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Missions to Moon, Then Trips to Mars

Posted on: Thursday, 20 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

Astronauts could go to the moon for as long as 90 days in the first step toward reaching President Bush's goal of sending a man to Mars, NASA says.

The preliminary plans provide the first glimpse of the next possible moon mission and how the space agency intends to prepare for a Mars expedition. Extended moon visits were proposed by Bush in January as a steppingstone for the more complex task of reaching Mars.

Bush called for Americans to revisit the moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020. No human has set foot on the moon since astronaut Eugene Cernan left in 1972.

Another possibility being considered by NASA is a seven-day stay that would test the agency's ability to assemble spacecraft in weightlessness and land on different parts of the moon, says Michael Lembeck, a NASA official working to design a new lunar craft. Crew size could range from two to six people.

"I think it's terrific if they can pull it off," said Roger Launius, a space historian at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. "I do think it's doable. To think we can't do this would be shortsighted."

Even a 45-day mission would be far more ambitious than the Apollo moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s. Only two men at a time landed on the moon during Apollo, and crews stayed no longer than three days on the lunar surface.

A 90-day stay would allow NASA "to get some experience with operations at a distance for long durations," says Lembeck. Such experience would be crucial for a Mars mission, which could last a year.

Power for a long stay on the moon could come from a small nuclear reactor, which NASA is also working to develop. Water and oxygen could be shipped to the lunar surface on robotic cargo carriers. But NASA officials still must figure out how to shield moon residents from space radiation.

NASA officials drew up the mission scenarios to help develop a crew exploration vehicle to go part or all of the way to the moon.< The vehicle's design will be determined in part by the mission's length and the crew size.

A human mission to the moon would not launch until 2015 at the earliest. Polls show that the public has not embraced Bush's space plan, and legislators from both parties have been hesitant to allocate money to it.

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