Going Back to the Moon Won't Break the Bank, NASA Chief Says
Sending humans back to the moon won't require a big Apollo-style budget boost, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said. During the height of the Apollo program in the mid-1960s, NASA gobbled up about 4.5 percent of the federal budget. This massive influx of resources helped the space agency make good on President John F. Kennedy's famous 1961 promise to get astronauts to the moon, and safely home to Earth again, before the end of the decade. NASA's budget share now hovers around just 0.5 percent. But something in that range should be enough to mount crewed lunar missions in the next 10 years or so, as President Donald Trump has instructed NASA to do with his Space Policy Directive 1, Bridenstine told reporters yesterday (Aug. 30) here at NASA's Ames Research Center.
The key lies in not going it alone and continuing to get relatively modest but important financial bumps, he added. (Congress allocated over $20.7 billion to NASA in the 2018 omnibus spending bill — about $1.1 billion more than the agency got in the previous year's omnibus bill.)
"We now have more space agencies on the surface of the planet than we've ever had before. And even countries that don't have a space agency — they have space activities, and they want to partner with us on our return to the moon," Bridenstine said in response to a question from Space.com. "And, at the same time, we have a robust commercial marketplace of people that can provide us access that historically didn't exist," the NASA chief added. "So, between our international and commercial partners and our increased budget, I think we're going to be in good shape to accomplish the objectives of Space Policy Directive 1."
We're talking about the surface of the Moon, right? Not the mini-ISS in lunar orbit that would give the Space Launch System somewhere to go?
Previously: President Trump Signs Space Policy Directive 1
2020s to Become the Decade of Lunar Re-Exploration
NASA Cancels Lunar Rover
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine Serious About Returning to the Moon
Related: Should We Skip Mars for Now and Go to the Moon Again?
How to Get Back to the Moon in 4 Years, Permanently
NASA Administrator Ponders the Fate of SLS in Interview
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 03 2018, @01:18PM
Takyon wasn't doing that. And if you're going to consider gravity wells as obstacles, you should also consider other relevant orbital dynamics as obstacles. The delta-v from Earth crossing asteroids to Earth orbit is similar to that from the surface of the Moon even though the former has a much lower gravity well. Shifting orbital dynamics and other trajectory changes can be quite costly.
I think the Moon has several possible advantages. It's only a few seconds communication delay (round-trip), which means one can do real time teleoperations for a lot of relatively slow things (for example, it would be feasible to remotely operate a supertanker or heavy construction or mining equipment on Earth from the Moon, most of that stuff has serious lag in the controls already). So for a lot of tasks, you'd be able to control the gear from far cheaper Earth.
It also means the Moon is right next to the most valuable real estate in the Solar System. Some of that value is going to rub off. Location is important.
And it has a lot of matter structured in ways we understand. The Moon is basically just a giant igneous body (with geology similar to that of Earth's igneous regions) with a thin surface of meteorite-tilled debris covering it. We get how that works already, giving us a leg up on mining and resource collection, and have already worked out a variety of possible ways to exploit that to make useful materials.
And gravity has its advantages. Things stay put when you're not trying to move them. You can sort mixtures by density (a common chemical industry task).
Point is that I can't point to any killer apps that require a human presence on the Moon (though being able to cheaply launch bulk material into Earth orbit may become one in future decades). But it'll have significant advantages when humans do figure out how to do valuable stuff on other bodies.