http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9355479

NASA to unveil plan for moon mission in 2018

White House officials briefed on $100 billion proposal

Sept. 15, 2005


WASHINGTON - NASA briefed senior White House officials Wednesday on its
plan to spend $100 billion and the next 12 years building the spacecraft
and rockets it needs to put humans back on the Moon by 2018.

The U.S. space agency now expects to roll out its lunar exploration plan
to key Congressional committees on Friday and to the broader public
through a news conference on Monday, Washington sources tell SPACE.com.

U.S. President George W. Bush called in January 2004 for the United States
to return to the Moon by 2020 as the first major step in a broader space
exploration vision aimed at extending the human presence throughout the
solar system.

NASA has been working intensely since April on an exploration plan that
entails building an 18-foot (5.5-meter) blunt body crew capsule and
launchers built from major space shuttle components including the main
engines, solid rocket boosters and massive external fuel tanks.

That plan, called the Exploration Systems Architecture Study, was
presented by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, his space operations chief
Bill Gerstenmaier and several other senior agency officials Wednesday
afternoon to senior White House policy officials, including an advisor to
U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney and the president’s Deputy National
Security Advisor J.D. Crouch.

NASA’s plan, according to briefing charts obtained by SPACE.com, envisions
beginning a sustained lunar exploration campaign in 2018 by landing four
astronauts on the Moon for a seven-day stay.

The expedition would begin, these charts show, by launching the lunar
lander and Earth departure stage (essentially a giant propulsion module)
on a heavy-lift launch vehicle that would be lifted into orbit by five
space shuttle main engines and a pair of five-segment shuttle solid rocket
boosters.

Once the Earth departure stage and lunar lander are safely in orbit, NASA
would launch the Crew Exploration Vehicle capsule atop a new launcher
built from a four-segment shuttle solid rocket booster and an upper stage
powered by a single space shuttle main engine.

The CEV would then dock with the lunar lander and Earth departure stage
and begin its several day journey to the moon.

NASA’s plan envisions being able to land four-person human crews anywhere
on the Moon’s surface and to eventually use the system to transport crew
members to and from a lunar outpost that it would consider building on the
lunar south pole, according to the charts, because of the regions elevated
quantities of hydrogen and possibly water ice.

One of NASA’s reasons for going back to the moon is to demonstrate that
astronauts can essentially “live off the land” by using lunar resources to
produce potable water, fuel and other valuable commodities. Such
capabilities are considered extremely important to human expeditions to
Mars which, because of the distances involved, would be much longer
missions entailing a minimum of 500 days spent on the planet’s surface.

NASA’s Crew Exploration Vehicle is expected to cost $5.5 billion to
develop, according to government and industry sources, and the Crew Launch
Vehicle another $4.5 billion. The heavy-lift launcher, which would be
capable of lofting 125 metric tons of payload, is expected to cost more
than $5 billion but less than $10 billion to develop, according to these
sources.

NASA’s plan also calls for using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, equipped
with as many as six seats, to transport astronauts to and from the
international space station. An unmanned version of the Crew Exploration
Vehicle could be used to deliver a limited amount of cargo to the space
station.

NASA would like to field the Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2011, or within a
year of when it plans to fly the space shuttle for the last time.
Development of the heavy lift launcher, lunar lander and Earth departure
stage would begin in 2011. By that time, according to NASA’s charts, the
space agency would expect to be spending $7 billion a year on its
exploration efforts, a figure projected to grow to more than $15 billion a
year by 2018, that date NASA has targeted for its first human lunar
landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.


© 2005 Space.com.



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