NASA says it will get astronauts to the Moon by 2024

[editor]

Ambitious but bring it on!

NASA's chief says the agency is all set to meet a new challenge — returning humans to land on the moon within the next five years.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine promised Tuesday (March 26) that the agency will work quickly to send a crew to the lunar vicinity in 2022 and land astronauts on the moon's south pole by 2024.

Bridenstine's declaration came after U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who chaired the fifth meeting of the National Space Council Tuesday, announced a goal to land astronauts on the moon in the next five years.

Bridenstine pledged that the agency will use "creative approaches to advance SLS manufacturing and testing to ensure Exploration Mission-1 launches in 2020," while making sure that the rocket is safe and reliable.

The announcement comes in the 50th year after humans first landed on the moon, in 1969. NASA sent 12 astronauts to the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972 as a part of the Apollo program, and nobody has returned to the moon since (despite several other U.S. presidents trying to send missions afterward). Some Apollo astronauts are still living today, including Buzz Aldrin, who was on the first moon landing in 1969 with Neil Armstrong, who died in 2012.

President Trump is up for re-election in 2020. If Trump is re-elected, his second and final term concludes in 2024 — the same year that NASA is supposed to land astronauts on the moon.

NASA Chief Vows Quick Action to Return Astronauts to the Moon by 2024

Are We Really in a New Space Race with China and Russia?

 

[Limejuice]

Excellent! Bring it on!

 

[Yossarian]

The accelerated timeline sounds like a recipe for the kind of disaster that will set NASA back by years - the previous timeline was to get American astronauts back to the moon by 2028. Trump has now ordered them to speed things up "by any means necessary" to make sure a return to the moon happens by the end of his hypothetical second term. One problem: He's also cutting NASA's budget.

Mr. Pence described a need for NASA to adopt greater urgency in returning to the moon. But an accelerated pace has not been evident in the Trump administration’s NASA budget requests to Congress, raising many questions about how it will be possible for the agency to accomplish this ambitious goal.

NASA’s current schedule sets 2023 for the first flight of Orion with astronauts aboard. A moon landing would not occur until 2028, almost a decade from now ... “Ladies and gentleman, that is just not good enough,” Mr. Pence said of the timeline, laid out in budget documents weeks ago. “We are better than that.”

The Trump Administration Wants Astronauts on Moon by 2024. But What’s the Plan?

Quoting the late Mercury Seven astronaut Gus Grissom, Abbey says: “There’s no Buck Rogers without any bucks.”

The 2020 budget proposal the White House has submitted to Congress actually cuts NASA’s budget a bit, including the Space Launch System and Orion programs meant to help NASA’s human exploration efforts in deep space.

Consent Form | Popular Science

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

NASA says it will get astronauts to the Moon by 2024

Hate to break it to you all, but it's already been done.

 

[Supine]

Is Trump building an apartment block up there?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Whitey's (back) on the Moon.

 

[NoXion]

How are they going to land on the Moon? Because as far as I know, NASA don't have any crew-rated landers.

 

[HAL9000]

I'm skeptical this will happen by 2024, it wouldn't surprise me if this target is quietly dropped.

The target date for Starliner's first crewed ISS flight has also been pushed back, from August until Novembe

Boeing Delays 1st Test Flight of Crew Capsule to August: Report

 

[Yossarian]

"Let's tell Boeing to get this done as fast as possible by any means necessary, what's the worst that could happen?"

 

[T & P]

NASA says it will get astronauts to the Moon by 2024

Hate to break it to you all, but it's already been done.

That's what they'd have you believe

 

[ferrelhadley]

The SLS launch system is in a lot of political trouble. But it can likely make a CIS Lunar flight by 2022 as the capsule has been partially tested and rocket is close to completion, even if it has slipped again.
A lander is another kettle of fish but in theory is a very simple piece of equipment compared to anything that has to deal with the atmosphere.

 

[ferrelhadley]

Whitey's (back) on the Moon.

Very Urban 75

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Very Urban 75

What, quoting Gil Scott Heron? Guess it is.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Article in this week's New Scientist makes me even less enthusiastic about this dubious project. NASA funding is currently at around 0.5 per cent of the federal US budget. By comparison, during the height of the Apollo programme, it was up around 5 per cent. There is no suggestion of an increase in overall funding for this project (in fact, it has been specifically ruled out), and plenty of work to do to develop and build a launch rocket and landing craft. Meanwhile other projects, such as sending a mission to Europa, will necessarily suffer.

So I stand by my 'Whitey's (back) on the Moon' comment. This is a politician-inspired space project, much as Apollo was. I'm all for space exploration, and I don't think a half of one per cent of a budget is money badly spent - it's not either/or wrt space exploration and social justice here on Earth; it's quite possible to have both. But I have yet to see a coherent case made for doing this now rather than other potentially much more exciting things. That Trump and Pence want this is almost enough on its own for me not to - it will provide them with the politician's spectacle that, say, a mission to Europa would not provide, but advances in science and understanding? I've not seen much of a case for that.

 

[8ball]

Pfft! They'll never be able to put a man on the moon.

 

[Crispy]

NASA is not capable of the sort of agile moves neccesary to achieve this goal. It is knee deep in bureacracy and tied down to dozens of commitments in dozens of congressional districts, many of whose congresspeople/senators hold the agency's purse strings.

SpaceX's Starship will fly before NASA returns to the moon IMO, and at that point they may as well give up, having ceded every kind of advantage in human spaceflight. The power of pork is strong, but there will be a reckoning at some point.

 

[pug]

Article in this week's New Scientist makes me even less enthusiastic about this dubious project. NASA funding is currently at around 0.5 per cent of the federal US budget. By comparison, during the height of the Apollo programme, it was up around 5 per cent. There is no suggestion of an increase in overall funding for this project (in fact, it has been specifically ruled out), and plenty of work to do to develop and build a launch rocket and landing craft. Meanwhile other projects, such as sending a mission to Europa, will necessarily suffer.

So I stand by my 'Whitey's (back) on the Moon' comment. This is a politician-inspired space project, much as Apollo was. I'm all for space exploration, and I don't think a half of one per cent of a budget is money badly spent - it's not either/or wrt space exploration and social justice here on Earth; it's quite possible to have both. But I have yet to see a coherent case made for doing this now rather than other potentially much more exciting things. That Trump and Pence want this is almost enough on its own for me not to - it will provide them with the politician's spectacle that, say, a mission to Europa would not provide, but advances in science and understanding? I've not seen much of a case for that.

I can understand the prestige of sending people back to the moon but I think they'd be better off investing the money in robotics and sending the robots at the moment, humans are all soft and weak and need protection, food, water, air etc then they have to rest, robots with nuclear batteries and ai can just get on with what needs to be done whilst being controlled from earth, they could be operational for years and don't need to be brought back to earth when they fail, we could even send robot repair robots to keep the ones at the coalface going.

 

[Crispy]

Thing is, a human can do in days what a robot would take a month. The Mars rovers move at a crawl and every geological investigation has to be meticulously planned and carried out one step at a time. A human with a geologist's hammer is orders of magnitude faster and more capable. (All of which assumes that science is the only motivation for space exploration!)

 

[19sixtysix]

NASA says it will get astronauts to the Moon by 2024

Hate to break it to you all, but it's already been done.

Not in trumplandia. They think the Saturn Vs went to Saturn

 

[pug]

Thing is, a human can do in days what a robot would take a month. The Mars rovers move at a crawl and every geological investigation has to be meticulously planned and carried out one step at a time. A human with a geologist's hammer is orders of magnitude faster and more capable. (All of which assumes that science is the only motivation for space exploration!)

Thats why I think they should invest all the money in robots, to advance the technology so it can work better and faster, with the moon being much closer than mars the comms will be quicker, they can send bigger more complex machines with better ai features and have more confidence that they'll actually make it there intact, they could send two or more robots to work together on their missions. With the increased development of the technology the ones they send to mars and elsewhere in the future would be better and as we've seen with the mars rovers they have the potential to operate for many years. Bearing in mind that they're planning to send these people there five years from now to spend days doing stuff when they could have robots there in a couple of years if they wanted, the robots would in that case surely produce the results sooner.
Still it would be cool to see humans on the moon in my lifetime.

 

[Yossarian]

Trump is basically just a really shitty boss.

"You guys need to get to the moon by 2024, I don't care how you do it, just do it."

"We might be able to make it happen, but we're going to need more people and a lot more money."

"I'm not giving you any more money, just make it happen, you bums. Work harder! If you can't do it, I'll find somebody who can."

 

[Yossarian]

4 years later: "Sir, we have the plans ready for the moon mission, you need to sign off on them."

"Oh yeah, the moon thing - put it on my desk, I'll take a look at it later. Wait, let's make it Mars - let's send this thing to Mars next year. No, I don't know how much you'd have to change to send it to Mars, I thought that was your fucking job."

 

[ferrelhadley]

Article in this week's New Scientist makes me even less enthusiastic about this dubious project. NASA funding is currently at around 0.5 per cent of the federal US budget. By comparison, during the height of the Apollo programme, it was up around 5 per cent.

The US GDP has grown that means that 0.5% is a silly comparison, the cost of space flight has changed dramatically since then as well as has technology.

There is no suggestion of an increase in overall funding for this project (in fact, it has been specifically ruled out), and plenty of work to do to develop and build a launch rocket and landing craft

.
The rocket has already been built and is due to fly next year unmanned, fly round the moon in 2022 and has a mission for a 30 day human fly by of the moon slotted for 2024 that the NASA chief, Jim Bridenstine was suggesting could be repurposed. All that is missing is, as I said, "A lander is another kettle of fish but in theory is a very simple piece of equipment compared to anything that has to deal with the atmosphere." The risks are slippages in the existing hardware that has been developed that can carry out this mission and his launch dates.

Space Launch System - Wikipedia

and

The Exploration Mission-3, or EM-3, is a planned 2024 mission of the Space Launch System and second crewed mission of NASA's Orion spacecraft.[2] The intended goal of the mission is to send four astronauts into a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon. It would also deliver the ESPRIT and U.S. Utilization modules to the proposed Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G).[3]

Exploration Mission-3 - Wikipedia

I'm all for space exploration,

Yet you seem oblivious to the fact most of the infrastructure for this exists and the missions are being finalised.

 

[ferrelhadley]

Thats why I think they should invest all the money in robots, to advance the technology so it can work better and faster, with the moon being much closer than mars the comms will be quicker, they can send bigger more complex machines with better ai features

Since the drive for more autonomous machines is driven by huge commercial, military and existing science foundation money, how exactly w ould diverting funding from human space flight accelerate this in a way that is quicker than building a small landing vehicle and attaching it to a mission that is already budgeted to fly in 2024.

 

[ferrelhadley]

Thing is, a human can do in days what a robot would take a month.

A human can get deeper into the Lunar soil than any machine has in an hour. There is no comparison.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

This touches on an important point Crispy made - namely that part of NASA's remit is to provide jobs in the US. So, according to New Scientist, the SLS has had 6 billion dollars spent on it already. Cost per flight - between 500 million and 1 billion per flight (just a little less than Saturn V). The most powerful version of the SLS - the one needed to carry people - isn't in the current budget. And I was wrong about NASA's budget being unchanged - Trump is planning to cut it.

SpaceX may well get in there first with its much cheaper systems. Or it may find itself up against limits that it struggles to overcome within its relatively restricted budget. Jury on that is necessarily still out. Either way, if NASA presses on with this priority in mind, other projects will either be cancelled or delayed. Me, I'd far rather be setting sights on Europa given an either/or choice between those two missions.

 

[ferrelhadley]

This touches on an important point Crispy made - namely that part of NASA's remit is to provide jobs in the US. So, according to New Scientist, the SLS has had 6 billion dollars spent on it already. Cost per flight - between 500 million and 1 billion per flight (just a little less than Saturn V). The most powerful version of the SLS - the one needed to carry people - isn't in the current budget.

Wrong the existing budget has funding for the Block 1B version.
The proposed budget for next fiscal year has cut it. But there is a lot of political momentum behind human exploration and a maze of political machinations to get through before that budget proposal is a set in stone actual budget.
And as the Exploration Mission 2 is set for an SLS Block 1 launcher and is sending humans to orbit the Moon I am baffle by where you are getting your info from. Block 1B is an improved cryogenic upper stage. It will see the translunar injection go from 26 tonnes to 37 tonnes.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I am baffle by where you are getting your info from. B.

Most recent issue of New Scientist. I have it here in front of me. I quote:

Its [SLS's] most powerful version, capable of launching the Orion crew capsule, isn't in Trump's proposed 2020 budget, which calls for cuts to NASA's already shrinking budget.

 

[ferrelhadley]

Its most powerful version, capable of launching the Orion crew capsule, isn't in Trump's proposed 2020 budget, which calls for cuts to NASA's already shrinking budget.

So exactly what I said.

The most powerful version of the SLS - the one needed to carry people

Block 1 is sending people round the Moon

isn't in the current budget.

Block 1B is in the current budget, it is not in the budget proposed for next financial year, (just like it was not in the one proposed for this year) There is a great deal of horse trading to come.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

And that horse trading will necessarily involve the cancellation/shelving of other projects. Is putting someone on the Moon again the best use of NASA's increasingly limited resources? That was, and is, my question. It's a mission that appeals to Trump because he can see the live coverage already. He can see the presentations in the White House to the returning astronauts. I'm very suspicious of it for the exact same reason.