I find it funny that this article ignored the fact that India, China and Russia will be on the moon by 2025. They will put colonies on the Moon then go to Mars.

Why does MSNBC and NASA ignore the moon? Are they afraid of little green men on the moon?

no one is ignoring it... its just already been done, not too mention theres no point in placing bases on a moon when you can place them in space. They aren't exactly going to fall down into the next solar system below...

Having bases on the moon has huge advantages over having them in space.

There are resources on the moon has that can be converter into fuels and many other useful things. Floating in space has basically no resources.

So if you put a base in space, you have to take everything to it. One on the moon can make things, drastically reducing the amount of weight you have to send up in the first place. If you look at fuel consumption on most missions, almost all of it is used just to get off this rock.

The argument of property also will come up. Once people build bases on the moon, they will claim that area as their own. If we wait till all the other counties go up there and set up shop, there might not be any viable areas left to build our bases.

I would rather be the first to build there, than the last.

peteMT - That's an incredibly pesimistic pov. Assuming modern society does not completely collapse, where do you think the space program will be in 10-20 years?

Magnum Serpentine - I'll be very surprised if either China or India put a man on the moon by 2025.

Regarding the moon, I believe we should establish a permanent presence there like on the ISS. However, I'm not sure if it offers any benefit as a "pit stop" to Mars, or other deep space missions. In space refueling depots make more sense. You don't have to waste fuel landing on the moon and overcoming it's huge gravity well.

It would be like starting a cross-country road trip getting off at the very first rest stop. Why bother?

cjsks - yeah, I know. It's hard to write something like that. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was growing up, or a scientist.

However, in the next 20 years, I do agree that China, India, possibly Russia, will be on the moon for the Helium3, while the US and Europe fall behind due to health care obligations and debt issues.

Helium3 as the next energy source. That's really the only reason I can see humanity establishing a base on the moon.

I think the US might continue to be the 'probe' pioneers, but only because of the 'bang for the buck' factor. I just don't think we'll be able to afford developing our own heavy lifting systems or send anyone back to the moon or on to Mars due to our financial problems.

Not to turn this political, but until we check our behavior and elect some competent individuals to office, we're going nowhere. Here, and in space.

Of course they're going to beat the US to Mars! for god's sake, we have people running for President that don't even believe in evolution!

For a good look at just how far the EU is ahead of us, look at the skylon. Google it. It's an incredible vehicle, more advanced than the space shuttle. It flies like an airplane and can angle upwards and become a rocket and blast into space. more than 50x more fuel efficient than the shuttle almost as much cargo room. Plus it's reusable and requires A LOT less maintenance.

Kennedy didn't believe in evolution and he started the space program.

And what in the world has belief in evolution got to do with space exploration? Or being a good doctor, for those who think that way? I don't believe in it and if you told me I could go to Mars tomorrow, I'd jump at the chance to go.

Kennedy believed in this country's evolution. Too many politicians today don't.

FYI: The United States military has hardware that is capable of both space and atmosphere flight. They have had it for decades. And perhaps a Moon base--who knows? Experts at keeping secrets.

Under Eisenhower (1950's) the U.S. was orbiting a satellite that took pictures over the then Soviet Union, but when Sputnik launched, our military could not reveal our covert spy satellite--maybe the Russians had hoped that U.S. might be goaded to reveal such. The U.S. was first.

With the end of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has returned to a Space and Air Force, inasfaras manned missions go. But our probes and robots are light years ahead of the rest of the planet. And what we as average citizens know, is only the tip of a great iceberg.

Space exploration for the sake of "look at what we can do" is wasteful and ignorant. The U.S. may be forced into that game again, but regardless, we the public would like to see the U.S. in the manned space flight, openly. For our national self-esteem, if nothing more.

Umm, we did have plans to build a base on the moon. It was part of the constellation program until Obama cancelled it, dumping years worth of research and billions of dollars down the drain.

As a person who took part in the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, please allow me to share my thoughts. I believe it is essential we be the first to establish a colony on our Moon as well as Mars. If we don't, China will. Has anyone remembered that China is or has built the first stages of their orbital space station with docking features that will not accept the docking hardware on vehicles from the US or Europe ? My guess is that there is an unfriendly reason for this.

We need to establish these colonies for two reasons. We need to know exactly what natural resources exist on both bodies and, by or before 2050, we will have procreated a population on Earth upon which we won't be able to grow enough food to feed ourselves. This population needs to be transported to an established colony with known resources so we will be able to prosper in an orderly manner. Type of soil need to be determined as well as sources of water and renewable energy. Will we be able to grow our own food ? Can we create our own atmosphere so we don't have to live in a bubble ?

I believe these colonies need to be established before 2020. Private businesses should be able to do this work for a lot less money than would government. In fact, government shouldn't even have a say in this endeavor.

China has a fantastic chance of becoming dominant in space (and the world) due to the fact that they have stolen, borrowed all of the trillions of dollars that we have spent for R&D and the fact that they could care less about human life. Not to bring up the past but, as a communist nation, they are the leader in atrocities. At 65 million murdered or killed due to communist actions globally, they have killed more than Hilter and AIDS (AIDS from 1981 till now). If life means nothing to you and you have everything you need being developed by the intelligent first world countries for free, I guess that gives you a leg up... The funny part is, if they would have been a free, democratic society instead of communist, they would have reached these milestones decades ago... I agree with Joe Slater... We should go big with private industry... So far, our government has slowed up or reversed progress for our great nation... I would like to see the United States turn this around ASAP and get back to the buisness of space, space exploration and the boundless benifits from it...

Jeff P-14 : "Of course they're going to beat the US to Mars...."

Yup, 'cuz the majority of Americans will never support the kind of funding neccessary to do it.

@JoeSlater67

China was going to use APAS so as to be compatible with the ISS until America said no way. ITAR!?! That's when CNSA ramped up its own station program. Mind you, I would have said no too. Well at least until they had demonstrated R&D. However I believe that they can convert back to RDS at a drop of a hat as RDS was part of the licence agreement. So they could dock with the Russian seg. and OPSEK. And vice versa. Of course ESA (ATV) uses RDS as well. Commonsense would indicate that all parties sit down and agree on a mutual standard. RDS is reliable but a bit narrow! ESA touted its International Berthing Mechanism but that died with the CRV.

We can determine Lunar resources using satellite mapping and Tele-operated Avatar Robots (Project M) ='bots for ground truthiness. Perhaps some astros for 'bot repair. But I expect we will have 'bot repair 'bots before too long.

Exporting people off planet is a non starter there is not enough lunar water (Think Lake Windermere rather than Lake Superior!) BOTE 20-50,000 tops assuming closed cycle and a boating lake!

Getting anything more than frozen embryos to Mars is also a non starter.

Any future settlement will be through growth in situ.

Sorry but we have to drastically cut our pop. growth here. NOW.

2020 is wishful thinking. We might have had MoonBases and Jetpacks by now if we had started in the 1970's But then the MoonBases would not have been near the poles or in those handy lavatubes we keep discovering.

I am afraid that the best we can hope for is an ISS functioning to 2028+ and a steady technological advance in the face of the Senate Launch System.

Mind you as someone living through the Cold War just seeing Cosmos and Astros (and Taikos?) sharing the same toilet gives me hope for the future.

And I never dreamed we would get a Titan Lander!

"However, in the next 20 years, I do agree that China, India, possibly Russia, will be on the moon for the Helium3,"

For what purpose?

Helium-3 means something, only if you have commercial fusion reactors that can use it. Until then, it's like refining gasoline in, say, 1870. Yeah, there may be a major use for it one day, but...

"Umm, we did have plans to build a base on the moon. It was part of the constellation program..."

There were no 'bases' as part of Constellation. Its only advantage over Apollo would have been to have all three crew members down on the surface (by leaving the Orion in Lunar orbit unattended), and with stay times in weeks, maybe a small number of months, with another expendable Lunar lander (Altair), leaving behind no infrastructure. And do so only 1-2 times a year.

And it's just as well, as Ares V-launched supply flights for a base would have broken the bank, if regular missions did not. Constellation wasn't just to expensive to develop. it would've been too expensive to operate, even if handed to us for free. (And that, after all, is one of the reasons we retired the Shuttle...it proved to be too expensive to run. The very opposite of its reason for being.)

We could easily do better and cheaper than this, if we let go of the notion that the only way to get to the Moon has to look like the way we first got to the Moon...

(Likewise, don't assume the next RLV has to look very much like the Shuttle, either.)

Helium-3 means something, only if you have commercial fusion reactors that can use it. Until then, it's like refining gasoline in, say, 1870. Yeah, there may be a major use for it one day, but...

We did have gasoline in 1870. It was a petroleum by-product, marketed as a cleaning solution, like turpentine. Automobiles were built that ran on electric, alcohol, gasoline, kerosine, steam and many other fuel and power sources. Why did gasoline win? It was dirt cheap.

Obama, a luddite Democrat is the first President to kill off the american Manned Space Program.

As long as liberals are around, the US will not progress into space again.

You mean like that liberal, JFK? You mean how like Republicans left us with a huge deficit and no President can head for the stars until we get a handle on our domestic economic politics? Like that? Like how W had the chance to fully fund the future of NASA but didn't? Like that?

JFK was a democrat, but most certainly not a liberal.

If Obama had decided to spend on the space program you would have condemmned him anyway.

But having said that, yes, there is a problem with the death of the manned space program. It is our legacy as humans. What we need to do is to get everyone on board, as it is so expensive that we ned the whole world to cooperate in a world space program. Like CERN and the LHC.

But then the right wing would say we are in favor of some kind of world government which someohow in their demented logic is bad.

044110, et al: Ridiculous/irrelevant.

Obama did not kill the American manned space program... He cancelled the Constellation program, which had been underfunded from the get go, was behind schedule, and had suffered some serious technical issues (lunar lander scrapped, Orion redesigned three times due to lack of margin on Ares I performance, etc.)

Constellation would not have yielded a manned flight on Ares I until 2017-2019 at the earliest. Cancellation of CxP was necessary to allow NASA to refocus on more achievable goals. i.e., Commercial cargo and crew to LEO; Orion/SLS to BEO... and to maintain it's unmanned exploration and science directives.

I'd be more inclined to blame Congress.

Excuse me 044110: It is the GOP in Congress that has been continually pushing for the defunding or elimination of NASA for years now.

Seriously, look up some facts before you take cheap troll shots at Obama.

Contrare yaky - Each Congressman Republican, or Democrat who have NASA facilities within their districts fight furiously for funding. Your idealogical bent is showing.

I think your kind of underestimating the value of the Shuttle. It's truly one of the biggest achievements of the US over the last thirty years and is the crown jewel of space exploration vehicles. It's sad to see it come to an end.

We could have went to Mars if it was not for that stupid weapons of mass destruction easter egg hunt. Ahh, the last of the Texans I hope.......

@TarheelTom - That damned Bill Clinton, what was he thinking?

It's a matter of resource allocation: Develop the shuttle as a returnable orbital vehicle, establish a moon base or go to Mars. We choose to sink money into the shuttle.

thats why the newest plan has money more focused on research rather than just building the next deep space ship yet.... if we just built it right away, we would just be doing the same all over again and getting one of those 500 day flights.

You're missing the point of exploration.

The best rover is an astronaut. The best sample return mission is a manned sample return mission. The amount of science that can be done on a manned mission far exceeds anything we've sent there to date.

The research that is required to enable such a mission will be of great benefit to society (e.g., deep space life support, etc., etc.)

I would also mention that from a PR perspective, the general public does not get too too excited about robotic exploration. Putting a human on Mars would provide an incredible boost to the general publics interest and pride in the space program.

Deep space 69...

QWe have a space program, but he is privatizing it. Let the market desing it rather than NASA. I thought that's what you teabaggers want.

Ferro, your right, let the market take care of it. Odumbo already has given NASA a new mission to make the Muslims feel good about their contribution to space exploration.

July 7, 2010

NASA's Muslim Outreach

By Mona Charen

It's not really surprising that President Obama told NASA administrator Charles Bolden that his highest priority should be "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering." It fits with so much that we already knew about the president. Now that is a space program

Yes, we seem to be selling out the nation to privatization. The republicans like it, so too the democrats, it seems. Where does this stop? USA, Inc., a country of government of the people by the Corporation and for the corporation? In many ways it is kind of run that way by congress. They expect us to pick up the tab for their mistakes and extravagances. they want us to "share the pain", while not experiencing any of the pain for themselves or their buddies, the rich.

While I don't believe the government should have a monopoly on space, neither should we cede it to private interests or foreign countries. Either will put a strangle hold on it that will not be to this country's best interest, only their own.

Wow. What ignorance! Without Arabic' achievements in math and science, we would literally not have any of the technological achievements we have today. Guess who came up with our beloved Base 10 number system? Guess who is responsible for giving us Algebra, Trig, Decimals, and Cubic Equations? Every single one of these is IMPERATIVE to Rocket Science + "Space Math." Your ignorant comments do nothing but prove how little you actually know

Soupy

You're a pervert

QWe have a space program, but he is privatizing it. Let the market desing it rather than NASA. I thought that's what you teabaggers want.

Umm... Then money was given to NASA and they would bit out the projects to private companies. If you knew anything about NASA and what has been built and created, you would realize it's mostly from private companies they had working for them.... So it was already in a way privatized....

I worked for NASA and although there were companies making the parts the program management and final preparation was done at NASA. I think the privatizarion of NASA is acutaually a good idea.

China is where we were in the 50's, India is behind them. Russia has stated it is decreasing it's emphasis on manned space flight and have expressed no desire to put a man on the moon.

America still has the most advanced space program... by far. We are in transition between man-rated launchers. In a couple years, posts like yours will look incredibly comical. (To those of us who know better, it is already comical).

another one of those people again... o dear

Ok dear, after we clean up our room can we go play outside?

That mythical day 'when all our problems on Earth are solved' will never come.

The <i>answers</i> to some of our problems are out there.

Some of the places with the greatest resources are already quite dead and sterile. I do have some contamination concerns where Mars is involved, but how do you 'fuk up' the Moon or an asteroid?

I want our 'evil' species to survive, by spreading out. Today, one planetary disaster is the end of humanity. Colonize the solar system and beyond, it may last for an unknowably long time.

You and Klatuu may disagree. Oh well. Too bad. You're welcome to stay behind.

(And has it occurred to anyone that the general notion that humanity is the scum of the Universe is just another form of self-centered hubris? Not only are we not the center of creation, but there may be entities somewhere out there with even darker history and behavior than ours? That contrary to what some of us would like to believe, <i>we're not even the worst at being bad?</i> That notion may be one more pedestal we may have to get off of.)

They can only stay for a few days or wait a very very long time
for the planets to align up again.

That is the bad part of going to Mars, it's only a short stay or a very long one.

...and?

I would want a long stay.

Follow the water!

First despite having 'won' a space race, America did not win the Moon. Any exploitation of the LIMITED polar water reserves is:

a/ not economically feasible even in the medium term
b/ counter to OST
c/ a dead end.

OTOH Asteroidal water reserves are vast in comparison: (Ahem) Ceres and a very good case could be made under international law that DGL2014 (a fictional lump of ice that I just made up for an example) might just NOT fall under the treaty as

a/ it is new 'land'
b/ hardly a celestial body under any legal definition
c/ of a size that a landing would count as "possession" and thus 9/10ths of the law.

Short of an international consensus on Lunar property rights which we will need btw. The asteroids are, ultimately, a better resource for a Kardashev II Civilisation.

Assuming Phobos Grunt reveals a reasonable water content I would suggest an international program with the following goals:

AO1999 in 2025 as a test flight (as per the Obama speech); Phobos base and refinery ~2035 then straight to Ceres in the 2050's followed by the water found in the moons of the outer planets and ultimately the Oort Cometary Halo. By which time you are already half way to Alpha Centauri.

If we are talking about (whispers) "Settlement" [Jeff Greason] water is critical for two reasons: Fuel (as he suggested) and as biomass.

Remember our bodies are ~60% water by mass. Thus more people in space needs more water and Carbon and Nitrogen. These last two elements are conspicuous by their absence on the Moon. Meaningful space emigration btw is a complete fallacy

If America wants to have any part in the international exploration and exploitation of space it needs to drop the Exceptionallist and Unilaterallist cant.

Note that Russia; China and ESA are forming a partnership here. All have links to the new space powers even North Korea and Iran!

But I would suggest that America is declining back into isolationism:

"peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none."

I know its quite comical to view. Two sides of the same coin(Republican and Democrat) always criticizing the other while doing the same actions. I really don't understand how they cant see the hypocrisy themselves and the fact those people they back just don't care. While never even taking the time to do any kind of meaningful research on a position they hold. Well maybe one article or what one person told them to feel.

I really don't understand how they cant see the hypocrisy themselves and the fact those people they back just don't care.

they do see it, as a matter of fact they count on it. it's how they make their living

What people don't understand is that we have all been had by a one-party system disguised as a two-party system. It is a bad act that continues to work well on a dumbed down society. With the aid of the public schools and Major Media it will continue to be effective.

amen

If we had planned (plenty of 'plans' existed at the time), <b>and</b> if we had been willing to pay for it.

We were not willing. Period. Simple as that. For many, it was; 'Okay, we won the space race, why are we still doing this?' We didn't even want to pay for the last three planned Apollo Lunar missions, for which the hardware had already been built. (of the last three Saturn Vs, one launched Skylab, the other two are now lawn ornaments at KSC and JSC...I've visited the latter, myself)

The political support for large post-Apollo manned space projects just wasn't there. Then vice-President Spiro Agnew was 'ready to go to Mars tomorrow,' but he was virtually alone in government.

All the 'ifs' in the Universe don't matter, if Congress won't open the purse again.

Today, Congress is, if anything, more interested in process than goals. Only in the state/district jobs that will come with a heavy-lift rocket that even NASA doesn't want, with long development times, and no particular plan for its use, should it ever be finished. (It would do nothing to reduce our reliance on Russia for access to ISS because of the decade-plus time to development, and its size would be expensive overkill only for flight to LEO, without at least the partial re-useability of the Shuttle)

Bringing down the cost of access to LEO, in the end, is the most important thing. Yes that's 'boring,' but you can't do much <i>beyond</i> LEO without that.

If our country is so overpopulated why are we importing more bodies here?

oh, no sir, today, obama is going to give 300,000 illegal aliens amnesty to stay in the United States... Expect more mexican flags to fly over our public schools, more crime, more of our tax dollars going to feed, clothe and give medical care to... sorry, this was about space but i couldnt help it

ok, well thats cool except we have a jillion NASA employees who are seasoned veterans in the industry... if looser wants to kill the NASA shuttle program well, ok then i guess these folks will either greet at wal mart, work for india or china or maybe, just maybe we can do both... maybe we could turn our economy around (not rely on our failing idiotic government) and get back to space through private industry utilizing the manpower and know how that we already possess. reminder- its our government failing us, not the people of the United States failing each other...

oh, almost forgot, i am not saying our new illegal buddies are going to commit crimes. I am saying with a liar of a president, lies in congress about 9% unemployment realling falling between 21 and 27%, jobs being shipped over seas at a contstant rate, maybe the criminals will be developed from within our borders... food costs money and its not getting any cheaper...

personnally, I'd like to go colonize the red planet.

All youse who wanna scream and fight each other over who's right and what is and isn't truth, can have the Earth.

@ Brobuf:

There seems to be 600 million tons of ice at the lunar poles. In sheets of ice at least two meters thick.