NASA today announced plans to return to the Moon and set up a permanent base by 2024, as per the goals and objectives laid out in “A Renewed Spirit of Discovery” issued by the White House in 2004. That document directs the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to undertake various initiatives in space to include renewed human exploration of the Moon no later than 2020, and of Mars and “other destinations” at some unspecified future date.

NASA’s announcement of today is fairly general and utilizes the yet-to-be-built Ares launch vehicle and Orion crew capsule. They go on to describe plans for about 40 landings on the rim of Shackleton Crater near the Moon’s south pole, in order to construct the aforementioned base and habitat. The main benefits provided by that particular location are moderate temperatures, high levels of sunlight and low delta-v requirements.

NASA hopes to have a fairly mature operation in place at the Moon base by 2025, supporting long-duration missions with near self-sufficiency. Plans become vague beyond that timeframe, with “Humans to Mars” occupying a single bullet point in the NASA presentation - however, we were fortunate to have NASA Administrator Michael Griffin forward the attached graphic to us, showing what a future Mars colony might look like)

Why The Moon - NASA News Release, 12.04.06

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Aerospace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.