Why hasn't N.A.S.A. planned any shuttle missions to the moon?

Answer 1

Actually, they are planning to go back to the moon, then on to Mars. CHECK IT OUT!!! I am so excited. It is the Vision for Space Exploration. I am in the High School Aerospace Scholars Program and I just went through six months of lessons and a one-week camp learning primarily about this very thing. I may be only 16, but I do know these things. lol

Answer 2

This is the sole reason people do not understand why we have not been back to the moon.

For heaven’s sake go read what it took to produce the Apollo missions. The lander had to be the spidery thing it was because you have to take enormous care in landing – the place is full of holes, rocks, ridges and trenches.

DO you not realize the shuttle has to land on a runway? Where are the runways on the moon?

Also, the shuttles are launched by rockets that are dispensed with. How would your shuttle take off from the moon?

Finally, the rockets that injects the shuttle into orbit are meant just for that. To inject the thing beyond orbit you need a much much bigger booster. The Saturn V was immensely bigger for this reason, but was mothballed after the cancellation of Apollo in 1972.

Please go read the history. There is so much ignorance of this that it fuels all that garbage about the moon landings being a hoax.

Shuttles to the moon is about as daft as a 747 going into orbit. They are simply not designed to go that far, and if they could, they could never land on the moon, or even if there was a nice convenient runway up there to land on, there is not a huge great launchpad with rocket boosters to get them off.

Answer 3

I'm not sure the shuttle is even capable of propelling itself to the moon, or to escape the earth's orbit at all. It's designed to deliver people and objects into orbit (eg.: to the space station).

There might also be a variety of other concerns there, such as how much oxygen the shuttle can carry (several astronauts for over a week), how long its electrical power can last when being extensively used, whether it could carry a lunar lander into orbit (heavy!) etc...

Even if the shuttle could do this, it's possible the NASA may not want to risk using the shuttle for something it wasn't designed for. Let alone the fact that there isn't much to be gained from going to the moon at this time.

Answer 4

The shuttle is incapable of going to the Moon, for barious reasons.

1: Fuel. The shuttle uses all its fuel to get into low Earth orbit. Once it's up there it has enough fuel for manoeuvring and enough to slow it slightly to begin re-entry, but that's it. The two solid rocket boosters and the entire content of the big external tank are required to get the orbiter to a speed of 17,500mph, orbital velocity. To go to the Moon it needs to further accelerate to 25,000mph. It would need to rendezvous and dock with another fuel supply, which would need enough fuel to get it up to that speed, plus enough to brake it into lunar orbit and the accelerate it out again.

2: Re-entry heating. The shuttle thermal protection system is designed to withstand the temperatures generated by entering the Earth's atmosphere at about 17,500mph. On a return from the Moon the velocity at re-entry is about 25,000mph. The shuttle heat shield materials simply are not designed to cope with the temperatures that would be produced.

3: Re-entry mechanical stress. The shuttle bodywork is not designed to cope with the stresses of a translunar re-entry. The shuttle will simply break up on hitting the atmosphere.

Slowing it down to 17,500mph for re-entry requires more fuel, which requires another rendezvous or making the first fuel tank larger.

The bottom line is that the shuttle was designed to operate in low Earth orbit, and can no more go to the moon than a Citroen Saxo can cross the Atlantic. The hardware needed for a lunar mission as used in the Apollo days no longer exists, so NASA is currently working on making new lunar hardware for a planned future lunar mission series.

Answer 5

I don't think the shuttle is capable of going to the moon. In fact I read somewhere that the technology to do another moon trip does not exist any more, it would have to be started basically from scratch again. The shuttle might carry a manned probe that could make it to the moon, but the shuttle itself--no.

Answer 6

I don't know what you mean by shuttle missions. Shuttle technology is not for moon. Though your question does make sense if it asks why has NASA not planned any future moon missions. Its because going on moon is very costly and secondly no scientific good can come out of it. We have several kgs of rocks of moon surface to do research. Whats the point of spending billions bringing another several kgs.

Answer 7

The Space Scuttle cannot quite make it to routine servicing of the near-Earth orbit multi-$billion (plus multi-$billion in FUBAR repairs) Hubble telescope.

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/nasa3.htm

NASA going to the moon? HA HA HA! Back when they could do it NASA used slide rules and engineers. Now NASA has obscenely expensive 100% rebuilt 10,240 Itanium II processor Columbia supercomputer and managers. NASA going to the moon? HA HA HA!

If Columbia had been built with the same number of AMD Opteron-800 series cores as Intel Itanium cores (and then completely rebuilt with Itanium-IIs when Columbia crapped out), the power savings from running and cooling would have more than paid for the hardware over its operating life. It would have been faster, too.

NASA can't even touch Apophis the Destroyer when it buzzes the Earth on 13 Friday 2029. You'd think they would be motivated, since 13 Friday 2036 (Officially misses by a whole bunch) increasingly looks like Clobbering Time in private simulations.

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/splat.htm

Answer 8

The only reason the governement funded
NASA going to the moon was so that they could beat Russia to the moon during the Cold War, a rivalry going on for a while. Now that we're the Alpha males, there is no need except for "science".

Answer 9

Man, take my word for this, Nasa never put a man on moon and never will unless it gets thick enough lead shields on the vehicles cuz It will have to pass through solar storms

Answer 10

Because the shuttle isn't designed for anything beyond Earth-orbital flight.

THAT was easy.