AP (at the Huffington Post, of all places) says he got a bum rap. I still think that we could get back to the moon by 2020. But NASA can’t, not as long as Congress is in charge.
4 thoughts on “Newt’s Lunar Ambitions”
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AP (at the Huffington Post, of all places) says he got a bum rap. I still think that we could get back to the moon by 2020. But NASA can’t, not as long as Congress is in charge.
Comments are closed.
I still think that we could get back to the moon by 2020.
We being…
the human race in general?
NASA?
private effort?
someone else?
We being the US, either privately, or as a government effort, but only if it was actually important, as it was in Apollo, and with a different organization than NASA.
The US can make moonfall by 2020 given its bottom line budget and commitment to commercial lift, ISS and SLS. But something else–upwards $5 billion per year–has to give.
“But something else – upwards $5 billion per year – has to give.”
That is a lot more money than is needed to make moon fall. I remember a presentation at SAS that showed how a person could get to the moon on a Falcon although I thought it was a bit risky. Then there is LiftPort that has a plan to build a lunar space elevator that only requires one Falcon Heavy launch. This would leave in EML1 a larger solar array than the ISS has as a side product of getting there. The string alone is 48,700 kg delivered to EML1 from that one launch.
$5 billion could fund dozens of Falcon Heavy launches with useful payloads all delivered to EML1 one in the same manner. Getting down to the lunar surface from there would require rocket science (without LiftPort) but not billions of dollars per year.
What we need to return to the moon is mostly a matter of the will to do so.