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Japan's space agency wants to create a moon base with the help of robots that can work autonomously, with little human supervision. The project, which has racked up three years of research so far, is a collaboration between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the construction company Kajima Corp., and three Japanese universities: Shibaura Institute of Technology, The University of Electro-Communications and Kyoto University. Recently, the collaboration did an experiment on automated construction at the Kajima Seisho Experiment Site in Odawara (central Japan). A 7-ton autonomous backhoe went through its paces at the site, going through procedures such as driving...

Op-ed | Moon Direct: How to build a moonbase in four yearsby Robert Zubrin — March 30, 2018SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, which made its debut Feb. 6, is the foundation of author Robert Zubrin’s “Moon Direct” plan for affordably returning humans to the moon within four years. Credit: SpaceX This op-ed originally appeared in the March 26, 2018 issue of SpaceNews magazine.The recent amazing success of the Falcon Heavy launch offers America an unprecedented opportunity to break the stagnation that has afflicted its human spaceflight program for decades. In short, the moon is now within reach.Here’s how the mission plan...

NASA generally proceeds slowly and incrementally – especially when human beings are blasted into space. But President Donald Trump and his advisers want to do something bold with the space program, and they’ve asked NASA to consider speeding up a long-planned moon mission. So NASA has launched a feasibility study to see what the risks and benefits would be if the agency added two astronauts to the first test flight of a new rocket and capsule. That flight, Exploration Mission 1, or EM-1, is scheduled for November 2018. The new Space Launch System rocket would blast off with a new...

The most bemused man in America must be former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. In response to a question at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, former Florida governor and current presidential candidate Jeb Bush pronounced Gingrich’s idea of a moon base as “pretty cool.” The former speaker must be asking himself, where was that kind of support in 2012 when he first proposed building a moon base by 2020? Indeed, a number of recent developments have made the once ridiculed idea cool again.

So can we get off of Earth already and start building bases on the Moon or an asteroid? As highlighted in a recent Office of Science and Technology Policy blog post, one way to do that quickly could be to use resources on site. But how do we even get started? Can we afford to do it now, in this tough economic climate? Universe Today spoke with Philip Metzger, a senior research physicist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, who has explored this subject extensively on his website and in published papers. He argues that to do space this way would...

Yesterday, Metzger outlined the rationale for establishing a base in the first place, while today he focuses on the cost. UT: Your 2012 paper specifically talks about how much development is needed on the Moon to make the industry “self-sustaining and expanding”, but left out the cost of getting the technology ready and of their ongoing operation. Why did you leave this assessment until later? How can we get a complete picture of the costs? PM: As we stated at the start of the paper, our analysis was very crude and was intended only to garner interest in the topic...

By 2030, Russia will send robots to the Moon to collect samples. The program will be punctuated with a manned Moon landing — 60 years after Neil Armstrong’s Apollo mission. Payback, perhaps, for losing out on the major leg of the U.S. and Soviet space race. The optimistic program also lays out plans for active exploration of other planets in the solar system, and ideas for a follow-up to the International Space Station: The ISS is only funded until 2020.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich wants to create a lunar colony that he says could become a U.S. state. There's his grand research plan to figure out what makes the human brain tick. And he's warned about electromagnetic pulse attacks leaving America without electricity. To some people, these ideas sound like science fiction. But mostly they are not. Several science policy experts say the former House speaker's ideas are based in mainstream science. But somehow, Gingrich manages to make them sound way out there, taking them first a small step and then a giant leap further than...

Even as the U.S. begrudgingly watches it own 21st century Moon-landing aspirations fade into the sunset, other nations are more than happy to pick up the slack. We've already covered China and India's lunar ambitions extensively. Now another Asian superpower is thirsting for the resources buried on Earth's largest natural satellite. According to a report in Japanese publication NODE, JAXA, Japan's space program, is looking to pour $2.2B USD into plans to put an army of robots (peaceful robots, of course) on the Moon.

Competitiveness: The president spent Tax Day reassuring Florida voters that money will keep flowing to NASA. But in space as well as on Earth, we'll be an unexceptional nation. In space, no one can hear you scheme. President Obama's speech at the Kennedy Space Center will never be confused with President Kennedy's clarion call in 1961 to send an American to the moon within a decade. Rather it was an admission that we will now boldly go where no one wants to go.

Recently President Obama canceled Project Constellation that would return Americans to the Moon by 2020. Some maintain that Constellation was over budget, behind schedule and needed cancellation. What if we had approached another project the same way? Amalgamated Press. January 26th, 1944. General George C. Marshall today announced that the planned invasion of Europe has been canceled. There have long been rumors of cost overruns and other problems plaguing the planned invasion, which was designated 'Operation Overlord', which General Marshall referred to in his announcement and subsequent press conference.

Industry advocates are voicing concern with U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to cancel NASA’s Moon-bound Constellation program and the threat it poses to America’s aerospace work force and U.S. strategic missile arsenals, but Defense Department officials said the two agencies are forging a plan to sustain the nation’s solid-rocket motor industrial base. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) is among those railing against Obama’s proposal to scrap NASA’s plan to replace its space shuttle fleet with new rockets and spacecraft in favor of relying on commercial crew taxis to get astronauts to the international space station and back. “This is not money-saving....

...By the end of this year, there will be no shuttle, no U.S. manned space program, no way for us to get into space. We're not talking about Mars or the moon here. We're talking about low-Earth orbit, which the U.S. has dominated for nearly half a century and from which it is now retiring with nary a whimper. Our absence from low-Earth orbit was meant to last a few years, the interval between the retirement of the fatally fragile space shuttle and its replacement with the Constellation program (Ares booster, Orion capsule, Altair lunar lander) to take astronauts more...

NASA's Constellation programme, which was going to fly manned capsules to the International Space Station in (maybe) 2015, to the moon in (maybe) 2020, and to Mars someday, is dead. Some people are mourning it. I'm not.

Opposition to President Obama's bid to cancel the Constellation return to the Moon program has started to manifest itself among purveyors of popular culture. It has even inspired its first work of literature.

"You can't be a great country without doing great things and a great thing would be to return to the Moon and build a laboratory there and open it up to the world," Hickam said on Tuesday's MetroNews Talkline. Hickam says he's angry about the cut. "It's really a foolish decision to take away the goal of going back to the Moon. I can certainly see figuring out a better way of doing it, but simply to take away the goal, I think, is so shortsighted and so foolish that it's almost breathtaking in its stupidity."

While discussing his spending priorities, President Obama used an image we can all understand: the shrinking family budget. We have less money to spend, he explained, at home and on Capitol Hill. So good on him for ditching the manned (shouldn’t that be “personned’’?) space program. It is the unneeded and extravagant lawn service of the federal government. I grew up with the fairy tale of the space program: brave men with crewcuts, such as the tragically (and pointlessly) martyred Gus Grissom, launching themselves into space, um . . . because it was there? Because the Russians had done so...

Achievement: The nation that put the first man on the moon may have put its last as budget cuts slash NASA's plans to return. Men will return to the moon, but they will likely speak Chinese. On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy announced in front of a joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American to the moon by the end of that decade. It was a clarion call to the American spirit and technology to rise up and prove that America's best days were still ahead. Forty-one years after Neil Armstrong set foot on...

President Barack Obama's proposal to cut the $81bn funding for Nasa's Constellation manned spaceflight programme spells the end of America's attempt to return people to the moon by 2020. If Congress approves the budget, it almost certainly means the next people to land on the moon will be Chinese. Some people are saying this is a serious strategic error.

President Obama's decision to cut back on spending for NASA and future trips to the moon has the support of one of the pioneers of space exploration. Action News reporter Jerry Olenyn down with General Chuck Yeager at his office in Grass Valley, not far from his home, to discuss his past and the future direction the United States should take in the new frontier.