Posted by
Far_view on Monday, December 04, 2006 11:48:04 PM
Today NASA put out a longer term goal beyond just going back to the Moon
in the form of a "permanent" lunar polar base. It seems to me that
might be a tad premature since recently there has been some
contradictory findings
about whether or not there is water ice in the permanently shadowed
craters in the lunar polar regions. Be that as it may, I have been
thinking more and more that going back to the Moon might just be a dead
end... it could sap funds and people's enthusiasm and delay us from
other deep space destinations- namely Mars and the Near Earth
Asteroids. Some alternatives to the Moon as a destination for human
exploration were recently suggested by the International Academy of
Astronautics (IAA). There's a Space Review article on this topic
here and the IAA report itself is
here.
I think the good thing about the Orion spacecraft architecture that is
currently being developed is that it is not necessarily Moon-specific.
If, as a result of the 2008 presidential election, the decision is made
to re-orient the program from the Moon to first check out the Sun-Earth
L2 point or some near Earth asteroid, I believe that could be done
fairly efficiently. I really think such a reprioritization of goals
might be in order, but nobody has asked me (!).