President Barack Obama is redirecting
America’s space program, killing NASA’s $100 billion plans to return astronauts to the moon and using much of that money for new rocket technology research. White House science adviser John Holdren told a budget briefing on Monday, “We’re putting the science back into the rocket science at NASA” The moon mission, which had already cost $9.1 billion, was based on old technology and revisiting old places astronauts had already been. The $4 billion that NASA spends yearly on human space exploration will now be used for what NASA and White House officials called dramatic changes in rocketry, including in-orbit fueling. Eventually, those new technologies would be used to send astronauts to a nearby asteroid, the Martian moons, or even a brief mission to the moon.
Officials are quick to point out the failures of the Bush administration’s moon program, called Constellation. The Constellation Program would have utilized two types of rockets, Ares I and Ares V, and an Orion crew capsule. Former President George W. Bush proposed going back to the moon after the 2003 shuttle Columbia disaster that claimed seven lives exactly seven years ago Monday. MIT astronautics professor Ed Crawley, who was on a special panel that looked at the future of spaceflight for the White House, told the Associated Press the Bush moon plan was well thought out, but it was based on existing technologies and it was underfunded.
Besides redirecting money to new technologies, NASA is getting an extra $6 billion over five years to encourage companies to build private spaceships that NASA could rent. Many of those companies are run by Internet pioneers, including Blue Origin, headed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Another firm, SpaceX, run by PayPal founder Elon Musk, is already building private rockets. NASA now has seven companies getting money to work on planning for some types of commercial spaceships. NASA says if the private companies work well on their unproven spaceships, astronauts could fly in them to the space station as soon as 2016. After the next five space shuttle flights, NASA will be forced to hitch rides to the space station on Russian rockets, so having private spaceships may take up some of the slack.
For more, visit www.nasa.gov.
On Friday, a
California state panel registered 106 objects left by the Apollo 11 mission as an historical resource, to preserve the site where humans first set foot on the moon. The move by the state Historical Resources Commission marks the first such designation for cultural artifacts located other than on Earth.
The group hopes that placing the moon objects on
California’s registry of historic landmarks and resources will lead ultimately to designating Tranquility Base as a United Nations World Heritage Site.
The collection encompasses about 2,270 kg of objects, ranging from the bottom stage of the lunar lander to the American flag planted on the moon’s surface on July 16, 1969 by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. It also includes a seismic monitor left behind to record moonquakes and a high-tech mirror used to reflect laser beams aimed at the lunar surface from Earth to measure the precise distance between it and the moon. And like most American campsites, there’s also an assortment of junk; boots, tools, empty food containers and bags of human waste, that were left behind by the astronauts to lighten their load for the takeoff from the moon back to Earth.
An inventory of the items was made through independent research conducted for several years by Ralph Gibson, a program manager at the Placer County Museums near
Sacramento, with a grant of $22,000 from NASA. But the listing was carefully written to include only the objects -- not the site itself or even the astronauts’ footprints -- because international law precludes any country or state from making a claim to the lunar surface, according to Jay Correia, a state historian who oversees the registry.
California’s recognition was sought because aerospace firms and institutions based there led the way in “researching, developing and manufacturing the machinery that got men to the moon,” according to Mr. Correia.
Lisa Westwood, part of a team of scholars and museum professionals who applied for the listing, says her group will next seek historic designations from New Mexico, Texas, Alabama and Florida, states that played a major role in the space program, before trying to get Tranquility Base listed as a national historic landmark and a United Nations heritage site, which ” would put it on the same level as the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt.”
