In January, 2004 President Bush outlined his goals for the future of manned space flight. He proposed decommissioning the aging shuttle fleet by 2010 and replacing it by 2014 with a newer, more up to date spacecraft that would be able to not only service the Space Station but also return man to the moon by 2020.

Recently, NASA has fleshed out those proposals with some specifics. And judging by some of the plans, NASA will have a difficult time trying to both meet a budgetary requirement of $104 billion over 12 years as well as bringing the systems on line in the time period specified.

The new manned vehicle system will be, as NASA Administrator Mike Griffin joked, “an Apollo on steroids.” Using the same solid fuel rocket used by the Space Shuttle, the agency will plunk a capsule capable of carrying four astronauts on top and blast it into space. Immediately prior to the liftoff of the crew capsule, NASA will launch another, much larger unmanned rocket carrying fuel, food, and other supplies. This rocket will use both the Shuttle’s huge main engine as well as two solid rocket boosters – the same configuration used to get the Shuttle space-borne. The two ships will rendezvous and dock in low earth orbit and then execute a controlled rocket burn that will blast them toward the moon.

Once in lunar orbit, all four astronauts will descend to the surface leaving an empty crew capsule circling the moon. After a stay of 4-7 days (initially), the crew will ascend to dock with the capsule in lunar orbit and then power back to earth, re-entering the atmosphere using heat shield technology that’s been around since the Mercury program, and end up making a soft landing (on the White House lawn if whoever is President could arrange it, I’m sure.)

There are several interesting aspects to this mission profile that are in its favor. First, we don’t have to invent a lot of stuff. Most of what we will be using is “off the shelf” proven technologies – at least for most of the dangerous aspects of the mission. Since plans call for re-using the capsule up to 10 times, it will have to be made of some pretty durable materials. The solid rocket boosters – redesigned after the Challenger disaster – are reliable and relatively inexpensive. The Shuttle’s main engine will undergo some modifications using some of the technology used on the original moon rocket, the Saturn V. The new configuration will be able to generate up to 6 million pounds of thrust which would be necessary to lift the supplies of food, oxygen, fuel, and the lunar lander into low earth orbit. And while it may seem quaint and old fashioned to use a heat shield, as Griffin pointed out, the physics of the atmosphere hasn’t changed much recently.

The heat shield ablates the tremendous heat that builds up during re-entry by literally falling apart. As the temperatures reach several thousand degrees, the hottest parts of the shield fall off in layers thus keeping the astronauts from burning up. The heat shield will be the only element of the capsule that will need to be replaced for every mission.

Earlier this year, NASA Administrator Griffin proposed an accelerated timetable for the new crew exploration vehicle, moving up the proposed launch of the new system from 2012 to 2010. The first several missions would take place in low earth orbit to test out the system with plans calling for a lunar mission sometime around 2018.

This ambitious timetable is a good goal but would seem to be unrealistic. Every major project undertaken by NASA in the past has taken longer to develop than anticipated and cost more than was originally thought. Why should we think they can suddenly get things right on the new crew exploration vehicle?

Secondly, it is doubtful NASA’s current level of funding will be increased in any meaningful way. This means that in order to achieve the goal of landing on the moon by 2018, NASA will have to devote nearly 2/3 of its budget to a lunar mission. The agency is going to be in hot water with the scientific community who have their own plans for big projects including the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), a hugely important but ruinously expensive scientific instrument. There are also unmanned missions on the board for landers on Mars as well as another Jupiter mission to explore the strange, icy Jovian moon Europa that may have a liquid ocean underneath miles of ice which could harbor life.

These missions as well as others would have to be stretched out or canceled altogether in order for NASA to get back to the moon without a substantial increase in its budget. And given the size of the budget deficit as well as a general resistance on the part of lawmakers to spend extra money on space extravaganzas, it would seem to be a long shot to achieve the goal of a moon landing even by 2020.

Where does this leave NASA in its desire to get back to the moon much less go on to Mars? Interestingly, elements in the new moon program would have direct application for missions to Mars:

These plans give NASA a huge head start in getting to Mars. We will already have the heavy-lift system needed to get there, as well as a versatile crew capsule and propulsion systems that can make use of Martian resources. A lunar outpost just three days away from Earth will give us needed practice of “living off the land” away from our home planet, before making the longer trek to Mars.

The propulsion systems of the lunar craft will be powered by methane. The reason for that relates to one of the more remarkable exercises in citizen lobbying in the history of the United States.

Dr. Robert Zubrin, an engineer formerly with Lockheed-Martin had been an advocate for more than a decade of the “Mars Direct” proposal. He and a group of like minded enthusiasts pushed the notion that a trip to Mars could be done a lot cheaper if we didn’t have to carry fuel for the return flight 48 million miles. Why not launch a factory to Mars to make the fuel before people even got there?

This is possible because of the chemistry of the Martian atmosphere. By sucking in the Martian “air” which is mostly carbon dioxide (CO2), such a factory equipped with a relatively small amount of hydrogen and using technology that’s more than 100 years old, could turn the carbon dioxide into both water (H2O) and methane (CH4). By saving the weight of lifting off from earth with the 200,000 lbs of fuel it would take to return safely from Mars, an enormous cost savings is achieved – around $1,500 per lb.

Zubrin’s book A Case for Mars was a national best seller. It also contained other ideas including the novel approach of holding a contest (with a $5 billion dollar prize) to see which company could develop a Mars rover.

At first, NASA was dismissive of Zubrin’s ideas. But it must have gradually dawned on the bureaucrats that the plans that they had come up with were both extraordinarily expensive and technologically unfeasible. Zubrin and his fellow Mars enthusiasts almost single handedly changed the corporate culture at NASA to include some elements of their Mars Direct proposals.

This opens the question as to why we should go back to the moon in the first place. Why not go to Mars and then straight on till morning?

The Apollo program to the moon was a massive undertaking. It was the largest construction project in human history, dwarfing the cost in money and manpower of the pyramids, the Panama Canal, the Aswan Dam, and the Pentagon combined. It is estimated that nearly 500,000 human hands were laid on the Saturn V rocket, the Apollo capsule, and the service module prior to liftoff. Nearly 25% of all the hours worked on the project were in the form of unpaid overtime. In today’s dollars, the cost of the moon landing would be over $130 billion. These monies were spent over a 7 year period not the 15 years proposed for spending the $104 billion it would take to get back to the moon by 2020.

But if we are going to spend the money, we may as well do it right. There’s no overwhelming national security reason for going to Mars. Let’s face it; Mars isn’t going anywhere. If we can learn things by living and working on the moon, extracting its natural resources, including probably water in the form of subsurface ice deposits, the hazardous trip to Mars would then make sense. In fact, it may prove less expensive in the long run to actually build a ship to Mars on the moon rather than earth. With 1/6 the gravity of earth, a Mars mission taking off from the moon may prove to be cheaper in the long run.

All of this means a tinkers damn unless NASA can get its act together and build a reliable crew exploration vehicle and make the new booster configurations work. If NASA fails in this regard, then humans are probably going to have to rely on consortium’s of government and industry to do the job that NASA at one time was unparalleled in doing; sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to earth.