[FPSPACE] No money to put astronauts back on Moon by 2020; Moon not a realistic goal--Augustine Panel

[Jens Kieffer-Olsen]

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Pesavento [mailto:pjp961 at svol.net] 
Sent: Saturday, August 15, 2009 12:43 AM
 
> From the Washington Post
>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302
244_pf.html
 
 [snip]

> The committee is clearly most animated by what it calls the "Deep Space"
> option, a strategy that emphasizes getting astronauts far beyond low
> Earth orbit but not necessarily plunking them down on alien worlds.
> Instead, the Deep Space strategy would send them to near-Earth asteroids
> and to gravitationally significant points in space, known as Lagrange
> points, that are beyond the Earth's protective magnetosphere. 
> Astronauts might even go all the way to Phobos, a tiny moon of Mars,
> where the spaceship wouldn't land so much as rendezvous, in the same
> way a spacecraft docks at the International Space Station. That might
> seem a long way to go without touching down on the planet below. But
> the Deep Space option steers clear of "gravity wells," which is to say
> the surface of any planet or large moon. The energy requirements of
> going up and down those steep gravity hills are so great that it would
> take many heavy-lift rocket ships to carry supplies and fuel on a
> mission to the Martian surface. A human landing on Mars is presently
> beyond NASA's reach under any reasonable budgetary scenario,
> the committee has determined. 

 Good thinking - Phobos and Deimos YES, Mars NO for the time being!

 That said, the whole thinking becomes hollow when combined with the
 2009 NRC Interim Report on Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard
 Mitigation Strategies, which is due in its final version later this
 year. See for example Casey Johnston's comment below:
 
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/08/nasa-asteroid-tracking-program-s
talled-due-to-lack-of-funds.ars

 "[...] Congress is not doing its own deadline any favors by squaring
 off with NASA over funding. The committee that produced the interim
 report has been asked to focus in particular with evaluating whether
 the established NEO discovery goals should be modified."

 This is rather sad and illogical. Mapping the orbits of 90% of NEO's
 with diameters larger than 140m before 2020 makes good sense. Many
 objects smaller than 140m will be discovered too. This is good,
 because the smaller the size of NEOs the higher their frequency of
 hitting Earth.

 Maybe Congress feels it a potential yoke to discover threatening
 objects of such light calibre? If so, they obviously fail to
 appreciate that a simple evacuation ( as in New Orleans 2005 )
 will be all that a Tunguska-x2-sized impactor is likely to call
 for in order to save thousands of lives. 

--
Jens Kieffer-Olsen
Slagelse, Denmark