Posted on 09/15/2005 11:46:54 AM PDT by Airborne1986
WASHINGTON - NASA briefed senior White House officials Wednesday on its plan to spend $100 billion and the next 12 years building the spacecraft and rockets it needs to put humans back on the Moon by 2018.
The U.S. space agency now expects to roll out its lunar exploration plan to key Congressional committees on Friday and to the broader public through a news conference on Monday, Washington sources tell SPACE.com.
U.S. President George W. Bush called in January 2004 for the United States to return to the Moon by 2020 as the first major step in a broader space exploration vision aimed at extending the human presence throughout the solar system.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Can you get asteroid insurance on a moom plain?
"Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1969."
Make the tax cuts permanent before going to the moon.
"Can you get asteroid insurance on a moom plain?"
To be consistent, they would have to build inside of a crater.
This is a necessity. Current projections show that by 2020 our stockpiles of moon pies will be perilously low.
Don't they have the old plans for the Saturn V rocket? It did the trick before.
Yawn! Why don't they offer a $10 Billion dollar prize for the company who can establish, maintain, and operate a lunar base for 25 personnel for two years?
Do we really need a socialistic, bloated governmental agency (NASA ...we fly the shuttle (and sometimes it works)) to spend $100 Billion to do what has already been done.
I don't think so!
$8.33 bil/year
That's 0.167% of a $5tril budget.
FIFTY YEARS LATER!
We've also flown a plane nonstop across the Atlantic before. Should we stop doing that too?
Word is that they don't.
That's just sad. We landed on the moon 8 years after Kennedy's announcement. Now, after 35 years of technological advancement, it takes 15 years? What the heck has NASA been doing?
Wow, that really stinks! How could they lose something like that? Saturn V was a powerful rocket: I think they could modify and upgrade it in a relatively short time.
Cool we can do it all over again for only $100B.
I love the idea, in general, but have one bit of confusion.
Why did it take America less than 1 decade to go from NOTHING to the Moon in the 60's - with primitive computers & electronics & no space experiance, but this new plan is going to take more than a decade to get to where we were 30+ years ago? And now we have lots of experiance & much better technology?
I think there's a good possibility that some private enterprise effort will beat NASA back to the moon.
Hey Congress, go tell NASA to find "private donors" for this project.
With the money the taxpayers have spent on space exploration so far, we could have a nationwide mass transit system, an incredibly advanced military ( more so than it is now ), and New Orleans wouldn`t be flooded right now.
If private business invested in space exploration all these years, I would believe there would be people on the moon right now,.... on vacation.
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