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An artistic design of NASA's Deep Space Gateway, a space station that will orbit the moon.
An artistic design of NASA's Deep Space Gateway, a space station that will orbit the moon.
Photo: NASA
An artistic design of NASA's Deep Space Gateway, a space station that will orbit the moon.
An artistic design of NASA's Deep Space Gateway, a space station that will orbit the moon.
Photo: NASA
A NASA official said this week that the space agency was hoping to leave tracks on the moon in the late 2020s, nearly 60 years after we touched the surface for the last time.
This may seem like a long time, but Steven Clarke, NASA's Assistant Deputy Administrator for Exploration, said Tuesday that the plan was to work together on science and human exploration, with a view to a future mission on Mars. Clarke presented the agency's plans for lunar missions Tuesday at a meeting of the Committee on Astrobiology and Global Science of National Academies of Science, the Committee on Space Studies of the United States. engineering and medicine. The meeting is held in California.
"We want to build on our past experience," Clarke said. The last US trip to the moon took place in December 1972 with Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt.
Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has lobbied for the United States to return to the moon as a stepping stone to Mars.
On the human side, Trump 's $ 19.9 billion budget for the next fiscal year forces NASA to launch a non – unscrewed Orion flight by 2021, followed by a launch. Americans around the moon in 2023. year to start work on the foundation of a gateway to the lunar orbital platform of 2.7 billion – essentially a mini-space station orbiting the moon where the astronauts could live and work.
Clarke said the bridge should be fully operational by 2026. Human missions on the lunar surface should arrive soon after.
But NASA's lunar exploration plan also includes robotic missions. Although the agency, at the beginning of this year, abruptly canceled a lunar rover just a few years from the soaring moon in search of water, it asked commercial companies to submit their plans for new robotic missions .
NASA will select companies in December, said Clarke, and he hopes these missions will begin in 2019 or 2020.
"We are looking at how this comes to fruition in a Mars exploration mission – not just a robotic mission, but also a human exploration," Clarke told the committee.
Alex Stuckey covers NASA and the environment for the Houston Chronicle. You can reach her at [email protected] or Twitter.com/alexdstuckey.
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