NASA is going back to the moon if it can figure out how to get there (Achenbach/WaPo)
by Joel Achenbach January 9
NASA is going back to the moon — somehow, someway. The White House has ordered the agency to put American boots back on the lunar surface. The major unknowns at this point include the when, how, scale of the operation and cost. Also unclear is what exactly NASA would accomplish with such a mission and how it might affect plans for a human mission to Mars.
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“We have no idea yet,” Lightfoot said.
NASA is trying to do this without additional funding or a permanent administrator — another top science position that hasn’t been filled in the Trump administration. NASA’s ongoing challenge in recent years has been reconciling the orders of politicians with the hard realities of flat budgets and the immutable laws of physics. This is the third time this century that NASA has been ordered to make a major shift in the focus of its human spaceflight program.
“We’re always asked to change directions every time we get a new president, and that just causes you to do negative work, work that doesn’t matter,” former astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent nearly a year on the International Space Station in his last spaceflight mission, told The Post. “I just hope someday we’ll have a president that will say, ‘You know what, we’ll just leave NASA on the course they are on, and see what NASA can achieve if we untie their hands.’”
Scott Hubbard, former director of the NASA Ames Research Center, said he has heard grumbling in the space community about this latest change in NASA strategy. He said people are saying, “Please don’t push the reset button again, because you’re just going to waste billions of dollars of previous investment.”
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more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/09/nasa-is-going-back-to-the-moon-if-it-can-figure-out-how-to-get-there/?utm_term=.27d50e7e6aaf
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