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Some of the most influential leaders of the space community are quietly
working to offer the next U.S. president an alternative to President Bush's
"vision for space exploration"—one that would delete a lunar base and move
instead toward manned missions to asteroids along with a renewed emphasis on
Earth environmental spacecraft.
Top U.S. planetary scientists, several astronauts and former NASA division
directors will meet privately at Stanford University on Feb. 12-13 to define
these sweeping changes to the NASA/Bush administration Vision for Space
Exploration (VSE).
Abandoning the Bush lunar base concept in favor of manned asteroid landings
could also lead to much earlier manned flights to Mars orbit, where astronauts
could land on the moons Phobos or Deimos.
Their goals for a new array of missions also include sending astronauts to
Lagrangian points, 1 million mi. from Earth, where the Earth's and Sun's gravity
cancel each other out and spacecraft such as replacements for the Hubble Space
Telescope could be parked and serviced much like Hubble.
The "alternate vision" the group plans to offer would urge far greater
private-sector incentives to make ambitious human spaceflight plans a
reality.
There would also be some different "winners and losers" compared with the
Bush vision. If the lunar base is deleted, the Kennedy Space Center could lose
additional personnel because there would be fewer Ares V launches and no lunar
base infrastructure work that had been assigned to KSC. On the other hand, the
Goddard Space Flight Center and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
near Washington, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California,
would gain with the increased space environmental-monitoring goal.
Numerous planetary managers told Aviation Week & Space Technology they
now fear a manned Moon base and even shorter sorties to the Moon will bog down
the space program for decades and inhibit, rather than facilitate, manned Mars
operations—the ultimate goal of both the Bush and alternative visions. The first
lunar sortie would be flown by about 2020 under the Bush plan.
If alternative-vision planners have their way, the mission could instead be
flown to an asteroid in about 2025 (see p. 27).
Participants in the upcoming meeting contend there's little public enthusiasm
for a return to the Moon, especially among youth, and that the Bush
administration has laid out grandiose plans but has done little to provide the
funding to realize them on a reasonable timescale.
Planners say the Bush plan is beginning to crumble, with only companies that
have won major funding still enthusiastic about the existing plan.
"It's becoming painfully obvious that the Moon is not a stepping-stone for
manned Mars operations but is instead a stumbling block," says Robert Farquhar,
a veteran of planning and operating planetary and deep-space missions.
The prospect of challenging new manned missions to asteroids is drawing far
more excitement among young people than a "return" (as in going backward) to the
Moon, says Lou Friedman, who heads The Planetary Society, the country's largest
space interest group.
The society is co-hosting the invitation-only VSE replanning session with
Stanford.
A lot of people going to the meeting believe "the Moon is so yesterday," says
Friedman. "It just does not feel right. And there's growing belief that, at high
cost, it offers minimal engineering benefit for later manned Mars
operations."
Under the alternative VSE, even smaller, individual lunar sorties would be
reduced, or perhaps deleted entirely, says Noel W. Hinners, who had extensive
Apollo lunar science and system responsibility at Bell Laboratories before
heading all of NASA's science program development. He also led Lockheed Martin
Spaceflight System.
Hinners believes the group should examine dropping all the lunar sorties to
accelerate the human push to Mars in the revised VSE proposal to the new
administration.
The James Webb Space Telescope, with a 21.3-ft.-dia. mirror, will be launched
in 2013 to one of these "L" points. With little fanfare, it was recently
approved to carry a lightweight Crew Exploration Vehicle docking system just in
case a manned CEV has to make a house call a million miles from Earth for
emergency servicing.
A growing corps of scientists, engineers and astronauts are emerging to argue
for this chance to accelerate manned spaceflight operations outward well beyond
the Moon—faster toward Mars than can be done by using the Moon as a
stepping-stone only 240,000 mi. away.
"The notion that the Moon could serve as a proving ground for Mars missions
strains credulity," says Farquhar, who holds the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair for
Aerospace at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He also was mission
director for the Applied Physics Laboratory's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous
mission that was the first to land a spacecraft on an asteroid (see photo, p.
27).
A return to manned Moon operations has become "a bridge too far" in the Bush
administration's VSE, says Wes Huntress, another former planetary mission
manager.
Huntress is director of the Washington-based Carnegie Institution's
Geophysical Laboratory and had a long career at JPL and NASA headquarters, where
he led NASA space science development and operations—including the highly
successful Discovery planetary mission series. He's also helping to organize the
Stanford workshop that will have about several dozen participants, including
several top NASA and contractor exploration managers.
"There is little left of the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration except the
real need to retire the space shuttle," he says. "Even this goal is being
pursued with great sacrifice from all other parts of the agency because the
administration has simply not put its money where its mouth is."
"Inadequate NASA budgets are leading to collapse of the VSE Moon focus and to
incredibly slow progress for the Moon," says Hinners.
"The nation's space enterprise is under great strain even to build Ares I and
Orion CEV," Huntress stresses. "There are alternate destinations for human
deep-space missions that do not require building a lot of new hardware to [come
and go between Earth and the Moon]. These are missions to near-Earth asteroids
or to scout the Sun-Earth Lagrangian points for future space telescope
construction and servicing," he notes.
The Earth-Sun Lagrangian points (also called libration points) are at the
very edge of the Earth's gravitational well, and a mission would represent a
first excursion to the limit of Earth's influence in the Solar System—a
significant step beyond Apollo, says Huntress.
Missions sent to "L" points can stop just there, orbiting only above and
below the ecliptic plane without any significant use of station-keeping fuel.
Also, L points offer a much cleaner option for advanced astronomy than the dusty
lunar surface, where you have to land everything in addition to launching
it.
"As the nation seems to be turning to environmental threats to our own
planet, a mission to a near-Earth asteroid to assess their nature for good or
ill would also seem to be a real winner," says Huntress.
These stepping-stones would allow for the development of a broader vision of
human spaceflight than simply reinventing Apollo.
Major lunar-related contracts for the Constellation Crew Exploration Vehicle
Orion command ship, a lunar lander design and Ares V launcher have yet to be
awarded, giving the next administration some breathing room in post-Bush
administration VSE contracting.
Some basic asteroid mission design work—part of it volunteer—using the CEV
hardware is already underway at the Johnson Space Center (AW&ST Sept. 25,
2006, p. 21). Other, more in-depth and long-standing manned asteroid analysis is
underway under International Astronautical Assn. and Smithsonian National Air
and Space Museum sponsorship.
Scott Hubbard, consulting professor in the Stanford Aeronautics and
Astronautics Dept., conceived the reassessment meeting. Hubbard was previously
the director of NASA Ames Research Center and, before that, NASA Mars program
director. "We have planned this invitation-only workshop to elicit frank and
open discussion about the future of the 'vision' as the administration changes,"
he says.
"The Stanford workshop will address a broad range of issues touching on many
elements of space exploration. The attendees will discuss the balance between
space science and human exploration, the need for continuing and enhancing Earth
science observations, the relative utility of humans and robotics, and progress
or impediments to human exploration of Mars, asteroids and the Moon," says
Hubbard. "In addition, the workshop will discuss the status of access to space
and the emerging entrepreneurial space industry.
"This is the kind of debate that will go on—beyond whether a lunar base
really makes sense. But manned asteroid missions first—ahead of a lunar base—are
drawing strong attention," he says. Hubbard and Friedman are co-hosting the
event, along with former astronaut Kathy Thornton, associate dean of the
University of Virginia's Science, Technology and Society Dept. Thornton flew on
four space shuttle missions, including the initial critical repair of the Hubble
Space Telescope in 1993.
The alternative vision would also include far greater private-sector
incentives for participation at all levels, an area public surveys cite as very
important. Missions to asteroids and Lagrangian points, for example, are likely
to carry along Bigelow-type commercial inflatable modules. A recent informal
space program survey by The New York Times found substantial public frustration
about NASA's doing what entrepreneurs could do better.
Under the alternative concepts, astronauts using an upgraded CEV would
initially be sent on long-duration missions, not to the Moon, but to land on
asteroids where they would sample terrain perhaps more ancient than the Moon's.
These visits would also help develop concepts for diverting such near-Earth
objects, should they threaten a potentially devastating impact on Earth.
Although it may be hundreds of years before used operationally, an emergency
asteroid diversion would be "the ultimate 'green mission'—one that could save a
large portion of the Earth from impact destruction," says Friedman.
To reinforce that point, he notes that on Jan. 30, a 150-ft.-long asteroid
will pass close to Mars. The asteroid visit and Lagrangian mission concepts
would use much of the same CEV Ares I and Ares V heavy-lift booster
infrastructure, but in ways that would be much faster stepping-stones to Mars
than developing a manned lunar base. Asteroid and Lagrangian point missions
would each last several weeks or months. Both the libration points and asteroids
would be about 1 million mi. from Earth, requiring operations more like much
longer trips to Mars at least 40-100 million mi. away.
Robotic options for all mission elements also will be reviewed, and one
working group will be devoted to better defining manned versus robotic
tradeoffs.
Another issue is international participation.
Aviation Week discussed an unrelated European International Space Station
topic with NASA Administrator Mike Griffin last week, who in comments aside also
addressed the basic Moon/Mars issues between the U.S. and Europe (see p.
28).
"A large portion of the scientific community in the U.S. also prefers Mars
over the Moon," he acknowledged. But "interest in the Moon is driven by goals in
addition to and beyond the requirements of the science community. It is driven
by the imperatives that ensue from a commitment to become a spacefaring society,
not primarily by scientific objectives, though such objectives do indeed
constitute a part of the overall rationale.
"We continue to experience intense international interest concerning our
plans for lunar exploration," Griffin told Aviation Week. | 
