Word: moone
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...election-year head snapper, President George W. Bush sketched out a long-term vision for manned spaceflight that goes far beyond the dog paddling in near-Earth orbit to which the space agency has confined itself since the 1970s. Back on the table is human exploration of the moon; back on the table is human exploration of Mars. Swept to the floor--or at least to the side--is the overbudget, underproducing International Space Station and the increasingly creaky, increasingly lethal shuttle fleet...
Maybe. It's just possible, however, that there's a lot less to the Bush plan than meets the eye--or matches the hype. The President's proposal does not call for any new footprints on the moon until 2015 at the earliest--43 years after the last ones were left. And though the year 2030 was bandied about in the press as a target for putting a man on Mars, the President was careful not to set a date. In 1989 the first President Bush called for a manned Mars landing no later than 2019, then stood back...
...Human beings in a spaceship beat unmanned metal every time, no matter if the metal is up and running and the humans won't fly for years. Even overseas, the speech made news. British bookmakers offered 10-to-1 odds that human beings will not set foot on the moon again before the end of 2015 and 50-to-1 odds against Mars' being reached before 2030 is over. The Chinese had reasons of their own to be interested. On New Year's Day, Beijing announced that it was beginning its own lunar program, with a first unmanned landing...
...transfer vehicle to get astronauts to and from the space station and to take a little of the load off the shuttle. The design won a lot of backing in Congress and the space community after the Columbia disaster grounded the entire shuttle fleet. The President's Mars-and-moon plan calls for the development of what is being called a crew exploration vehicle, and a souped-up version of the Boeing craft might do that job nicely...
...thornier than the design of the spacecraft is the problem posed by all the fuel, food and water such a mission would require. The Apollo flights to the moon were gas-up-and-go trips that lasted no more than 12 days. You could fill the tank and the larder once before you left and carry along everything you would need. Not so when you're looking at 14 months of round-trip flight time between Earth and Mars and perhaps a 1 1/2-year stay on the planet to catch the next Earth-Mars alignment back home. Even...