Word: orbiter
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...region's heavyweight have entered a new and higher frontier. Both countries are focusing on increasingly visible and expensive manned missions and unmanned lunar landings within the next two decades. Space exploration is one area of national endeavor where developing China, the third nation to put a man in orbit around Earth, is not scrambling to catch up with its wealthier, more technologically advanced rival. Make no mistake, says Joan Johnson-Freese, the chair of the National Security Studies Department at the U.S. Naval War College, "China is on a fast track into space," and that has definitely caught Japan...
...tell the celebrations apart at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (J.P.L.) in Pasadena, Calif. They back-slapped and high-fived when the Pathfinder lander bounced down on Mars in 1997 and when the Spirit and Opportunity rovers followed in 2004. They cheered when the Cassini probe went into orbit around Saturn last summer and when the Huygens lander reached the surface of the planet's moon Titan months later. If it's possible to grow tired of popping corks and raising glasses, the J.P.L. engineers may be getting close...
...attempt to change all that, with a spacecraft that is almost entirely reusable. But a ship that must repeatedly fly back and forth between Earth and space takes an awful beating, requiring it to spend far more time in the shop being maintained than it ever did in orbit. What's more, the configuration of such a machine-with the rockets strapped directly to the sides of the crew vehicle-puts fuel, debris and humans in awfully close proximity. Fourteen people have died as a result of that lethal propinquity...
...them. A mammoth new heavy-lift cargo booster will be assembled out of two of the shuttle's solid rocket boosters and up to six of its liquid fuel main engines. This would be used to put an unmanned lunar lander and a small upper stage rocket into Earth orbit. A smaller booster, made of a single solid rocket and a single liquid-fueled engine, would then launch the four-person crew in the command module. The astronauts would dock with the lunar lander, light the upper-stage engine, and head out to the moon. Once there, all four...
...Just as important, there's a whiff of dithering around that 13-year time frame. It was in 1961 that President Kennedy challenged the U.S. to go to the moon; eight years later we were leaving footprints there-and that was before we'd even put a man in orbit. It shouldn't take so long to go back. A contemporary program with a 13-year deadline is precisely the kind of undertaking that can be frittered into nothing if future administrations lose the interest or the revenue to keep pursuing...