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posted by martyb on Sunday September 02 2018, @04:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-billion-here-a-billion-there dept.

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


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2018, @10:18PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2018, @10:18PM (#729667)

    As far as solar system real estate goes

    Sure, but that's begging the question. Why do we only consider locations at the bottom of a well as "real"?
    Most of your benefits are satisfied just as well by some circumlunar orbit or Lagrangian point.

    The exception, water ice, is a very good point, though. But it's not just water ice -- almost anything you can mine on the moon, no matter how difficult, will be cheaper than hauling it up from earth. As long as we build spaceships, factories, and habitats from mass, rather than energy fields, we'll need to haul that mass up from its self-imposed gravity wells to orbits where it will be useful. The moon's main competition in this regard seems to be asteroid mining, and while those wells are much shallower, they're also less accessible, requiring either substantial delta-v or absurdly slow "Interplanetary Transport Network" transits to bring materials to Earth's vicinity, while the moon allows for an efficient space elevator with no advances in materials science.

    Arguably, the main point of lunar surface missions in the big picture should be two-fold: mineral exploration and mining (for water ice and more) on one hand, and infrastructure (space elevator and surface railways) to get those mined materials up to L1, and thence to anywhere, on the other.
    In the near term, though, it's more about developing habitats and equipment suited to the lunar surface, so we can live in those habitats and use that equipment for our actual goals of prospecting and construction.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday September 03 2018, @11:53AM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Monday September 03 2018, @11:53AM (#729827) Journal

    Longer term, yes: We will (or schould) eschew gravity wells for rotating pseudo-gravity in spacebound habitats.
    We aren't quite ready for that though. To build anything like that we need more experience of working and building in microgravity and in airless environments. We also need access to materials that son't have to be hauled out of Earth's gravity & atmosphere. Yes, there are asteroids, but we aren't ready for those yet either.

    Moon first. Maybe Mars after that, or maybe skip it. Use Luna's "halfway house" environment to gain experience, mine resources, build some off-world infrastructure, THEN we can go fully offworld and start living among the asteroids. Think of the moon as the training wheels of space.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 03 2018, @01:18PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 03 2018, @01:18PM (#729835) Journal

    Why do we only consider locations at the bottom of a well as "real"?

    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.