[FPSPACE] Indians plan to send astronaut on circumlunar mission, says ISRO head

[pjp]

>From Agency France Presse..

 

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Asian_spacefarers_race_for_the_moon_09252007.ht
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It appears ISRO will take about seven years to complete its preparations.

 

Asian spacefarers race for the moon

 

Asian giants Japan, China and India are engaged in a race to map lunar
resources and make the moon a platform to explore planets beyond, amid a
renewed burst of global space activity.

Japan flagged off the Asian lunar race on September 14 when it successfully
launched its first lunar orbiter. China plans to launch its own moon probe
before the end of the year, followed by India in the first half of 2008.

"We want to investigate the moon, to know more about the whole of the moon,"
Keiji Tachikawa, president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, said
in this southern Indian city.

JAXA, as the agency is known, will carry out more robotic missions before a
landing and astronaut on the moon, said Tachikawa in a brief interview
Monday.

Missions to the moon and to Mars and international cooperation top the
agenda of a five-day global conference in Hyderabad that brought together
2,000 space professionals, including scientists, astronomers and astronauts.

"There is a great revival of interest in exploring various planets," said
Sun Laiyan, head of the China National Space Administration.

China's Chang'e 1 lunar probe is being transported to the launch site and
"if everything goes fine, will be launched by the end of the year," said
Sun, adding that China will consider a manned moon mission in the future.

India's Chandrayaan 1 lunar probe will be launched in March or April 2008,
said B.N. Suresh, director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Kerala's
capital Thiruvananthapuram.

Preparatory work is in "full swing" at the Sriharikota space station in
southern India, where the craft is being assembled, the launch vehicle
readied and antennae installed to receive data from the moon, Suresh told
AFP.

Also in 2008, India will likely choose the target year for a human
spaceflight to the moon, said G. Madhavan Nair, head of the Indian Space
Research Organisation.

"It will take seven or eight years," Nair said. "We are in the process of
sharpening our ideas."

Despite more than four decades of lunar missions, space scientists still
lack definitive answers to questions about the moon's origin, the minerals
it contains and whether it has water that could support human life.

"There is a lot more known about the moon, but even after the current round
of lunar missions, you will still have more questions," said Indian
scientist U.R. Rao, who did pioneering work on space launch vehicles.

Mineral samples from the moon contained abundant quantities of helium 3, a
variant of the gas used in lasers and refrigerators as well as to blow up
balloons, and space experts say that may offer a solution to the earth's
energy shortages.

Technology for converting helium 3 to energy is still far away, but
spacefaring nations are already talking about a permanent human presence on
the moon and looking beyond to Mars and more distant planets.

President George W. Bush in 2004 announced an ambitious plan for the US to
return to the moon by 2020 and use it as a stepping stone for manned
missions to Mars and beyond.

NASA aims to put a man on Mars by 2037, Michael Griffin, the administrator
of the US space agency, indicated here Monday, saying the orbital
international space station targeted for completion by 2010 would provide a
"toehold in space" for travel first to the moon and then Mars.

Japan's 55-billion-yen (478-million-dollar) Kaguya is the largest moon
explorer since the US Apollo missions ceased in the 1970s after six human
landings, the only time mankind visited another world.

"The moon is no longer a place for us to visit," said JAXA's Tachikawa. "We
should consider inhabiting and exploiting it."

The Kaguya orbiter, aiming to collect data for research on the moon's origin
and evolution, will travel around the Earth before moving into an orbit of
the moon in early October.

It will gather data on the distribution of chemical elements and minerals
and study the moon's gravity and environment while searching for hydrogen.

Still, humanity is a "couple of generations away" from tapping commercial
opportunities in outer space, including the moon, said Franco Bonacina,
spokesman for the European Space Agency.

"But we need to go back to the moon to go even farther," he said. "The moon
is a harbour -- a kind of spare wheel -- from where we can push to Mars."

In the scramble to reach the moon, spacefarers risk duplication of effort,
said Indian scientist Rao, who called for cooperation between the world's
space agencies to avoid that.

"Everyone doing the same work would be a waste of resources."