NASA’s Return to the Moon BY EDWARD S. GOLDSTEIN Images courtesy of NASA
T
he last time we sent men to the Moon and returned them safely to Earth – back then, our astronaut corps’ makeup dictated only men would undertake these journeys – we left much unfinished exploration business undone. During the Apollo era, NASA contracted for 15 flight-worthy massive Saturn V launch vehicles. Apollo 11 achieved the first landing with the sixth Saturn V, leaving nine for follow-on landings, three beyond the six missions that were attempted. Had budget cuts not crimped NASA’s plans, we would have mounted the Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions with the likely landing sites Schroter’s Valley, the Hyginus rille region and Copernicus crater, all in the Moon’s equatorial region, as were the six landings. Now, NASA intends through its Artemis program to land the first woman and the next man near the Moon’s south pole by
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2024, initially aiming for a brief visit to the lunar surface leading up to six-and-a-halfday missions, roughly twice the length of the longest Apollo sortie, and subsequently establishing a sustained human presence by 2028. Going back to the Moon has seriously been proposed twice before, by President George H.W. Bush (1989 “Space Exploration Initiative”) and President George W. Bush (2004 “Vision for Space Exploration”) administrations, but failed due to a lack of capability and long-term national commitment. Why might this time be different? Dr. John Logsdon, the George Washington University space historian whose books have chronicled the space policies of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, has a notion why. “I think the fact that we in Apollo used up the easiest exploration destination very early on
in the development of the program has led us over the past 50 years to try to re-create the rationales that led us to go to the Moon in the first place: power, prestige, very little science, and now economics,” he said. “They haven’t worked over this half-century since the end of Apollo. We in the U.S. have been aiming in my mind to go back to the Moon since 2004, pretty much consistently. We’ve been building hardware with the SLS [Space Launch System] and Orion [Orion Multi-purpose Crew Exploration Vehicle] ever so slowly, but there is a trajectory to get back to the Moon due to a combination of factors. One, I think, is the very simple reason that it is time to go back. If we are going to have a human spaceflight program, it should go somewhere, not just go around in circles. And the hope is we can finish the exploration of the Moon and find that there are economically valuable
