Preperations for the Lunar Flight
With its heavy cranes, arc welders and steel rolling machines, the nondescript metalworking shop located inside a hangar hard by the runways at Cleveland’s Hopkins Airport looks like countless other industrial factories in this rustiest of Rust Belt cities.
But there’s no mistaking the distinctive, white-painted, 5-ton steel cylinder, 6 feet high and 18 feet across, that rests in the center of the shop floor.
It’s a segment of a rocket–the first piece of a prototype for America’s newest launch vehicle. A rocket that is to take astronauts back to the moon.
Swiftly, aggressively and largely unnoticed by the rest of the nation, NASA has begun its next great manned spaceflight mission, the one that is scheduled to revisit the moon by 2020 and establish a long-term outpost there to serve as a steppingstone for an even bolder human journey to Mars.
Here at NASA’s Glenn Research Center and others across the country, a new crew capsule is under development, new rocket engines are being designed and new moon rovers are being created. The first test flight of the new rocket is set to launch in just 30 months.
It has been more than a generation since America first lofted humans to the moon and the nation’s space agency had a mission capable of capturing the public’s imagination as the Apollo program did. But for most Americans younger than 35, NASA has stood for little more than a balky and dangerous space truck flying back and forth to a half-built space station that methodically circles Earth every 90 minutes.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is still committed to flying the aging shuttle until its scheduled retirement in 2010 so that construction on the long-delayed International Space Station can be completed. But the real passion at the agency these days is the Constellation program to return astronauts to the moon, a goal set by President Bush in 2004 and given its initial funds by Congress a year later. About 10 percent of the space agency’s current budget, or $1.7 billion, and an estimated 20 percent of its brainpower are now devoted to the Constellation program.
“This is where the excitement is,” said Tony Lavoie, manager of the Lunar Precursor and Robotic Program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. “This is where the best minds in NASA want to be.”
The project is moving remarkably fast, in part because it borrows from designs and concepts proven during the Apollo and space shuttle programs.
NASA has already determined, for example, that the new Orion crew capsule, due to be flown for the first time by around 2012, will look a lot like its Apollo predecessor, although it will be larger to accommodate up to six astronauts instead of three. The Ares rocket that will launch it resembles one of the solid rocket boosters used to launch the shuttle.
A second, larger cargo launch rocket, which will take aloft a new lunar lander that will mate with the Orion capsule in Earth orbit before heading on to the moon, is about the size of the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo era but will make use of two shuttle-type solid rocket boosters strapped on either side.
The main contract to build the crew capsule was awarded in August to Lockheed Martin Corp., and astronauts are working with prototypes at Houston’s Johnson Space Center.
But despite the resemblance of some components to earlier missions, Constellation is something very new–a program not merely to revisit the moon but to establish a long-term, self-sustaining base there where NASA can learn what it will take to send humans on even more dangerous, years-long missions to Mars.
“We’re not going to the moon just to do footprints again,” said Tom Sutliff, a manager at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “We’re going to live off the land. It’s much, much more than Apollo.”
There’s no guarantee that future presidents and future Congresses will continue to fund the estimated $125 billion cost of returning Americans to the moon. But NASA is proceeding as if the mandate is assured–and cannily spreading the early jobs and contracts associated with the Constellation program as widely as possible.
Rather than concentrate the new moon mission at its two biggest space centers, Johnson in Houston and Kennedy in Cape Canaveral, NASA has farmed out major planning and development tasks to each of its 10 research facilities across the country. Not only does that approach take advantage of all the rocketry expertise distributed across the space agency, it creates jobs and economic benefits in many key congressional districts, planting lasting political constituencies for the mission.
Glenn, for example, which specializes in propulsion systems, microgravity physics and space communications, has been given responsibility for, among other things, designing the service module that will power the Orion crew capsule.
The Cleveland center is also fabricating the Constellation program hardware that will be the first to fly: a prototype of the upper stage of the Ares I rocket that will boost the crew capsule into orbit. The rocket segments, affectionately known as “tuna cans,” will be shipped by barge to the Kennedy Space Center, where they will be stacked together for the first test launch, scheduled for April 2009.
There are innumerable puzzles NASA engineers must solve before humans can pitch a camp on the moon, and work on them is beginning as well. Can water or oxygen, for example, be extracted from the lunar surface to help sustain human life? Can astronauts grow food in hermetically sealed greenhouses?
Even something as seemingly innocuous as lunar dust presents a challenge: The Apollo astronauts discovered that the extremely fine, highly abrasive powder collected on everything and rapidly degraded spacesuits and moving parts.
Equally daunting are the physiological questions: NASA still doesn’t know how to protect humans on long-term missions from absorbing deadly doses of radiation. And despite the familiar image of astronauts spinning weightlessly on exercycles, experts have yet to figure out how to prevent debilitating loss of bone and muscle mass.
America’s initial lunar adventures
“I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
–President John Kennedy, May 25, 1961
The goal Kennedy set 45 years ago was achieved when Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and returned to Earth on July 24, 1969. Here are other Apollo program highlights:
- Dec. 24, 1968: Apollo 8, mankind’s first trip beyond Earth’s orbit, featured a Christmas Eve TV broadcast from lunar orbit during which the three astronauts read from the Bible.
- April 17, 1970: Apollo 13 returned to Earth after an explosion of an oxygen tank–”OK, Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” astronaut John Swigert Jr. said–forced cancellation of a lunar landing.
- Dec. 19, 1972: The last Apollo mission, No. 17, ended.
