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NASA is going back to the Moon, perhaps permanently, as seen in a new road map (image):
Four months after President Trump directed NASA to return to the Moon, the agency has presented a road map to meet the goals outlined in Space Policy Directive-1. The updated plan shifts focus from the previous "Journey to Mars" campaign back to the Moon, and—eventually—to the Red Planet.
"The Moon will play an important role in expanding human presence deeper into the solar system," said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator of the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA, in a release issued by the agency.
While the revamped plan may share the same destination as the Apollo program, NASA said it will approach the return in a more measured and sustainable manner. Unlike humanity's first trip to the Moon, the journey back will incorporate both commercial and international partners.
To achieve this, NASA has outlined four strategic goals:
- Transition low-Earth orbit (LEO) human spaceflight activities to commercial operators.
- Expand long-duration spaceflight activities to include lunar orbit.
- Facilitate long-term robotic lunar exploration.
- Use human exploration of the Moon as groundwork for eventual human missions to Mars and beyond.
This may be the best outcome for the space program. Let NASA focus on the Moon with an eye towards permanently stationing robots and humans there, and let SpaceX or someone else take the credit for a 2020s/early-2030s manned Mars landing. Then work on a permanent presence on Mars using cheaper rocket launches, faster propulsion technologies, better radiation shielding, hardier space potatoes, etc.
Previously: President Trump Signs Space Policy Directive 1
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:16AM
A NASA group estimated [nasa.gov] (see appendix B) what NASA would price Falcon 9 development for and compared it to SpaceX's actual books. Result was a pricing of a cost plus contract for $4 billion versus actual SpaceX development costs (including all Falcon 1 development) of $390 million. Even before the usual cost inflation that happens when a cost plus contract meets reality, we have an order of magnitude difference.
A big factor of that difference is in institutional bad estimates of cost inflation. For example, NASA uses a metric called the "New Start Inflation Index" for calculating how much prices have risen in aerospace projects. From this spreadsheet [nasa.gov], I get a cost inflation of 7.091 from 1972 to 2017. The GDP deflator [areppim.com] gives an inflation of 4.54 over the same time period. We have roughly 20% (logarithmic) of an order of magnitude increase in contract costs just from the choice of inflation index.
The specification game is another way costs get pumped up. Rather than limited spacecraft that do a narrow job, we see spacecraft that cram lots of cutting edge tech and tricks, multiple purposes, sometimes exotic trajectories or environments, etc. The more you cram in, the more the costs of getting each feature to cooperate with each other feature.