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"NASA has largely been living off the successes of space projects launched up to a decade ago — including the now 'dead' Mars Opportunity rover. It hopes to launch its first manned space flight since the demise of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.
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But now the Trump administration appears to be determined to get a new Moon project off the ground. And it's eager to pay private companies to carry its cargoes.
NASA has been considering the prospect of a 'Lunar Gateway' space station placed in orbit around the Moon, acting as a stopover point for missions to the surface and, perhaps, Mars.
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NASA documents indicate the earliest date for an American to tread the lunar surface again is 2028." foxnews.com/science/nasas-new-grand-space-race-plan
Hopefully we can speed that one up.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday February 21 2019, @10:58PM (1 child)
When it comes to space, every president wants to be Kennedy, setting the goal of doing something incredible. Many presidents want to be Nixon enjoying the photo ops with those who just did something incredible that they can kinda take credit for. Nobody at all wants to be Lyndon Johnson, who paid for NASA throughout his presidency but got neither the glory of the initial declaration nor the triumph of carrying the plan to fruition.
That's a real problem: Science and engineering doesn't happen in convenient 4-year cycles where a president can propose something at the beginning of their term and have something impressive to show their constituents just prior to the relevant Tuesday in November a few years later. There has to be a willingness to see through what the previous guy proposed and NASA started working on, and so far nobody in my lifetime has had the guts to say something like "Yup, we're going to spend billions on this program, and we're not going to see any return on that until well after my term is up."
Instead, what we're getting is "NASA is going to do X!" and NASA starts working on that, and then a few years later it's "NASA is going to do Y!" and then they have to throw out what they did on X because the tech is obsolete 10 years later when somebody else comes along and tells them to get back to it. No wonder they're having a hard time getting things done when the mission constantly changes.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday February 22 2019, @07:57PM
It's like Schrödinger's-celestial-body.
We're going to the moon, or mars, and we won't know which until we get there.