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NASA has a full plate of lunar missions before astronauts can return to Moon

American

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NASA has a full plate of lunar missions before astronauts can return to Moon | Fox News

What will it take for NASA to put humans back on the moon? Aside from a still-undetermined sum of cash, the agency will need to launch about 37 moon missions between now and 2028, according to a launch manifest presented at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council on Tuesday (May 21).
The preliminary timeline, which was presented with an infographic labeled as "pre-decisional," is not yet set in stone. But it represents what some agency officials see as the best path to return astronauts to the moon in 2024 and build a sustainable presence on the moon via the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway by 2028.

Of the 37 missions included in the launch manifest, 15 would take place before astronauts get to the moon in 2024. That 16th mission, titled Artemis 3 (formerly called Exploration Mission-3, or EM-3), will be the second crewed flight of NASA's newly named Artemis program.
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I think this all sounds pretty exciting.
 
IMO, there are so many things that need looking after first.
 
Rexedgar said:
IMO, there are so many things that need looking after first.
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Govt spending on R&D reduces risk in pushing the SOTA in technology development, so industry develops products that benefit everyone. Usually this is related to products with long lead time to production. Defense spending helps in that area as well, because Congress likes dual-use technology, and is willing to invest in it.
 
American said:
Govt spending on R&D reduces risk in pushing the SOTA in technology development, so industry develops products that benefit everyone. Usually this is related to products with long lead time to production. Defense spending helps in that area as well, because Congress likes dual-use technology, and is willing to invest in it.
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I come up dry with this?
 
PoS said:
Only one problem... where's the money gonna come from?
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NASA is not likely to leave low-Earth orbit for the foreseeable future. It has nothing to do with funding or politics, and everything to do with radiation. The only protection we humans have against solar and cosmic radiation is the magnetosphere of Earth. Once astronauts leave the protection of Earth's magnetosphere they are subject to fatal radiation.

NASA got extremely lucky between 1969 and 1973, when humans traveled beyond the protection of the magnetosphere. Had the July 1969 lunar landing been delayed just 10 days the astronauts would have been instantly killed by an X-Class solar flare that occurred in early August 1969. Since we are currently monitoring the sun's activities 24/7 there is a good probability that we would be able to detect, and therefore be able to provide between 16 and 20 hours advanced warning, in the event of a solar flare. However, cosmic gamma-ray bursts are completely random, can come from any direction, and can be as equally fatal as a solar flare.

If we were to send astronauts to Mars with our current technology, none of them would make it back to Earth alive. Even if all they did was go to Mars, orbit the planet once, and then return without ever leaving their spacecraft.

Biological organisms were not designed for space, and therefore it will require a great deal of engineering in order to overcome the obstacles or challenges that space provides. Toward that end, both Prudue and MIT Universities have been working on creating protection against solar and cosmic radiation, but do not expect to have anything practical developed until 2030 or later.
 
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