Exploration architectures and alternatives

Later today NASA will hold a press conference to announce its "global exploration strategy and lunar architecture". What exactly this announcement will entail isn't known, although the Houston Chronicle reported in today's edition that NASA has selected a half-dozen justifications for its lunar exploration program, ranging from science to improving international relations. While these reasons "differ significantly" from the Cold War rationale behind NASA's initial missions to the Moon four decades ago, some of the reasons mentioned in the article sound similar to the justifications previously made for Space Station Freedom and the ISS.

While NASA is taking this step forward in outlining the rationale for the Vision today, there are still many issues with its implementation. In an article this morning, Florida Today reviews concerns about funding shortfalls for the program raised recently by the GAO. Scott Horowitz, NASA's associate administrator for exploration, said some of those concerns have already been addressed through design changes for the Orion spacecraft and the Ares launch vehicles, although the GAO's Allen Li said he believes that NASA needs "to complete key design reviews before continuing to commit large amounts of taxpayer money to the project" in an effort to avoid more expensive surprises down the road.

There's also the concern about what a new administration might do to the program two years down the line. That was mentioned in a talk at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory on Friday afternoon by Robert Farquhar of APL and Joseph Veverka of Cornell, who are working on a study of an alternative exploration architecture for the International Academy of Astronautics. As I noted in an article in this week's issue of The Space Review, that alternative would bypass the Moon in favor of missions to the Sun-Earth L2 point, near Earth asteroids, and beyond. Farquhar, who sees a human return to the moon as a "cul-de-sac", said he's briefed people at NASA Headquarters about the study and they're interested, since they want to have some alternatives to the current plan in place for whomever is in the Oval Office and the NASA administrator's office in 2009, should the current exploration architecture fall out of favor.

Posted by Jeff at December 4, 2006 07:35 AM

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