While I, among many people, would love to see us back on the Moon, I tend to take the long view of human space exploration. The report from the Augustine Panel, upon which Obama's new NASA budget proposal is based, takes an equally long view of human space exploration, and one which I believe will ultimately increase the scale and scope of human space flight, as well as vastly increase the commercial base of space-based industry and increase jobs.
What is poorly understood, among all the political hyperbole surrounding the new budget, is that the new Obama administration is trying to orient NASA towards what it can do, that others cannot. Unmanned and human spaceflight to low-Earth orbit (LEO) is commonplace. Government space programs, including those from the United States, Russia/Soviet Union, EU, Japan, India, and others, have figured out all the basics of rocket design, navigation, in-orbit rendevous, and so forth.
A variety of commercial enterprises, including those that build and operate the rockets for NASA, now feel ready to carry out unmanned and human spaceflight to LEO and below. You will probably see the first resupply of the International Space Station (ISS) by SpaceX using their very own Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon resupply module sometime during 2010, and Virgin Galactic will probably be operating regular sub-orbital flights (like those of Alan Shepard and Yuri Gagarin) by the end of 2012.
What the new NASA budget does is hand over travel to LEO to these commercial companies, buying tickets on their spacecraft much like government employees buy tickets on Delta or United Airlines. The new budget refocuses NASA towards places above LEO, such as high earth orbit and beyond. We will still end up with a heavy-lift launch vehicle (HLLV), probably using bits and pieces of the space shuttle design.
We will still probably go to the moon, sometime in the near future, but not using a rocket system like Constellation, which was not much different from Apollo. Instead, we will probably go there using another of the projects funded in the new NASA budget, which is the testing and implementation of in-orbit fuel storage and refueling, essentially having a gas-station in orbit. Using this model, small rockets get things into Earth orbit, after which they refuel, and go on to their destination. They may use new super-efficient engines, also funded in the new budget, which are intended for extra-atmospheric flight only, such as VASIMIR. This concept of in-space refuelling is not new. After far back as 1968-69, after the spectacular failure of their N1 moon rocket, the Soviet Union considered launching a Soyuz and lunar lander into LEO using existing Soyuz rockets and refueling it in orbit for travel to the moon - an approach distinct from using a towers rocket such as the N1, Saturn V, or the new-defunct Constellation program's Aries 5, and much less cumbursome and expensive.
What I hope is that NASA can continue to move forward with these changes. Hopefully usually short-sighted congressmen can see opening spaceflight to commercial companies could be a catalyst for far more jobs than might exist under tightly-controlled contracts for the Constellation program. However, that is yet to be seen, as the lobbyists for Northrop-Grumman and Boeing, existing NASA constractors, are far more entenched than those from the new space startups such as SpaceX.
2 comments:
You probably already read this, but on the 1st in the nytimes Kenneth Chang in "Obama Calls for End to NASA’s Moon Program" said that Obama wants NASA to focus on finding fuel on the moon and Mars. What do you think about this? Is it feasible?
All the TV science shows like to show off the NASA projects for making fuel (oxygen/hydrogen) from lunar soil. Whether or not this has actually progressed past the proof-of-concept stage, I do not know. But it is not outlandish…all they are doing is crushing rock and heating it to cause atoms to dissociate (though I am sure it is quite a bit more complex than that).
This sort of project has been suggested as much as 10-15 years ago by the Mars Direct group (though they wanted to scrub the necessary stuff from the atmosphere). It is a novel idea, and will probably be used to fuel the return vehicles for the first generation of missions back to the moon and to Mars. Moreover, this concept may end up serving a role akin to that of a the windmill/well for future lunar homesteaders.
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