FYI,

"NASA's Moon Plan Too Ambitious, Obama Panel Says
- A panel reviewing NASA's current plans for human space flight will
report that there is no realistic way to return to the moon by 2020
-- or even 2028"
Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/1185467.html

: NASA doesn't have nearly enough money to meet its goal of putting
: astronauts back on the moon by 2020 -- and it might be the wrong
: place to go, anyway. That's one of the harsh messages emerging from
: a sweeping review of NASA's human space flight program.

: The Human Space Flight Plans Committee, appointed by President
: Barack Obama and headed by retired aerospace executive Norman
: Augustine, has been trying to stitch together some kind of
: plausible strategy for America's manned space program. The panel
: has struggled to find options that stay under the current budget
: and include missions worthy of the cost and effort.

: The committee members will meet with administration officials
: Friday and will report that there is no realistic way to get
: Americans back on the moon by the target date of 2020, which has
: been the agency's goal since President George W. Bush signed off on
: the ``Vision for Space Exploration'' in 2004. Landing on the moon
: by 2020 would require such drastic budgetary maneuvers as
: de-orbiting the International Space Station -- crashing it into the
: South Pacific -- in 2016.

: The final list of options being explored by the Augustine group
: will include some variation of a lunar base down the road. But the
: committee is 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 that a spacecraft docks at the
: International Space Station.

: The Earth's moon would be a possible ``off-ramp'' of such a
: strategy but not a central target for exploration. Putting
: astronauts on the surface of Mars, and then returning them to
: Earth, would be prohibitively expensive, according to an analysis
: by the committee, which will send its report to the president by
: the end of this month.

: $50 BILLION GAP

: The ``program of record'' -- NASA's current strategy -- has not
: fared well in the committee's review. Former astronaut Sally Ride,
: a member of the panel, said the gap between NASA's goals and its
: current budget totals roughly $50 billion by 2020. If the space
: station's life is extended for five years, she said, the current
: budget would allow for the completion of a heavy-boost moon rocket
: only in 2028, and that would be without spending money on
: developing the components of a lunar base.

: ``If you're willing to wait until 2028, you've got a heavy lift
: vehicle, but you've got nothing to lift,'' she said. ``You cannot
: do this program on this budget.''

: Committee member Jeff Greason, an aerospace executive, was even
: more eviscerating of the NASA strategy, noting that the fixed costs
: of the current strategy are sure to bust the budget down the road:
: ``If Santa Claus brought us this system tomorrow, fully developed,
: and the budget didn't change, our next action would have to be to
: cancel it.''

: The panel will give the administration a menu of options that
: include some that require a boost in funding for human space
: flight, which currently costs about $9 billion a year. Unknown,
: though, is how the Obama administration feels about human space
: flight in general. The president, both as a candidate and in the
: White House, has explicitly endorsed sending humans back to the
: moon, but his decision to create the Augustine committee is a sign
: that the status quo strategy, which carries the imprimatur of his
: predecessor and is endorsed by Congress, is not long for this Earth.

: John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at
: George Washington University, observed the panel's session and said
: he wasn't sure that the Deep Space option, with its emphasis on
: ``fly-bys'' rather than landings, would be easy to sell to the
: public.

: ``I wonder myself if just flying around and not landing anywhere
: would be very attractive,'' he said.

: OTHER PROGRAMS

: The panel is certain to recommend extending the life of the
: International Space Station. It is also pushing hard for greater
: commercialization of space, including using private companies to
: taxi astronauts to Low Earth Orbit.

: Some options include pulling the plug on the Ares I rocket that
: NASA has been building for four years. The Ares I is supposed to
: replace the space shuttle, the final flight of which is slated for
: late 2010. Billions have already been spent on the rocket, which is
: scheduled for an inaugural test flight this month.

Mark Reiff

I am totally in favor of the deep space option except that I wouldn't
send astronauts just lots highly capable robotic probes. We need a
really good analysis of a lot of near earth asteroids. We need to find
several good size comet (ice) cores. We need a good resource summary
before launching mining and habitat development robotics. When there is
a LONG TERM livable place to go then we launch humans but instead of
being astronauts they are colonists. The goal is human expansion into
space not planting flags. The deep space option makes sense.

It sounds like somebody capable of writing a business plan is finally on
one of these committees instead of people who are good at wasting tax
payer money. Business plans aren't sexy but they are the way to get
things done.

I would also de-orbit the International Space Station in 2009. That
would free up a large chunk of useless expenditure. It has already
served its only important function which was to keep a lot of NASA and
civilian contractors employed.

New mantra:
Say NO to astronauts! Say YES to colonists.

Mitchell James

Nowhere do I see a reference to using lunar material to build SPS, which is the only economically valid reason we have for a lunar base.

I love exploration but to do that we absolutely have to have an economic rationale to support it and that rationale is the SPS.

GAry 7

I love the idea of getting people out past LEO. If we go
to L4 and L5, maybe we'll finally find out if there is
already material trapped there. That could be a game-
changer.

It seems like a Lunar base is being held out as a "maybe
someday" sort of thing, so it would be "too early" to
consider what such a base would be good for. @...

CATS, Mr. President. Until we get than animal in the bag,
none of the rest of it is going to happen.

To be clear, the panel doesn't say the plan is too ambitious -- they say
that with the current NASA budget (which has cut repeatedly since 2005),
NASA can't afford to do it.

This can (and probably should) be interpreted as a call for increased
NASA funding, not a call to abandon the plan.

Note in particular this encouraging paragraph:

> : The panel will give the administration a menu of options that
> : include some that require a boost in funding for human space
> : flight, which currently costs about $9 billion a year. Unknown,
> : though, is how the Obama administration feels about human space
> : flight in general. The president, both as a candidate and in the
> : White House, has explicitly endorsed sending humans back to the
> : moon, but his decision to create the Augustine committee is a sign
> : that the status quo strategy, which carries the imprimatur of his
> : predecessor and is endorsed by Congress, is not long for this Earth.

In other words, Obama supports humans on the Moon, but being a very
smart guy, probably recognized (or at least suspected) that the current
budget was not going to cut it -- so he convened a very qualified panel
of experts to come up with a definitive answer. And so they have.

What will the administration and Congress do about it now? Hard to say.
Our economy is still a bit of a mess; recovering, but slowly, and the
drastic measures needed to save it have run up our deficit to historic
levels -- so high that even the general public has begun to notice. So
increasing NASA's budget substantially could be a hard sell, unless it's
paired with cuts somewhere else.

But we are finally starting to pull out of some of the wars started by
GWB, which should save many times NASA's budget. So there is still hope.

Best,
- Joe