Word: orbitals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...what's not to like? For starters, the timeline. Earth-orbit tests of the vehicles would not take place until 2014; the first landing is planned for 2020, with the outpost to follow in 2024. That's a lot of Congresses and presidential administrations that would need to stay focused. Then there's the money. NASA's annual budget is a relatively modest $17 billion, and the new plans are based on the assumption that the figure will not rise appreciably. Things should get easier in 2010, when the aging shuttles are mothballed, freeing up perhaps $6 billion annually...
...allure of that second destination got a big boost with last week's discovery of fresh signs of water on Mars. It was made by the Mars Global Surveyor, a spacecraft that has been in Martian orbit since 1997 and finally winked out only last month. Before it did, it produced exhaustive photographic maps of the planet, including shots of tens of thousands of now dry gullies that were almost certainly carved by water. Most of those channels haven't changed over time, but at two of the sites investigators found what appear to be the tracks of flows that...
...there's plenty of reason for cautious optimism. After trying to reinvent the technological wheel with the dangerous and temperamental space shuttle, NASA is returning to what it does best. The hardware and crew for the lunar base will be sent into orbit atop comparatively reliable, disposable boosters, based on the sturdy and powerful engines of the shuttle and long-extinct Saturn boosters. The lunar orbital vehicles will be souped-up Apollo command modules and the landers will be similarly updated lunar excursion modules - the lovable, buglike LEMs. Astronauts on Apollos 15, 16 and 17 already showed that lunar rovers...
...wary Monday, when NASA announced its plans for a manned moon base in the south lunar pole, a settlement that it says should be up and running in 2020 and permanently occupied in 2024. A manned space program that has done nothing but circle the harbor of low-Earth orbit since 1972 - losing 14 astronauts to accidents in the process - hardly seems likely to pull off something so daring, especially when it's got an 18-year deadline in which funding and governmental enthusiasm for the project could easily melt away...
...focal points and to express its will, and then to march. A scared Communist official told an American businessman: 'The earth is moving.' The earth moved to the tread of a million feet in Hungary last week, and a satellite which had been blindly spinning in the Soviet orbit for eleven years suddenly swung out of its gravitational course into a still unsteady national axis. It had never happened before. As the world looked on, incredulous, a people armed principally with courage and determination (and a few filched guns) fought one of the most spectacular revolutions of modern times. Behind...