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Future lunar mission: Don't be over the moon

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-20 07:14

The mounting costs prompted Obama, soon after he took office, to order a close examination of the program. A blue-ribbon panel of experts headed by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine is due to issue recommendations in late August.

"With a few exceptions, we have the technology or the knowledge that we could go to Mars if we wanted with humans," Augustine said recently. "We could put a telescope on the moon if we wanted," he said.

"The technology is by and large there. It boils down to what can we afford?" he asked.

Currently NASA's budget is too small to pay for Constellation's Orion capsule, a more advanced and spacious version of the Apollo lunar module, as well as the Ares I and Ares V launchers needed to put the craft in orbit.

With a space exploration budget of $6 billion in 2009, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a former astronaut, said: "NASA simply can't do the job it's been given."

Related readings:  NASA releases restored Apollo 11 moonwalk video  Indian 1st Moon mission may end prematurely: ISRO  NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it  Moon talk before China's moon walk  Moon-lovers remember Apollo with radio chit-chat  Man on the moon by 2030

Several events are planned around the country to mark today's historic anniversary. Celebrations will be held from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the Apollo 11 mission blasted off to mission control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and at the Air and Space Museum in the US capital.

To recapture one of mankind's most dramatic moments, NASA last week unveiled restored video footage of key moments from the Apollo 11 mission found after a three-year search through some 45,000 video cassettes in its analog archives.

NASA has also upgraded its Internet website to mark the anniversary, which was largely ignored when the 30th anniversary rolled by in July 1999.

And the record of America's crowning achievement remains visible on the moon in the shape of astronauts' footprint.

"The first footprints on the moon will be there for a million years," reads a posting on a NASA website. "There is no wind to blow them away."

AFP

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