So when is the planned flight to the moon going to be?

Question

How long ago did bush say he wanted us back on the moon?(i dont care about your view on bush either...)
I know they are taking some things back off the space station for a moon base, but what is the estimated departure/landing? Are they really going back to an Apollo style rocket for it?
And is it going to be televised? or is the media not going to care about it like always?

Answer 1

2020

It will be a repeat of the Apollo program with a few more bells and whistles. The media will care about it as much as they currently care about the Space Shuttle. If China beats us back to the moon then there will be more news coverage.

The Orion Spacecraft will use old shuttle booster rockets, which are reusable, but we will be covering the same old ground. The plan is for the same spacecraft to be used to take the US to Mars.

Personally, I think the Democrats are going to scrape the entire idea. They are going to drop the NASA budget, and then in 10 years when China is getting close to its moon trip people will be bitching that we should beat them. HELLO, we already won the race back in 1969. The only reason we should return to the moon is to build a lunar station, without water that is going to be very difficult. So NASA has to find water on the moon first.

The moon is boring old space rock; it was formed from the Earth after a collision with a rogue planet when the proto-earth was still forming. The collision broke off a chunk which formed into the moon. It was mostly surface matter that broke off so the moon is far lighter than the earth with fewer dense elements. Those that are there would be deep in the core where we can’t get at them.

NASA needs to concentrate on updating the satellites we have in orbit, the new replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, and our NEO problem. In 2026 the asteroid Apothos is coming so close to the earth that it will move under our weather satellites. There is a 1 in 45,000 chance it could hit the Earth in 2036, when it comes back again. A mission to an asteroid would give us more science, be more interesting and a better preparation for a Mars trip than returning to the Moon just to say we could.

Steering a comet into the moon would solve the water problem we have; currently NASA is hoping to find old comet debris in a crater that is always in shadow so the ice would have a chance to hang around. So far no joy and the chances of finding it are pretty slim. Apothos won’t have any water on it, most likely, but a trip there would finally let us land on something new, this rock came from beyond Uranus for gosh sakes! I would love an attempt to capture it and put it into an L5 or stable earth orbit in 2036, but I doubt if anyone else is thinking along those lines. That is just too ambitious for most people. It would give us a tether for the space elevator, and an excellent space colony platform. We just drill out the rock we don’t need, and since most of it is iron we can make material we do need out of it.

But, then I think that scraping the Space Shuttle is a bad idea. For one thing NASA is too optimistic on how many flights they are going to get out of the remaining craft, and they are too optimistic on how quickly we can finish construction. The space shuttle was an excellent idea; a rocket powered truck for space construction. When we went to the moon we lost the technology 20 years later, the same is going to happen to us with the space shuttle. We are going to need a space truck to build any future manned missions because assembly in space would be a smarter way to handle it. So in 50 years we are going to have to try and reinvent the space shuttle again. Currently work on the Orion, an Apollo clone, has started from ground zero. The entire spacecraft is undergoing redesign, not update, but total new design. They even had to rethink the capsule shape, instead of using a tried and proven method.

The current shuttle program is going to be scrapped in only 3 years and that seems unreasonable. We need to come up with a replacement, updated to modern technology. The computers on board the Space Shuttle are pre-pentium design. Talk about old technology, their primary backup is a notebook computer that can handle the entire shuttle and that was true 10 years ago.

NASA needs new direction and I am looking forward to the next Presidential Administration doing something positive. However, the democrats don’t have much interest in space, which is a shame since a good deal of our advanced technology came out of the space program. “Necessity is the mother of invention” means that if you don’t need it you don’t invent it. Getting to the moon required so much new work and understanding of new equipment that it spurred a technological development that helped the US to win the cold war. But, we are giving that edge to the Chinese and letting them replace us. They are not only becoming the next super power, but they are going to replace the US in its current position, and they are doing it on the back of American technology. They already have invented a clone of the Apple I-Phone, and it is better and more useful than the current I-Phone.

You don’t get advance in technology until you have a need for it. European Whites are currently on top of society because it was hard work to survive in Northern Europe. Africa may have had the first humans, but life was easy so there was no spur to develop technology. The only way to advance technology is to take on a great program like a war or a space race. Look at radar; the US military detected the incoming Japanese surprise attack, but no one trusted the new technology. By the end of the war we were relying on it for coastal defense and to find the range for our naval guns. We had to develop radar and improve it because the war made it important. We had to develop Teflon for a space capsule heat shield. The first man portable camera was designed so Apollo astronauts could shoot live images from the moon. That same camera is so popular that it gave birth to U-Tube and is probably sitting on top of your current computer. People think the space program is too expensive, but currently it is less than 1% of our budget, and during the height of the Apollo program it was 2%. Space travel is expensive, but so is new technology. We have the most powerful military in the world not because we have the largest, but because we have the smartest. For the Chinese or Russians to hit a house on a hill would take an entire battery of artillery; but we can do it with one bomb, or one missile fired from anywhere in the world; that’s all thanks to GPS which is all satellite based. The space program is expensive, but so is staying on top and keeping our standard of living.

According to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_%28spacecraft%29
"Orion is a spacecraft design currently under development by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Each Orion spacecraft will carry a crew of four to six astronauts, and will be launched by the new Ares I launch vehicle. Both Orion and Ares I are elements of NASA's Project Constellation, which plans to send human explorers back to the Moon by 2020, and then onward to Mars and other destinations in the solar system.[1][2] On August 31, 2006, NASA awarded Lockheed Martin (LM) the contract to design, develop, and build Orion."

Answer 2

I think it will be possible. They are already doing space flights. I got a chance to listen to a talk by the guy behind Spaceship One and it was an amazing speech. This is a whole new market and now that it has proven deemable, I think you'll start getting a lot of companies that will make the push. I think right now its around 200k for a sub-orbital flight and around 20million for a flight to the International Space Station. Don't quote me on the numbers though. You are going to see a boom in the commercial space industry and its going to open opportunities for anybody to have a chance to go to space including to the moon. For going to the moon, it may be several years later for that to happen, but I think you'll eventually see it. It won't be one of the "vacations" like going to Disney World every year or what not. It will be more like a "once in a lifetime vacations", unless you got lots of money; you'll eventually start seeing prices go down with more competition. If you don't get a chance to see it....your kids will. That is my firm belief.

Answer 3

Haven't heard any real statements about it.
China is planning the next trip as far as I know in like 2020

looks like nasa is planning something around 2018
bush stated these plans in 2004
http://www.space.com/news/050919_nasa_moon.html