It’s less than three weeks until the fortieth anniversary of the first human lunar landing. Alan Boyle has a roundup of links. It’s also a good time to start planning a commemoration ceremony with friends and family. HappilyUnfortunately, it’s on a SaturMonday this year, a good eveningnot such a good evening to have a party.
Link is fixed, too thanks to commenter “Jim.”
I’m quite sure that Doug Stanley is on record as not being on board with the moon as a goal for VSE, and wanted to use the opportunity to build a (heavy-lift) infrastructure for Mars. But can anyone point me to a citable source for this?
Yes, I am working on a major piece for a serious publication…
I have a recollection that at some time within the past few years, Burt Rutan made a statement to the effect that if we weren’t killing a few people to open up space we weren’t pushing hard enough. But a diligent search of the Intertubes doesn’t turn up anything like that. Does anyone else recall this, and if so can they provide a citation? Or was I just imagining it?
Wes Huntress has some. I agree with a lot of what he says, but not all:
The directive to land on the Moon by 2020 is not achievable given the agency’s current limited out-year budget, costs for Constellation development, and the looming requirement to support the International Space Station beyond 2015. The best approach to lower cost and sustained development is to leverage existing space transportation infrastructure to the maximum.
I absolutely agree with the second sentence, but not the first. It is possible to get to the moon by 2020, within the available funding. But in order to do so, NASA has to focus its resources on getting to the moon, in an affordable and sustainable manner, using that existing infrastructure. As long, though, as they focus on developing their own launch systems, it will never happen. And not just because they’re not very good at developing launch systems.
I wouldn’t emphasize the international part, either. I don’t mind doing partnerships, if they make sense, but we shouldn’t do things internationally for its own sake. I wouldn’t abandon the moon–I think that NASA should be developing a lander, but that’s really the only major hardware element (at least in terms of transportation) that’s lunar specific. We need to develop a general deep-space transportation infrastructure, and it NASA had focused on that instead of Ares/Orion, they’d be a good way down that road now.
Kennedy asked the question forty-eight years ago. Dennis Wingo, Paul Spudis and Gordon Woodcock answer it.
Paul Spudis expounds on a theme that will be a major one in the piece I’m working on for The New Atlantis — that we need to figure out what we want to do before we design the hardware to do it.
My only quibble is that I really dislike the word “mission.” Too NASA oriented. I prefer to ask, what is the goal?
An interesting story of the orphans of Apollo.
He has some advice for the Augustine Panel, over at Popular Mechanics. He wants to go to Mars, and he doesn’t like solids. Scrap Ares I.
[Update on Thursday afternoon]
Newsflash! Mark Whittington has finally revealed one of the members of his secretive Internet Rocketeers Club:
Rand Simberg, the Bill Maher of the Internet Rocketeers.
Well, like Bill Maher, except funny. And not an asshat.
And I’ve never gotten a decoder ring (who do I complain to, Mark?). So I guess I got gypped. And I actually work on space stuff for a living, so I can’t figure out what the criteria are for membership in his heretofore imaginary club. I guess it must just be anyone who is smarter than Mark and talks about space on the Internet. Which is, admittedly, a pretty darned big club.
Clark Lindsey has the details.
Clark Lindsey finds Frank Sietzen’s bizarre thesis that we must continue with Constellation to avoid damaging NASA’s “reputation” for developing rockets upside down:
Instead of focusing on what it does worst, i.e. rocket-making, NASA should concentrate on what it does best: in-space operations and assembly. In the Hubble repair and upgrade missions and the construction of the ISS, NASA has displayed spectacular skill, knowledge, and adaptability. Such capabilities are essential to genuine spacefaring and they match perfectly with the currently available medium sized launchers. Very elaborate and ambitious space systems can be built from medium sized modules. Propellant depots, which will have a tremendously positive impact on in-space operations, can be supplied by such vehicles. This approach leads to high launch rates, which will bring down costs and raise reliability and safety.
The loss of NASA’s in-space assembly and operations skills would be comparable to the loss in capability that the agency suffered when it gave up Saturn and the lunar hardware at the end of the Apollo program. I hope the Augustine committee doesn’t let this happen.
Me, too. The most nutty thing about this is that it is NASA’s deliberate plan to abandon those capabilities, which are much more crucial to spacefaring than building yet another rocket.