LRO development Options

[jamescanvin]

Just read this interesting article about LRO

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/28apr_lro.htm

"This is the first in a string of missions," says Gordon Chin, project scientist for LRO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "More robots will follow, about one per year, leading up to manned flight" no later than 2020."

One per Year? Is this just wishful thinking or have any tentitve plans been mentioned for follow up missions after LRO? If the next one is going to be 2009/10 then I guess some desisions about it will have to be made fairly soon.

James

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Well, you know, Bush has already blindfolded himself once, taken a stick, and aimed at a much larger pinata that really is about 5000 miles away -- namely, Iraq. He was just doing it again here (and at least the Space Pinata isn't filled with bees).

At the first Mars Strategic Roadmap Committee meeting (which I attended), Sean O'Keefe showed up at the very start and blew menacingly through his mustache that the members were under no circumstances to actually question any of the official space goals that the Great Leader had stated in his official Initiative description -- including that manned return to the Moon. Their job was only to recommend how the Great Leader's goals could be achieved most economically. Nevertheless, by the third and last day of the meeting the members were in open rebellion; a whole series of them (including Sally Ride) said flatly that the Great Leader had better make up his damn mind whether he was really serious about initiating a manned Mars program in the fairly near future, because the manned lunar program was not only unnecessary for it but a serious bleed-off of resources from it.

Now, of course, new NASA Administrator Griffin has already started radically shaking up the entire manned program again -- including totally cancelling all of the Strategic Roadmapping Committees that dealt in any way with the design of the manned space program (plus the one on Nuclear Systems, which includes Project Prometheus). I don't yet know what he's up to; but I would hope that -- since Griffin, unlike O'Keefe, actually knows something about space technology and science -- we may be about to see a radical revision of the manned space program, both the current Shuttle/Station fiasco and the design of what will follow it. Hope springs eternal.