People are making a big deal of the latest story that Buzz Aldrin has seemingly changed his mind since April about the need to go back to the moon:

Aldrin believes NASA should move in stages toward a manned mission to Mars, by building outer space fuel stations and developing the moon. He said NASA has already spent hundreds of millions researching the projects, and their investment should be utilized — as recommended by Norm Augustine, former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board and chairman of the Review of the U.S. Space Flight Plans Committee.

What’s more, Aldrin said, the American government should not simply shrug off the considerable experience we have with lunar travel. “The U.S. has the most experience in the world, of any nation, in dealing with the moon,” he told FoxNews.com. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that flexibility is needed here.”

Back in April, this was what was reported:

Aldrin prefers that NASA forgo our moon in favor of a trip to the Martian moon Phobos and then a permanent settlement on the Red Planet itself. President Obama’s proposed $3.8 trillion federal budget request cuts NASA’s moonshot Constellation program, which has cost $9 billion over six years, instead proposing to hire private contractors to fly resupply missions to the International Space Station. It also focuses research money on new rockets that could one day be used to send astronauts into Mars, its moons or an asteroid.

So what happened? Let’s leave aside the common confusion between Constellation and returning to the moon (there are many ways to get back to the moon, almost all of them better than Constellation). Let us also stipulate that Buzz can be…mercurial (no pun intended). It could be that what he meant at the time was that he was opposed to redoing Apollo, which was essentially what Constellation did, by Mike Griffin’s own admission, and that this was misinterpreted as an opposition to going to the moon at all. But even if he has changed his mind, aren’t people entitled to do that?

This is the first time that I’ve heard him talk about “fuel stations,” but once one starts thinking about fuel stations in cis-lunar space, it’s inevitable that one will think about the moon as a source for the fuel (and oxidizer).

A couple months ago, I had (non-alcoholic) drinks with Buzz for an hour and a half after Bill Haynes’ funeral, where we bemoaned the current state of space policy. Afterward, I emailed him the link to my piece from last year at The New Atlantis. Perhaps he read it. It would account for his new-found enthusiasm for fuel stations.

Maybe I’ll give him a call and ask.

Justin Kugler has a good analysis of the NASA Authorization bill over at Open NASA.

The president signed the bill today. As Jeff Foust notes, the main thing this does is to start the clock ticking on some reporting requirements for the agency. I assume that they’ve already been working on the analyses. I hope that they’re done and released more transparently than ESAS was.

Some common sense from the Europeans:

“We need the courage of starting a new era,” Europe’s director of human spaceflight, Simonetta Di Pippo, told BBC News.

“The idea is to ascend to the space station the various elements of the mission, and then try to assemble the spacecraft at the ISS, and go from the orbit of the space station to the Moon. We need the courage of starting a new era.”

“What we are thinking about right now – but again we need more technical work to address this – [is] it should be a small spacecraft that goes around the Moon.”

…Learning how to assemble exploration vehicles at the ISS would also be part of this new vision.

If humans ever do go to asteroids or Mars, the scale of the infrastructure needed to complete a safe round trip could not possibly be launched on a single rocket from Earth. It will have to be sent up on multiple flights and joined together in orbit.

Gee, what a concept.

Doing this assembly at the ISS means it can be overseen by astronauts with ready access to tools if needed.

And if the crew assigned to man the deep-space mission travels up separately to the station, it would also mean all the elements for their long-duration flight could be launched without the complications of ultra-safe abort systems that complicate manned rockets.

The crew could instead ride to orbit in a simple, tried and tested rocket, such as a Soyuz, and then transfer across to their deep-space vehicle already waiting for them at the ISS.

The only problem with this is that it doesn’t address the issue of how to get back to the ISS orbit from deep space. As I said at Space Access in April, I view this as one of the fundamental problems of decoupling earth-LEO from pure space transportation. The solution will lie in either aerobraking, or cheap propellant, or some combination of the two.

But it’s nice to see people starting to think about how to make progress without waiting for a heavy lifter that will never arrive. It’s not the lack of heavy lift that has trapped us in LEO for decades. It’s the false perception that we need it.

[Update a while later]

A question in comments:

Would shifting the ISS orbit higher (now that it doesn’t need to be shuttle-reachable) be of any use here?

Not much, unless it’s a lot higher. L-1 or L-2 are much better portals to the rest of the solar system. Here’s a question — how big a launcher would it take for a direct inject of a capsule (Dragon or CST class) to L-1? The idea here would be to have a propellant depot in LEO that could deliver the propellant to L-1 by a slow ship, with a crew system to get people to/from L-1 quickly. Eventually, perhaps, the propellant could come from the moon. An alternative would be to depart to L-1 from the ISS, but not return to it from there, instead going directly back to earth. That way, you’d have a good staging area that was also relatively easy to get back to, and allow multiple expeditions without having to enter the atmosphere.