High Costs Will Keep Return to Moon Plan Grounded

WASHINGTON — A White House panel of independent space experts says NASA's return-to-the-moon plan just won't fly.

The problem is money. The expert panel estimates it would cost about $3 billion a year beyond NASA's current $18 billion annual budget.

"Under the budget that was proposed, exploration beyond Earth is not viable," panel member Edward Crawley, a professor of aeronautics at MIT, told The Associated Press Tuesday.

The report gives options to President Barack Obama, but said NASA's current plans have to change. Five years ago, then-President George W. Bush proposed returning astronauts to the moon by 2020. To pay for it, he planned on retiring the shuttle next year and shutting down the international space station in 2015.

All those deadlines have to change, the panel said. Space exploration would work better by including other countries and private for-profit firms, the panel concluded.

The panel had previously estimated that the current plan would cost $100 billion in spending to 2020.

...

Full Article

This saddens me. I was hoping to see man on the moon in my early life. Hopefully, they'll find a way to include it in the budget and go through with it.

NASA is wasting time and money. They "we" need to spend there funding on propulsion research, space elevator etc... What if we find life out there? We cannot do anything about it cause we are stuck in earth orbit.

Stop with the robots and flyby satellites and get to researching propulsion.

VASIMR is one such technology that could have already propelled us if funded.

Ad Astra

What happens if an asteroid is coming our way? We can't save any humans on a moon or mars colony because we do not have propulsion to get there.

The goal of NASA needs to be the spreading of Humanity through the universe not staring at stars for earth like planets we can not even reach.

Get us some engines and a ship and we can start thinking about what is out there besides ourselves.

We need to get the heck off this planet before we are extinct.