The Administrator of NASA, Michael Griffin, announced today a 13 year plan to return men to the moon for the first time since 1972.
The United States will send four astronauts to the moon in 2018 in a major return to its pioneering manned missions into space, NASA administrator Michael Griffin announced Monday.
Griffin said the new rocket would be “very Apollo-like, with updated technology. Think of it as Apollo on steroids.”
But the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) will enable astronauts to spend four times longer on the moon than the Apollo astronauts. The new missions will spend up to one week on the moon.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) plans to build a new heavy-lift rocket carrying the CEV, which would be able to take up to six crew.
Very cool. And the right step for the space program to take, I guess, but if this isn’t an admission that the entire post-Apollo manned space effort has been a collosal waste of time, I don’t know what is. We should’ve been planning to go back to the Moon as soon as the last mission ended. Instead, we built an aging space truck that hasn’t really accomplished anything in quite some time.
Hat Tip to Varifrank, who makes one wonder how many of the 12 men alive who have actually been on the Moon will be there when we return in 13 years.
