Word: moons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more head scratcher for at least some people in the space community is the Bush proposal's heavy reliance on the moon as a stopping point on the way to Mars. The President calls for NASA to establish a lunar base first, learn to live and work there, and then use that extraterrestrial space center as a launch facility where Mars craft shipped up from Earth in pieces could be assembled and relaunched...
...said for trying out your hardware and survival skills at a campsite only three days from home as opposed to one seven months distant. Wendell Mendell, Johnson Space Center planetary scientist, worries about the physical and psychological effects of a long Mars mission and agrees that the moon is a good place to try out survival skills. "The attitude is, They're astronauts, they're tough, stick 'em in a tuna can--it doesn't matter," he says. "But it does. That's why the moon is important...
...true too that the moon may be an appealing launchpad because lunar gravity, just one-sixth that of Earth's, makes payloads a lot lighter and launching them a lot easier. But things aren't quite that simple. An Apollo astronaut confessed that after his lunar module landed on the moon, he had the sobering realization that before he could return home, he would again have to get the ship moving very, very fast. As any astronaut knows, the two most challenging tasks in operating a spacecraft are starting and stopping it. If it's possible to avoid additional stops...
...directly from Earth orbit to Mars, and it would probably be simpler and less costly," says Larry Bell, space architect at the University of Houston. "Some of us don't see the necessity of going to the moon first...
There's another concern, one that worries administrators more than engineers. If NASA history has proved anything, administrators say, it's that intermediate space goals can sometimes turn into ends in themselves. "We could easily get bogged down on the moon and never get to Mars, at least not in this century," warns Murray. That kind of long-term detour, says Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars, is "the same swindle we fell for on the space station...