NASA Foresees Human Lunar Landings by the Late 2020s

NASA’s Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot claims that lunar exploration and the shuffling of astronauts to and from its surface will be commonplace in 2030. What will make this possible is the Lunar Orbiting Platform, a station that will orbit the moon and allow constant trips to it. New landers and habitat modules are being planned to support the goal.

“At the moon, we’ll have people transiting from the platform back down to the surface of the moon,” he said. “We’ll have a constant set of flights going back and forth that will allow us to do the work that we want to do on the moon.” The platform is the Lunar Orbiting Platform – Gateway, a human-tended facility in cislunar space formerly known as the Deep Space Gateway.

"Acting Administrator" ... who cares what red shirts have so say.

To the moon!

Trump just needs to pick up his phone and call Xi Jinping and say "Hey man, lets start a space race to the moon!" This will get things in order and make it go faster.

I think it's pure fantasy to think any government is going to establish a real lunar or extra-terrestrial colony.
Why? Lots of reasons. The dollars spent on it don't buy as many votes as dollars spent dirt-side, for one thing.
And because once a colony is self-sufficient, it will go independent, and there won't be a thing an Earth government can do about it. Sure, they could destroy the colony, easy enough with nukes but political suicide. What they won't be able to do is control it, given the cost and delay of sending troops there.

So who might establish off-Earth colonies is the mega-rich, like Musk and Branson.
And they'll do it for precisely the reason a government won't: because they can be free from Earth government control there.

LATE 2020? NASA, you assholes, I was a kid when Armstrong walked on the moon, I almost broke my leg playing 'Apollo Lander' with a ladder and an old shed. I was sure that by the time I graduated high school we'd have Space Marines. Late 2020? I could be dead by then, you've squandered my life by spending billions jacking off to get into LEO three times a year.

If you can't get shit done, give the money to someone who can.

P.S. Aaaah, soapbox, you are my true friend. I can see so far when I stand on your little square head.

P.P.S. I'm serious, NASA, get your dick out of your latest rover prototype and go throw some shit into space. I don't care what it is, as long as you have people on board and it's headed somewhere besides Earth.

P.P.P.S. I'd double my taxes if you could fill it full of screaming flat earthers. And a few people who don't believe in climate change. And some lawyers.

Wont happen, NASA cant get its head out of its ass these days.

BTW there is oil on the moon

the problems with NASA have much more to do with congress and the white house. Every new administration comes in and re orients NASA in often drastic fashion, which has the knock on effect of wasting all that time and money that has come before.

imagine trying to build a skyscraper and just as you are starting to build it, a new head of the project comes in and forces a complete revamp of how the building is to look and function. forcing everyone to start from scratch. thats whats happening with NASA.

and then they have the added crap where every project has to have bit and pieces of the project done in as many areas as possible, to help win over those congressman in those districts, which makes material logistics a real pain, saying nothing about the what it takes to make even the smallest of changes to a project.


if NASA was allowed to make an actual long term plan.. and then allowed to stick to it, you would see a very different picture of things.

katanaD said:

if NASA was allowed to make an actual long term plan.. and then allowed to stick to it, you would see a very different picture of things.

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They used to be able to and they did. It was called get your ass to the moon back then (only less crass). I would say we need another space race but it looks like China tried that already and we still are sitting with our thumbs up our collective asses.

Now I just resort to telling everyone there is oil on the moon/mars/whatever and hope to start said rumor enough to get the politicians to spend the money. Not because they believe it actually yield oil but because the uninformed masses believe it will and want congress to spoon feed them something.

Its sad.

NASA needs to get out of the rocket building business and just design missions. As part of the design, they request bids for a rocket launch(es) with time, weight, desired orbit or trajectory, man rated or not, and let SpaceX, ULA, that New Zealand company and anyone else bid for the launch vehicle. Let private companies do what they do best - make lots of mass produced rockets and let NASA design one off missions for those rockets.

Dead Parrot said:

NASA needs to get out rocket building business and just design missions.

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Like the poster above mentioned, they need to get their own budget that can not be raped every 4 years by different trajectories.

This is where we start destroying the moon like we do our planet though we're not sure how the moon will react and it will probably blow up and then we all fry us all to death.

Let the moon mining begin!

Rahh said:

Let the moon mining begin!

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Hey, there's a thought. Moon missions powered by cryptominers.... after all, power and cooling are free on the Moon! (* bring your own solar panels)

Dead Parrot said:

NASA needs to get out of the rocket building business and just design missions.

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It would certainly be more cost effective. There's something that worries me about this thinking though. NASA was originally set up with various manufacturing and administration facilities throughout the country (and particularly the south) to maintain political support. Take away those handouts and suddenly you may not have money in the budget for NASA.

SpaceX has really thrown a wrench in the industry by nailing re-usability, but I think NASA's manned program's big problem has simply been mismanagement. Congress has never voted to substantially increase the NASA budget, they cut it drastically in the 70s and slowly ever since. All the presidents since Regan have simply focused on keeping the manned program limping along rather than making big public investments in NASA. They kept flying the horribly expensive and dangerous Shuttle when it should have been replaced by the mid-90s. If the government had actually produced some kind of safe and reliable national space launcher (be it a rocket, spaceplane, whatever) we wouldn't be in this position, but they kept using the Shuttle. Even today they're trying to keep using as much as possible from the Shuttle to save a buck. I assume they've been trying to avoid provoking an expensive space race with Russia or China, but the result has been a multi-billion-dollar rocket program to nowhere thus far with Ares and now SLS.

The Trump administration's plan is the Obama administration's plan: Skylab 2 at the moon followed by lunar landings and asteroid missions sometime in the 2020s, missions to Mars orbit in the 2030s.