With President Barack Obama back in the White House for a second term, NASA is reportedly getting ready to reveal plans to send astronauts back to the moon and possibly even to build an orbiting base around Earth's satellite.
It's been speculated for some time that the space agency has been mulling the construction of a floating Moon base that would serve as a launching site for manned missions to Mars and other destinations more distant than any humans have traveled to so far.
Those plans may have already been greenlighted by the Obama administration, Space.com reported Friday. NASA was reportedly waiting to announce such an ambitious endeavor until it was determined whether Obama or his challenger, Mitt Romney, was going to be president.
The Orlando Sentinel reported several months ago that the proposed outpost, called a "gateway spacecraft," would support "a small astronaut crew and function as a staging area for future missions to the moon and Mars."
The proposed space station would be situated at what's called a Lagrangian point, or L-Point, a place where the gravitational pull of two large bodiesin this case the Earth and the Moonare at an equilibrium, making it possible to place a spacecraft in a fixed spot in space at relatively little expense. NASA wants to put its base at Earth-Moon L-Point 2, on the far side of the Moon, according to reports from several news sites.
That would place the spacecraft about 277,000 miles from Earth and about 38,000 miles from the Moon's surface. Though taking advantage of an L-point reduces the power cost of fixing an object in space, the project's costs "would certainly run into the billions of dollars," according to the Sentinel.
Using such a base as a launching station for manned trips to Mars or to a near-Earth asteroid probably wouldn't happen until the 2020s.
The newspaper cited documents it obtained pertaining to a White House briefing on the idea given by NASA administrator Charles Bolden earlier in September. The Sentinel noted at the time that it was "unclear" whether the Obama administration supported the project.
Now Space.com says space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University believes the moon base project has "probably already been cleared with the Obama Administration."
"NASA has been evolving its thinking, and its latest charts have inserted a new element of cislunar/lunar gateway/Earth-moon L2 sort of stuff into the plan. They've been holding off announcing that until after the election," Logsdon told the site, noting that Romney "had pledged to reassess and possibly revise NASA's missions and direction."
NASA might be able to build the space station using parts salvaged from the International Space Station. The Russian space agency is also considering the removal of parts of the ISS to help build a proposed new space station called the Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex (OPSEK) that could also serve as a platform for manned missions to Mars and elsewhere.
Late last year, Boeing proposed essentially the same thing to NASA, suggesting the development of what it called an "Exploration Gateway Platform architecture that not only returns man to the lunar surfacevia the use of only one SLS launch to a reusable Lunar Landerbut provides a baseline for pathfinders towards an eventual crewed mission to Mars."
SLS is a reference to NASA's next-generation Space Launch System, which would utilize the four-person, long-range Orion crew module to potentially ferry astronauts to Mars, near-Earth asteroids, and other destinations.
Orion only arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in July. An initial unmanned test flight won't happen until 2014, and the proposed timeline for the first manned missions using the spacecraft is squarely in the middle of the next decadesuggesting that the lunar space station, if it happens, is still quite a ways out.
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