perfidy

NASA has released its bold plan to send mankind to the stars. Well, to send a few people to the moon sometime in the next century, anyway. When President Bush promised in 2004 to do in sixteen years what we did forty years ago in eight, I was underwhelmed. I am now subunderwhelmed. Check out a few groundbreaking details:

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.

Meaning that using components that in large measure we have already invented and already used, in 13 years we can be back on the moon. And as an added bonus, the crew capsule will be disposable!

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.

That will be somewhere around the 45th anniversary of the immediately previous seven day moon mission.

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.

So we’re considering building an actual outpost. Sometime around 2080, I imagine. By the time NASA gets around to building that, they might have to rent landing space from Branson’s Virgin Galactic Lunar Amusement Park.

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.

Hey that’s a great reason. Prove you can live off the land, using a hundred billion dollars worth of lowest-bidder equipment. That’ll show the Chinese.

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.

$10 billion dollars. That’s not a lot of money. Of course, that’s just to develop the vehicles. Then we’ll actually have to buy them. Maybe one or two, so we can make one Lunar voyage per year and still have launch capacity to service the ISS and Hubble. I should think that by using pre-existing hardware, you’d be able to actually, you know, save money.

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.

Or put another way, no less than a year after Rutan wins the $50 million prize for first reusable private orbital vehicle

Development of the heavy lift launcher, lunar lander and Earth departure stage would begin in 2011.

By which time, all the manufacturing plants developing the shuttle components will be closed, and using those parts will no longer be possible, seeing as we’ll probably lose another shuttle sometime in the next six years.

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.

$7 billion a year. Just imagine what smart people could do with that sort of cash.

How anyone could imagine that this is a sensible plan is beyond me. The engineers at NASA certainly know better. If NASA just used the comparatively honest and efficient defense procurement system, they could be back on the moon in a few years, especially given that they could use pre-tested shuttle components. Aargh.