on an Arduino. NASA's engineers can also automate astrogation using Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technology. There are also highly efficient hydrogen upper stage engines available off the shelf for the Orion and the lander. Unlike Apollo, 2020's NASA can use a more modern approach of Earth-Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) to construct the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) stage with a lander and lunar orbiter via separate launches. Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) rendezvous and docking has become routine for us in this era. It's a maneuver that's performed several times each year at the International Space Station. LIDAR and automated docking has made an EOR safe and, virtually, error-free. For this theoretical exercize, the vehicle could be automatically assembled in an 100mi orbit. Crew could go up and rendezvous in the final lunar orbiter-and-return component of the vehicle, or in a temporary (Dragon) capsule. The EOR approach reduces the size of the launch vehicles required, making it feasible for a COTS provider like SpaceX to provide a Falcon Heavy for this purpose. It also allows for the re-use of current CCTS providers, by letting crew proceed to the vehicle in a human-space-flight rated Dragon capsule (or a mated CSM-equivalent). This system can be constructed via hardware that is currently being flight-rated, or will be flight rated soon, making the SLS redundant (in the short-term). The SLS - for political reasons - could be repositioned as a long-term support and heavy payload delivery vehicle as a part of an extended Space Transport System, as originally envisioned for the Shuttle. SpaceX could provide the reusable "shuttle" aspect. The SLS heavy-lifter capabilities. And a lunar gateway as a refueling station. A deal that keeps all parties happy. For the LEM component, NASA has the benefit of hindsight. The LEM designs still exist, there are LEMs in storage and can be mapped in 3D to study them. The data collected from 6 landings can be used to implement "in hindsight" improvements, making it easier to take the LEM template from Apollo and modernize it by reducing the electronics requirement and payload capacity. NASA doesn't have to redesign everything from scratch, there is a design that works. A design that was taken down to the surface with great uncertainty in 11 and 12, but worked for 14, 15, 16 and 17. The most difficult aspect of the mission - the ascent stage - was studied following Apollo, and can now be trivially simulated in computer games, such as Kerbal Space Program. We can beg, borrow and steal the LEM design, and simulate what the original planners could not, giving NASA a much faster turn-around time this time around. It is conceivable that, if the payload characteristics were more realistic, and the goals of staying on the surface were trimmed down, a slightly up-scaled LEM and a down-scaled Altair/LSAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_(spacecraft) could be made in 2 years or less. Flown in 3. Making it possible for an autonomous lunar landing in 4 and a surface jaunt in 4.5 years. However, that's theory, which would require tremendous resources to achieve. After a cislunar docking maneuver, our astronauts can come home riding a far superior thermal protection systems than any contemporary material available in the Apollo-era. The amount of research that has gone into this area is extremely impressive, and gives our pioneers a safe journey home, where they'll land and descend via parachutes - which are far more complicated, but something that NASA, the organization, has more cultural experience with than SpaceX or Boeing. From this template, a mission is not only conceivable - it's doable. The only question is how much. How much is congress willing to give to make this a reality? And how far is the Trump administration willing to go to seal the deal?
- chasd00 7y agothey should hold a press conference and get a reporter to ask about the possibility of SpaceX getting to the moon. Then they respond laughing saying "those amateurs? look, this is NASA, the big boys not some techies with a website". Then just get some coffee and wait. we'd be back on the moon by 2023.
- gfodor 7y agoSpaceX will beat them there regardless. Not out of a difference in skills, but NASA, let’s face it, is a political football. If Trump wants us to go to the moon, half the country will argue we should never set foot there again. NASA is basically gridlocked until the next administration, so SpaceX will get to the moon and Mars first.
- redis_mlc 7y agoCan somebody explain what the benefit of sending men to the moon is? I mean science or engineering. I don't mean PR or funding visibility - you can get that by sponsoring a NASCAR ride. Both the Space Shuttle and ISS have been huge money sinks with no benefit. How will another moon visit be any different?
- unchocked 7y agoBecause we now know there is water at the Moon’s poles, from which rocket fuel and life support consumables can be manufactured. Because of this, the Moon can be our first permanent foothold in space and the stepping stone to the rest of the solar system. Why humans? Not just because we aspire spread humanity beyond Earth. Humans also accomplish science objectives much faster than robots. A single human mission can accomplish more science and exploration than a decade-long robotic campaign.
- sandis 7y ago> Both the Space Shuttle and ISS have been huge money sinks with no benefit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_research_on_the_International_Space_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_research_on_the_Int...
- saberdancer 7y agoAstronaut Garrett Reisman on Joe Rogan show said something that resonated with me, we have plenty of experience with 1G of gravity and enough experience with 0G. They know the physical effects of both of those. What they do not know is effect of 0.2G or 0.5G in long term. Whether effect is linear or is it a curve. Etc. That's just for exploring long term space habitation. Another major reason to do it would be a potential mining/fueling base on the moon. Cost of any launch from Earth is quite prohibitive due to Earth gravity, Moon has gravity that is 6 times less powerful so if we managed to mine ice/hydrogen/oxygen from the surface of the moon it could be used to refuel rockets in space for missions to the rest of the solar system.
- hss 7y agoI would like to know the "why" behind landing on moon project. Don't we already know enough about moon? Why waste money on it? Can't this money be used in other space projects like Mars Landing or earth projects like fighting poverty?
- mLuby 7y agoThe problem with creating custom spacecraft each time is it's expensive and takes a while. It's done to get the most out of a single rocket launch (and because it extracts the most money from the customer AKA Congress AKA taxpayers). CubeSats have been revolutionary for standardizing small spacecraft launch. Next I want to see CubeLanders: standardized vehicles that land your payload on the Moon. Also I wish we did more on-orbit spacecraft assembly. A lot of the mass limitations go away if you don't have to fit everything for a moon landing and return onto one superheavy rocket. Just scrap the SLS and pay for a bunch of smaller launches!
- magicmouse 7y agoAbsolutely no chance. NASA spent 20 years designing this new super rocket, never even built a single one of them; so it only exists on paper, and when you look closely at the design it is basically the Saturn 5 with some slight modifications. The reason so many engineers jumped ship from NASA and went to work for SpaceX is that at least Elon is doing something with some alacrity. NASA is just a bunch of paper shuffling time wasters at this point (especially at the top). People forget that they subcontracted most of the Apollo project. Having civil servants who never get fired is not the way to achieve excellence in any product or service!
- jakeinspace 7y agoThe SLS core stage is assembled and currently undergoing testing
- autokad 7y agoNASA went from nothing to the moon in 10 years.
- nickserv 7y agoSLS is repurposed Space Shuttle hardware, not related to Saturn.
- baq 7y agoyou've just described precisely why it is in fact possible to do what they say: there's a company on the market that has both knowledge and appetite to do that. in fact, they might do an unmanned moon landing just to make a point to NASA to simplify their negotiations for a manned one.
- sidcool 7y agoIt's ambitious but possible. And this time it will be permanent, so even more preparation.
- starpilot 7y ago2004: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/bush_vision.html https://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/bush_vision.html "Our third goal," Bush said, "is to return to the moon by 2020, as the launching point for missions beyond."
- rob74 7y ago> A moon landing in 2024 would mean a triumph during the last year of President Trump's second term, if he gets reelected in November. Yeah, sounds just like Trump to rush this program (and endanger lives while doing it) just so he can bask in its (hopeful) success...
- bluGill 7y agoI hope not. I like telling old people that nobody has been to the moon in my lifetime. Last moon landing was December 1972, which puts bounds on my age and what I consider old people...
- netman21 7y agoOld person here. I was 13 in December 1972 when NASA talked abut a permanent colony on the Moon by 1984. That drove me to graduate college with a BS in aerospace engineering. I attended one of the top three universities for aerospace. In order to study rockets I had to do it via "independent study" because all of the classes had been removed from the curriculum by 1979.
- ponytech 7y agoWe were able to land on moon in 1969. How come are we not able to do it again 50 years later with all the technological progress?
- sgillen 7y agoIt’s really about the willpower and desire to have it happen (by which I really mean budget...) .We have the technology to go but it doesn’t make any sense to devote the resources it takes to make it happen. Yes it would take years to put together a manned moon mission again, but I feel confident that if for some reason the US absolutely needed to it could put men on the moon by 2024. Certainly our knowledge of how to launch Saturn Vs has atrophied. But we do still routinely launch things into space. We put lots of robots on Mars.
- romanovcode 7y agoBecause we never did it in the first place.
- nickik 7y agoNo its not. This is a notion that vice president has and NASA would like it. But they will absolutly not get the money from congress. And even more so, Congress only cares about blowing money up Boings ass and literally nothing else. So any architecture that would actually work and be reasonable quick to deploy, will not be allowed. Congress with force NASA to use lots old technology and force them to use Boing, LM, Northrop. This has just reasently been something were congress published its 'plan' (ie, plan to force 10 billion to Boing and Lockeed).
- bradhe 7y agoI feel like I see this headline every few years with a slight bump to the target year.
- Gene5ive 7y ago"The Apollo Program cost roughly $25.4 billion, unadjusted. That makes the total Apollo Program cost $163 billion inflation adjusted to 2008. That's our total cost to go to the moon. Consider, however, that this was for a project spanning from 1959 to beyond 1970 with six successful missions." This is not going to happen again unless China decides they want to get there first but, hey, it never hurts to hope.