The scientist warns that Artemis and NASA may repeat Apollo's mistakes

In the five months since Vice President Mike Pence asked NASA to send humans back to the moon by 2024, the space agency has made considerable progress towards this goal.

Meanwhile and under the direction of administrator Jim Bridenstine, the agency has contracts with both elements of the Lunar Bridge, the small space station that will follow a distant orbit around the Moon. NASA has also begun soliciting ideas from the industry regarding their designs for a three-story lunar lander, on which construction could begin sometime in 2020. The agency is also seeking freight deliveries on the Moon.

These are milestones and it's hard to get a big agency like NASA moving quickly. For all this, however, there are storm clouds on the horizon. Clearly, there is talk of funding the Artemis program to put humans on the moon – the US House has not planned funding for this effort in its preliminary budget for fiscal year 2020 and the Senate has not yet prepared a budget. If there is no additional funding, NASA can not give money to the industry to go do the work.

But there is also another problem, which was brought to light at the meeting of the National Space Council, last Tuesday, by Clive Neal, a lunar scientist from the University of Notre Dame. NASA runs a very real risk of turning the Artemis program into a repeat of the Apollo program: a footprint of flags and footprints returning to the moon without tracking, in the form of a lunar base or a A lasting presence in the deep space.

A springboard?

"To look forward to the moon, we must learn from the past," said Professor Neal. "The Apollo program was a monumental achievement, but Apollo showed us how not to explore the human space because such a program based on international competition is not sustainable. "

Since the beginning of his term, Jim Bridenstine, director of NASA, spoke about setting up a "sustainable" lunar program and his stay on the moon. In his March speech, Vice President Pence said the same thing. He wants NASA's next giant leap to go to the moon, but this time it stays.

"Now is the time for us to do the next" giant jump "and send the American astronauts back to the moon, establish a permanent base on the ground and develop technologies to bring American astronauts. to Mars and beyond, "said Pence.

Since then, however, President Trump has repeatedly said that he is more interested in humans who "plant a flag" on Mars instead of returning to the moon. He publicly questioned Bridenstine on the need to go to the moon before Mars, and in recent speeches mentioning space, he totally ignored the moon.

In response to this, Bridenstine pivoted in speaking of the value of the Moon as a permanent base for human exploration. Instead, he talks about it as a "test site" or a "stepping stone" on the way to Mars.

Bridenstine and Pence were sitting side by side on stage Tuesday. Professor Neal explained that this approach devalues ​​the moon and threatens to undermine NASA's efforts to bring humans back into the deepest spaces. "The moon has been interpreted, at least by some, as a springboard or box to check the way to Mars," said Neal.

Such a view ignores the intrinsic value of lunar resources, Neal said, in the form of ice-water poles, as well as lunar soil that can be broken down into oxygen, titanium, silicates, and so on. If NASA wants to set this aside and only touch the moon before going to Mars, what is the point of repeating the Apollo program?

Checkered history

The reality is that, even with a healthy budget increase, NASA can hardly afford a human landing program on the moon in the 2020s – at least using its Space Launch System rocket and its usual methods of trading as she seems determined to do. This is more than enough for a space agency that has not plunged man into space for 47 years.

Talking about Mars is historically unsustainable with current budgets or NASA's existing technology. (For example, NASA can at best build one SLS rocket per year and a single human mission on Mars would require six to eight SLS rocket launches). Efforts to go to the Moon, Mars or both have all ended in a cancellation. So, speaking of a plan to explore the moon at Mars all the way up, the NASA administration seems to be moving from the edge of the possible to the realm of the impossible. .

But that did not stop the White House from marching towards Mars. At the end of Tuesday's meeting, Vice President Pence asked Bridenstine to come back with deadlines for moon landings, as well as for human missions to Mars. "We set specific deadlines for the administrator within the next 60 days (…) for the submission of a plan for sustainable exploration of the lunar surface and the development of crewed missions on Mars "said Pence.