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As it celebrated its 60th birthday last week, NASA unveiled its new master plan for a return to the moon and manned journeys to Mars and beyond.
The 21-page national space exploration campaign is the agency's response to President Trump's Space Policy Directive-1, inviting NASA to launch an "innovative and sustainable program" … to allow human expansion through the solar system, "first with missions beyond Low Earth Orbit, aka LEO, leading to manned missions to Luna and, possibly, Mars.
Nearly 50 years after Neil Armstrong's first march on the moon, humanity can not go further than LEO, where the International Space Station is in orbit. NASA aims to regain the ability to reach the lunar orbit, first with the Orion spacecraft built jointly with the European Space Agency.
Even if private companies develop the capacity to carry all the necessary cargo and personnel up to LEO, NASA will build the space launch system, "the most powerful rocket in history," allowing 140 tons in deeper spaces.
This will enable him to begin construction in 2022 of the lunar orbit bridge platform, which will host missions on the lunar surface and serve as a basis for assembling boats to go beyond the moon.
New technologies will be vital, especially for powering a crewed interplanetary ship – presumably a nuclear propulsion supplemented by solar cells. Assuming engineers can solve such problems, the agency plans to start sending crews into Martian orbit in the 2030s.
On a separate runway, NASA is already planning an unmanned mission to reach and return from the surface of the red planet, bringing back the first sample of Mars. Steps to achieve this goal include sampling of the asteroid Bennu, 4.5 billion years old near the Earth, in 2023, as well as the landing of the earth. a new Mars rover in 2020.
In short, it is a gigantic enterprise. But giant steps for humanity begin with small planning steps.
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