Moon Landing Anniversary

Forty years ago today, three American men—Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and Michael Collins—were floating in a tiny spacecraft above the surface of the Moon getting ready for two of them to make history: tomorrow will be the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

If Neil, Buzz, and Mike could have looked ahead 40 years from that point, where would they have thought we'd be right now? The reality is that we haven't been back to the moon in decades, and our space program has languished by trying to do too much (space shuttles, space stations, earth science, planetary science, astronomy, robotic exploration, etc.) with too little funding. And here we are, finally talking about going back to the moon. But we're going to be doing so with basically the same level of technology that those three brave explorers had at their disposal.

That's not to say that we haven't learned anything in that time. We know far, far more about the effects of weightlessness on the body, about how the radiation of space will affect the next wave of explorers we send beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), and the avionics that control the spacecraft will be vastly more advanced than the mostly analog and mechanical components that powered Apollo 11 and the Eagle landing craft to the Moon.

But we have numerous challenges to overcome before routine flights to space stations and beyond are within the grasp of mere mortals like you and me: the cost of just getting to LEO are unimaginably high (they say that once you've gotten to LEO, you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System); we still don't have a good way to protect the intrepid explorers aboard the space craft in the event of a solar radiation storm; we still don't have the ability to survive once we get where we're going without sending replacement supplied from Earth at great expense.

Decades before the U.S. space program was even conceived, science fiction writers painted a picture of a future with flying cars, asteroid mining, people travelling the stars in highly advanced spacecraft, extrasolar colonies, and more. And for the most part, they thought we'd be there by now. What went wrong?

A Kinder, Gentler NASA

Reuters reports that NASA is more than willing to work with commercial partners when it comes to going to, and establishing a base on, the moon.

"If we could be in a commercial relationship with somebody who has the capability that's fine because in many cases they can do it for less money than we can," said Neil Woodward, acting director of NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, at the International Space Development Conference in Dallas.

Woodward also suggested that NASA would be very interested in an orbital fuel depot, an idea pushed heavily by Jon Goff and others. "One thing that keeps getting batted around is a fuel dump in orbit, in low Earth orbit. If someone was to build one of those and said do you want NASA to be a customer we would say yes because if you do the math it turns out that it would be an advantage to us," Woodward said.

"We're trying to help some commercial entities demonstrate that they can do low Earth orbit resupply to say the space station and once they can do that we can contract with them and then we don't have to do it ourselves anymore."

It's good to see that NASA is not only willing to work with private enterprise in space, but actively encouraging development of space. For many years, that was not the case, and it's a good sign for the future.

NASA's Lunar Plans

What better topic for my first post than NASA's announcement of their plans for exploration of and a permanent outpost on the moon? Yesterday, NASA announced that it plans to land humans on the moon by 2020 and establish a permanent settlement at the lunar south pole by 2024.

While very little in their announcement constitutes news, this is, nevertheless, an exciting day. NASA gave details of their moon landers, which can be either piloted or remotely controlled and can carry crews or cargo to and from the moon's surface. Also, parts of the landers will remain behind (much like on Apollo) when the crew leaves, thus accumulating structures that will form the permanent outpost.

Most exciting to me, I think, was the suggestion by NASA associate deputy administrator Doug Cooke that part of the reason they chose their outpost site was because of the presence of of resources nearby that can be mined. The gathering of resources on the moon will be necessary to eventually make any type of permanent settlement self-sustaining. Two birds could be killed with one stone... the settlement(s) could become financially self-sufficient, and resources shipped back from the moon could buttress scarcities here on Earth.

Also of interest was the statement by NASA exploration chief Scott Horowitz that supplying oxygen to the lunar outpost could be turned over to a commercial supplier.