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NASA May Unveil New Manned Moon Missions Soon

NASA is serious about sending astronauts back to the moon’s neighborhood and will likely unveil its ambitious plans soon now that President Barack Obama has been re-elected, experts say.

Image: Artist’s concept of astronauts in an Orion capsule helping direct robotic teleoperations on the moon’s farside. Credit: Lockheed Martin

The space agency has apparently been thinking about setting up a manned outpost beyond the moon’s far side, both to establish a human presence in deep space and to build momentum toward a planned visit to an asteroid in 2025.

The new plans have probably already been cleared with the Obama Administration but have been kept under wraps in case Republican candidate Mitt Romney won Tuesday night’s (Nov. 6) presidential election, said space policy expert John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University.

“NASA has been evolving its thinking, and its latest charts have inserted a new element of cislunar/lunar gateway/Earth-moon L2 sort of stuff into the plan,” Logsdon told SPACE.com. (The Earth-moon L2 is a so-called libration point where the two bodies’ gravitational pulls roughly balance out, allowing spacecraft to essentially park there.)

“They’ve been holding off announcing that until after the election,” Logsdon added, noting that Romney had pledged to reassess and possibly revise NASA’s missions and direction.

A new vision of human space exploration

In 2010, President Obama directed NASA to work toward sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s. To reach such deep-space destinations, the agency is developing a huge rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) and a crew capsule named Orion.

But astronauts likely won’t head straight to a space rock when SLS and Orion are ready to fly together in 2021. In the last year, word has begun leaking out that NASA wants to explore Earth-moon L2, a point in space that lies beyond the moon’s far side, as a precursor.

Rumors currently point toward parking a spacecraft at the Earth-moon L2 gateway, so NASA (and perhaps international partners) can learn more about supporting humans in deep space. Astronauts stationed there could also aid in lunar exploration — by teleoperating rovers on the moon’s surface, for example.

NASA officials think they can pull off such manned missions without busting their budget, which stands at $17.7 billion in the proposed 2013 federal budget.

“They’re not talking about plans that imply significant budget increases,” Logsdon said. “It gives a more focused use for SLS and Orion before an asteroid mission.”

Moon missions coming soon?

Exploration of Earth-moon L2 could get started as early as 2021 with the first manned flight of SLS and Orion, which NASA calls Exploration Mission 2. (Exploration Mission 1 is the initial, unmanned test launch of SLS, slated for late 2017.)

“I’m not privy to the specifics of this, but one could conceive of the second SLS mission being the start of activity in cislunar space, rather than just being a lunar orbit mission,” Logsdon said.

We may know soon enough. NASA higher-ups have dropped hints recently that a big announcement may indeed be in the offing before too much longer.

“We just recently delivered a comprehensive report to Congress outlining our destinations which makes clear that SLS will go way beyond low-Earth orbit to explore the expansive space around the Earth-moon system, near-Earth asteroids, the moon, and ultimately, Mars,” NASA deputy chief Lori Garver said at a conference in September.

“Let me say that again: We’re going back to the moon, attempting a first-ever mission to send humans to an asteroid and actively developing a plan to take Americans to Mars,” Garver added.

Proposed Space Boat Could Explore Lakes On Saturn’s Moon Titan

While rovers are ideal for exploring Mars, a boat is best for Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Scientists are proposing a new mission to explore this alluring world that would send a floating probe to land in a lake on Titan.

Image: Images from NASA’s Cassini mission show river networks draining into lakes in Titan’s north polar region.Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS

Titan, the largest of the more than 60 natural satellites of Saturn, is covered in seas, lakes and rivers of methane, and hosts a thick atmosphere, making it one of the most Earth-like bodies in the solar system. Smaller than Earth but wider than Mercury, Titan is in many ways more like a planet than a moon.

Scientists don’t know if life might be possible on Titan. Some think it’s too cold, as average temperatures are a chilly minus 289 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 178 degrees Celsius). Yet others say the insulating atmosphere and plentiful liquids, not to mention a possible subsurface ocean, could be hospitable to microbial organisms.

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Wish List: Best Proposed Robotic Missions to Other Planets

Wired: When it comes to exploring the far reaches of our solar system, robots rule.

Man may have left footprints on the moon but our probes have landed on or orbited every single other planet as well as countless asteroids and comets, beaming back valuable data and amazing images. The next few years will see greater milestones, with a rover scaling a mountain on Mars and a spacecraft getting the first close-up view of Pluto.

But there’s always more to be done. Eager planetary scientists would love to get new information about each body in our solar system and numerous propositions have been made, including missions to fly through the clouds of Venus or drill down to the ocean on Europa.

NASA’s latest budget hit the agency’s planetary science division particularly hard, making some of the more expensive missions nigh impossible. But there’s always room for hopes and dreams. Other countries’ space agencies are picking up the pace in their own robotic exploration — with occasionally disastrous results — while newcomers like India and China are laying down the foundation for future exploration.

Here, we take a look at some of the coolest missions that we would love to see happen some day. Let us know in the comments which ones we missed out on or some ideas you’d like to see in the future.

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Apollo 17’s Moonship

Mars500 Astronaut Diego Urbina Takes “Marswalk”

Mars500 astronaut Diego Urbina treks across simulated Martian terrain. Urbina is carrying a tool originally designed for Soviet manned lunar missions in the 1960s and 1970s that never came to pass.

Credit: ESA

See photos from Russia’s Mars500 Mars mission simulation, a full-duration test run for a Red Planet trip.