Last week Troubadour posted a nice diary on the Augustine Commission Report and the "Flexible Path" option for NASA writing:
[T]he purpose of the Flexible Path is not actually to go anywhere in particular, it's to build the capability to go everywhere in the inner Solar System through a progression of increasingly distant, more challenging missions, some of which would have actual destinations (though not necessarily landings).
However, this lack of immediate landings - in particular a near term postponement of a rapid return to the Moon - causes consternation amongst some.
To that, I suggest that we also carefully consider a proposal presented by Buzz Aldrin in a recent HuffPo piece: A Different Kind of Moon Race.
Keith Cowing at SpaceRef wrote the following last Thursday:
In a nutshell, the Augustine Committee viewed NASA's current human spaceflight program as being in a time of transition. Mounting costs and technical challenges had resulted in the current approach being deemed as unable to meet the goals it was intend to accomplish.
The Committee was specifically asked not to prove recommendations but instead, to provide options (5 were presented) as to what the White House might want to have NASA do. That said, the Committee's options clearly had self-evident recommendations buried just under the surface.
Okay, so what should NASA do? Page 14 of the Augustine Commission's Official Report identified three primary options:
=> Mars First, with a Mars landing, perhaps after a brief test of equipment and procedures on the Moon.
=> Moon First, with lunar surface explorations focused on developing the capacity to explore Mars.
=> A Flexible Path to inner solar system locations, such as lunar orbit, Lagrange points, near-Earth objects and the moons of Mars, followed by exploration of the lunar surface and/or Mars surface.
Last week, our own Troubadour argued for the Flexible Path as follows:
[T]he purpose of the Flexible Path is not actually to go anywhere in particular, it's to build the capability to go everywhere in the inner Solar System through a progression of increasingly distant, more challenging missions, some of which would have actual destinations (though not necessarily landings).
Were this program to be undertaken, manned space missions would no longer be viewed as routine, because each one would be breaking some new barrier, achieving some new milestone, and taking us tangibly one step closer to what this has always been about: The freedom of mankind to move beyond its cradle, and the intelligence to see both the wisdom and necessity of doing so.
Daily Kos: Flexible Path, Golden Path (w/Eye Candy)
But why no landers? Lander are expensive and quite frankly NASA cannot afford to develop landers for either the Moon or Mars in the near term without a significant budget increase and given where we are as a nation, a significant budget increase would be difficult to justify. On the other hand, I also very much doubt Congress could be persuaded to simply cancel NASA human spaceflight. Too many prominent Democrats (Bill Nelson, Barbara Mikulski, Bart Gordon) would loudly object to any plan to simply terminate NASA.
Given those constraints, what do we do?
The advantage of the Flexible Path, as Troubadour explains, is that "the low gravity of Phobos makes landing possible, and it is just massive enough to make establishing a base potentially feasible."
A seemingly odd fact is that it Phobos - a moon of Mars - would be far easier to land on than our own Moon. This is also true of near Earth objects (asteroids). Because of the low gravity, explorers do not need a dedicated lander and that would save considerable development costs.
Expressly bluntly, the Flexible Path shall be cheaper than either a return to the Moon's surface or a landing on Mars and yet offers the prospect of thrilling accomplishments in space and paves the way for future landings, thereafter.
But what of the Moon? Enter Buzz Aldrin and his October 12th piece at Huffington Post - A Different Kind of Moon Race.
A quarter of a million miles from where you are reading these words, on the dusty surface of our companion Moon, lies the best chance in decades for America to reestablish itself as a global space leader. It is time for our country to foster a new Moon race -- but not the kind that our space program has been planning for the past five years. Instead of duplicating -- at great cost and effort -- the lunar competition that Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and I won more than four decades ago last summer, I propose instead America call the world to the Moon. In a new global effort to use the Moon to establish a global space consortium with a lunar surface facility as its epicenter, America can gain new leadership, international respect, and technological progress by collaborating with emerging space powers, not merely competing with them.
. . .
I am proposing a different way back to the Moon: international collaboration.
Aldrin's call could easily be coordinated with the Flexible Path. Rather than run a NASA dominated program for returning to the Moon, we facilitate other nations - India, Japan, China, the European Union and anyone else who wishes to participate - in achieving their ability to land humans on the Moon.
Private sector space companies within the United States should be fully welcome into this collaborative effort.
I believe this offers a genuine geo-political opportunity. In the 1960s, one purpose of Project Apollo was to prove to the world that the United States had better technology than the Soviets. We did that. Today, what we need to demonstrate is our ability to work cooperatively and in collaboration with other nations and a cooperative lunar exploration effort provides an opportunity to do exactly that.
As for American pride? Well, since NASA would be pursuing the Flexible Path aimed at destinations beyond cis-luanr space, in parallel with a collaborative international lunar effort, there shall remain plenty of opportunity for space achievement for NASA.
Aldrin calls for opening the Moon to all of humanity through an NGO that would "build the communication and navigation satellites needed by future lunar travelers, develop fuel depots using lunar LOX -- perhaps derived from the recently discovered lunar water -- and construct habitats that will shelter space travelers while on the surface. It will enable a sustainable human presence on the Moon that will be accessible to all the nations on Earth."
I find this to be an inspiring vision and if our nation were to offer genuine and authentic assistance to the peoples of the world and facilitate planting other flags on the Moon - India, the European Union, Russia, Japan, Brazil, Canada and yes, even China - we would grow our soft power and improve our national security.
I fully support NASA pursuing the "Flexible Path" and I fully support the simultaneous pursuit of Buzz Aldrin's vision for a new age of international cooperation in space exploration.
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EDIT: In response to a comment, I see no reason to abandon the International Space Station and I do not believe Station would need to be abandoned to pursue the plan I describe herein.