[X] My Assistant

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?id=4430

Looks like this bunch has the goods on NASA, in the form of its new internal documents on the major new problems. One proposed solution is to have the CEV hover at the L-2 Earth-Moon Lagrange point 66,000 km above the Moon's farside, while the LSAM lunar lander does all the work of descending into lunar orbit, then landing, and later blasting off all the way back to the L-2 point for its rendezvous with the CEV. "This unconventional technique leads to significant mass savings on the CEV, and surprisingly leads to the same mass on the LSAM. In this case, the CEV fits on the Crew Launch Vehicle [which isn't the case any more for the currently existing plan]; however, the LSAM is still too large for the CaLV [Heavy Lifter] -- though the L2 architecture is closer to meeting the performance limit than the baseline cases examined."

So what's NASA's other plan to deal with the new crisis? Why, to scale down Bush's lunar program to an exact duplicate of Apollo -- two-man LMs capable only of equatorial-zone landings -- except that their stay time would be increased from 3 to 7 days. Inspiring, isn't it?