Our New Deathkingdom

[Richard Romeo]

from the mouth of record:

January 14, 2004
NY Times
On to the Moon, and to Mars, via von Braun
By KENNETH CHANG
 
Once again, it is back to the future for NASA.

In 1952, Wernher von Braun, the German rocket
scientist who spearheaded America's first two decades
of space efforts, laid out a step-by-step blueprint of
space exploration, starting with putting a satellite
in orbit around Earth.

The next steps in von Braun's blueprint read like
NASA's achievements of the past four decades:
launching astronauts into orbit, sending astronauts to
the Moon, the space shuttle, a space station. Only the
order was changed when President John F. Kennedy made
the push for sending people to the Moon. That goal was
originally supposed to come after the space shuttle
and the space station.

Today, in remarks at NASA headquarters in Washington,
President Bush is expected to announce new efforts to
complete the last two items on von Braun's list: a
permanent Moon base and a mission to Mars.

"It would be the culmination of the von Braun
paradigm," said Roger D. Launius, chairman of the
division of space history at the National Air and
Space Museum and a former chief historian at NASA.
"The von Braun paradigm has been played out almost
religiously since it was first enunciated in the
1950's. It was very logical. It's easy to grasp."

This will be NASA's third major push for Mars. A
couple of months after Neil Armstrong walked on the
Moon in 1969, von Braun and NASA advocated an
ambitious sequel: a space station in Earth orbit, a
fleet of space shuttles, a second space station around
the Moon, a base on the Moon, a nuclear-powered
shuttle to and from the Moon, and an expedition to
Mars as early as the 1980's.

President Richard M. Nixon agreed to only the space
shuttle and Skylab, a rudimentary space station that
circled Earth in the 1970's.

In 1989, the first President George Bush announced
plans for a permanent Moon base and sending astronauts
to Mars. But the plans died after NASA estimated it
would cost more than $400 billion to get to Mars.

After that costly proposal, engineers at Martin
Marietta contended that a Mars mission could be
achieved at a fraction of the cost by sending a robot
ship first that would manufacture fuel for the return
trip.

NASA has since incorporated many of those ideas into a
proposal, last updated in 1998, that would cost $50
billion.






--- Dave Monroe <monrobotics at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Today, President Bush announced a new vision for the
> Nation's space exploration program. 

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