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Boldly going nowhere

US ambitions to send astronauts back to the moon, as a prelude to future Mars missions, have been put in doubt by budgetary constraints, 40 years after man’s triumphant first lunar landing.

After the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003, former president George W Bush decided to phase out shuttle flights by 2010 and set a more ambitious space mandate for the United States.

Launched in 2004, the so-called Constellation programme aims to take Americans back to the moon by 2020 and to use it as a launch pad for manned voyages to Mars. Without renouncing those objectives, President Barack Obama has named a commission of experts to review the US manned space flight programme and make recommendations by the end of August.

The space shuttles, which have carried crews of astronauts into space since 1981, were conceived as reusable vehicles to transport heavy, bulky equipment into Earth’s orbit, primarily for the construction of the International Space Station (ISS).

But the shuttle has kept the United States stuck in a low orbit for too long at a time when other countries like China are emerging as rivals in space, argues Michael Griffin, the former NASA chief who championed the Constellation programme.

“I think we must return to the moon because it’s the next step. It’s a few days from home,” he said. “Mars is only a few months from Earth.”
In unveiling the Constellation programme in 2004 to Congress, Griffin said: “The single overarching goal of human space flight is the human settlement of the solar system, and eventually beyond.”

“In the long run, human populations must diversify if (man) wishes to survive,” Griffin was also quoted as saying during an interview last year.
But NASA’s budget is not big enough to cover the cost of Constellation’s Orion capsule, a more advanced and spacious version of the Apollo lunar module, and the Ares I and Ares V launchers needed to put it in orbit.

Constellation is projected to cost about $150 billion, but estimates for the Ares I have skyrocketed from $26 billion in 2006 to $44 billion last year.
With a space exploration budget of $6 billion in 2009, Senator Bill Nelson, of Florida, said: “NASA simply can’t do the job it’s been given - the (former) president’s goal of being on the moon by 2020.”

Nelson, a former astronaut, said that after 2010, when the shuttle programme ends, the United States will have no way of transporting its astronauts to the ISS except aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Astronaut Harrison Schmitt, part of the last Apollo mission to the moon in 1972, said that the Constellation was conceptually “excellent” but had been underfunded.

“The underfunding is massive. It’s not the programme that is wrong, it’s the way that has been funded,” Schmitt said.

Meanwhile, a group of active and retired NASA engineers who are critical of the Constellation project, have been working in their spare time on a parallel project dubbed DIRECT Jupiter. It envisions using the Orion capsule but replacing the Ares launchers with a family of launchers with common components based on existing shuttle technology.

The group has presented proposals to Obama’s commission on human space flight. They are saying their project would cost less to develop and would get astronauts back to the moon more quickly. The commission chairman, respected former Lockheed Martin chief executive Norman Augustine, said it comes down to money.

“With a few exceptions, we have the technology or the knowledge that we could go to Mars if we wanted with humans,” he said. “We could put a telescope on the moon if we wanted. The technology is by and large there.” Augustine added: “It boils down to what can we afford?”

Did they or didn’t they?

Forty years after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, there are still those who insist that his giant leap for mankind happened on a film set in Arizona, not on the lunar surface.

The deniers insist that NASA went to extraordinary lengths and great expense to stage a moon landing in a film studio because it wanted to distract a public weary of the Vietnam war, or felt it had to beat the Soviet Union in the space race but feared it didn’t have the technology.

They put forward theories - like the astronauts would have been fried by radiation when they passed through the Van Allen belts on their way to the moon - to back up their claims that a moon shot in 1969 would have been impossible.

Most of the deniers were tipped into the realm of lunar landing disbelief after seeing photos of Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon, astronomer Phil Plait said on the SETI Institute’s ‘Are We Alone’ radio show. The first thing they tend to notice is the starless sky, Plait said.

“There’s no atmosphere on the moon, so you would expect the stars to be brighter,” Plait said.

But even photos of the night sky on earth would show no stars unless they were shot with an exposure of several seconds - which they couldn’t be for the moon landing because the pictures of Armstrong and Aldrin were taken when the sun was up, he said.

Deniers also point out that the American flag shown in video footage of the lunar landing flutters - even though there’s no air on the moon.

Categorized | World News

Tags : ares, china, congress, constellation, moon, night, obama, president, project, shuttle, technology, the-moon, united, united-states, vietnam

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Boldly going nowhere

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