One of these days, Alice...

[captpackrat]

NASA's current plans call for a return to the moon with Orion 15, tentatively scheduled for June, 2019.

Whatever happened to being able to put a man on the moon in under a decade?

Comments

[austin_dern]

Under a ``waste anything but time'' mandate, yeah, you can speed things up a touch. But there are trade-offs: the budget requirements killed off pretty near every other project not convincingly related to the lunar landing missions, and even lunar science operations were reduced to scouting missions for Apollo. The system designed was hugely optimized to very short landing missions, so that really excessively risky gimmicks were required just for the three-day, three-EVA lunar missions. For example, the fuel reserve for the nominal mission for the later flights was technically speaking negative (as certain mission points were reached, fuel required for contingencies was freed up to the ``nominal mission'' budget and so a safety margin was created along the way). That's a clearly insane mission plan justified only by rushing.

And then in trade the Apollo capsule designed was not a satisfying fit for its Earth-orbit missions: it couldn't be launched with full fuel reserves on the Saturn I-B booster, even for the Skylab or

[dakhun]

the budget requirements killed off pretty near every other project not convincingly related to the lunar landing missionsNo, not really. "Nearly" perhaps, but there was still one other very important space program going on

[austin_dern]

I said near and meant it. Pioneer was lovely, but -- for example -- lost to the Apollo Budget Rush were projects like the original Voyager missions (unrelated to the gas giant probes): massive, impressive probes for Venus and Mars which would have included multiple landers from a single probe with as many as ten landing sites on Mars alone were lost to the need for money to Get Apollo There Fast. And collateral damage wiped out smaller but still worthwhile projects like Mariner-Mars 69.

And such lunar science programs as Surveyor were basically reduced from what they might be to scouting expeditions for Apollo. (And then after the handful of landing missions, NASA effectively ignored the Moon for three decades, since, after all, they'd gotten enough attention and there was a whole rest of the solar system to look at.)

Incidentally, there's far more robotic exploration going on now than there was in the 1960s, producing much higher-quality data and actual orbital missions rather than quick flybys yielding a couple dozen

[captpackrat]

The first test of an Orion component, the Launch Escape System, is scheduled for Septemberish of this year. The amount of delay in performing the pad abort test will give a good indication of just how badly delayed the rest of the project will be.

[nipper]

Doing it on the cheap I suspect, or perhaps spending a similar amount but spreading it out over a longer period to make it more politically palatable.

[deffox]

Well if they hold off until 2019 they don't have to bring as many supplies. There will be a Chinese restaurant to eat at.