[FPSPACE] NASA's new lunar spacecraft

[Allen Thomson]

> Phillip Clark said


> BUT ........ however nice the Bush II plan to return people to the Moon 
> and then fly to Mars may be and however pretty the supporting artwork will 
> be, what evidence is there that this is as real as the other 
> return-to-the-Moon plans that each US President has seen proposed during 
> his time in office and which quickly died along with that particular 
> presidency?

> I would love to see a return to the Moon and people off to mars in my 
> lifetime but I have as much confidence in the new proposals as I had in 
> all of the others which have come and gone, leaving only a pile of papers 
> in their wakes.


If RTTM is as presented in the Orlando Sentinel article (and hinted in 
various places previously) the thing that may save it is its sheer modesty. 
We know that we can do Apollo in a decade, and this program is just a 
slightly plumped-up Apollo.  If P44 committs to doing it when he/she arrives 
in the White House in January 2009, there's some chance it will get done, at 
least through the first few landings.  I'm not sure I think it's as much as 
50% likely, but it's more than 10%.