Wahoo. Robots.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team said Friday it has completed its preliminary design review as part of the mission confirmation process.
The first in a series of robotic missions to the moon, the LRO is scheduled for launch in October 2008. It will carry six science instruments and a technology demonstration.
The mission goal is to develop new approaches and technologies to support the effort to send humans back to the Moon and to Mars as part of the Bush administration’s Space Exploration Vision.
Wow. Robot missions to the moon. Starting in 2008.
Let me just get the confetti ready for that parade right now.
And the missions are just in “support” of eventually, perhaps someday, maybe possibly if we can find a way to do it that’s absolutely risk-free and incredibly comfortable, sending humans back to the moon.
Wait. Let me emphasize that. BACK to the moon.
As in, we’ve already been there a couple few times. We know how to do it. The technology needed is 40 years old.
So, I ask with an amazing amount of calm, why in the name of all that’s holy are we SENDING ROBOTS!?
Have we lost all our quevos as Americans? Can we not manage to get our courage roused enough to repeat something we did before I was born??
Apparently, we can’t. Welcome to the new world, kids. Visionaries need not apply.
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Category: Out in the Black
I don't see why we can't send people back to the moon. Certainly there will be no shortage of victi … I mean, nominees … for the first flight.
I look back at the 1960's, see all the people who were almost killing each other to become astronauts and get a chance to fly in a craft and on a mission that was immensely more perilous than a similar trip today and I think….man we're wusses!
There actually are some technical barriers, though as you've evidently realized, most of them are political. We can't build carbon copies of Apollo equipment–the blueprints aren't complete, and the engineers who built them are pretty much gone. Plus, in modern terms, the hardware is pathetic. The Shuttle can't get to the moon and back–not enough fuel. Thus, new vehicles have to be designed and built.
NASA, given its status as a political entity, is taking the conservative path, and essentially trying to build up human spaceflight based on the unmanned spacecraft industry. But that's just not enough to capture the public imagination–NASA still hasn't figured out how to do that, and unfortunately its funding depends on it.
WE have become so risk-averse as a nation now. Given that we've already been there, can you imagine the screeching if we *gasp* lost a human life? Plus, there are starving children in Africa and religious icons that have not yet been immerse in various human bodily fluids and placed on public display at taxpayer expense.
How can we possibly justify spending this amount of money on mere space exploration, you barbarian?
Mr. Science Guy – I think we'd both agree that imagination is where NASA sorely fails us. We certainly could return to the moon. We know how to do it, and building the tech to get there would not be a very difficult feat. The trick is that NASA – or someone with some control over the process (since they won't actually let go of the process very much) has to start thinking, and talking, big. They have to speak to our love of exploration, our daring spirits. I can't imagine a bureaucracy doing that and President Bush just doesn't think in that direction.
Cassandra – Yeah, I know. Barbarism abounds.