Congress has officially given NASA the task of putting astronaut boots on Martian soil, but they’ve been critical of the space agency’s Mission to Mars blueprint and that might mean a cut in funding.
A lunar space station in orbit around the moon might help NASA send humans to Mars and keep Congress from gutting the space agency’s funding. The aerospace company Boeing has a plan to place a station in orbit around the moon as an important first step to a manned Mars mission, John Elbon, Boeing’s vice president and general manager, told Space.com.
“If we’re thinking about going that far away to Mars, we need to take a kind of interim step. And to take the capabilities that we’re developing on station, take them to the next level and test them a little farther away. And that’s the idea of going to cislunar space.”
Boeing has proposed launching the components of the lunar space station in five stages aboard NASA Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft between 2021 and 2025.
The components would be assembled in space; they include two habitat modules, one logistics module, an airlock, and a power generation module.Astronauts would spend the rest of the 2020’s testing the moon orbiting space station and evaluating its effectiveness in deep space.
Then, in the early 2030s, NASA astronauts would travel to Mars with a stop over at the lunar space station to refuel. Finally, in the late 2030s, astronauts would descend to the Martian surface.
Boeing’s plan to put a space station in orbit around the moon is in line with the United Launch Alliance plan to develop a new economy in orbit above the Earth. The ULA partnership, a collaboration between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, aims to have 1,000 people living and working in cislunar space in just a few years.
The planned cislunar economy in low-Earth orbit involves private companies mining the moon and passing asteroids for valuable resources and then trading those minerals for food and fuel, Elbon told Space.com.
“Our idea would be to build a complex there in the area of cislunar. From there, if folks want to, they can go up and down to the lunar surface. The Europeans seem excited about doing that. There would be that opportunity. We could practice controlling robots and explore the far side of the moon. But, mostly, we could practice living in deep space and what that would be like.”
Other space travel companies like Biglow Aerospace, Lockheed Martin, Orbital ATK, Sierra Nevada Corporation and NanoRocks are currently building and designing the habitat needed for such an undertaking.
The experience gained from operating in cislunar space would help NASA astronauts survive the longer more dangerous journey to Mars. Workers in orbit above the Earth can come back to Earth relatively easily compared to astronauts who’ve undertaken the seven-month journey to the red planet.
Any manned mission to Mars would need to operate independently from Earth and would need to be able to survive for an extended period of time with without resupply.
Boeing and NASA aren’t the only ones preparing for a journey to Mars.
Not only has Elon Musk announced plans to colonize the red planet starting with unmanned cargo trips in 2018, but SpaceX recently renamed its Mars Colonial Transporter as the Interplanetary Transporter. The recent change seems to imply Musk might be eyeing other planets in the solar system, like Venus , for colonization or he could even be visualizing living on a large asteroid like Ceres.
What do you think about Boeing’s plan to put a space station into orbit around the moon?
[Featured Image by forplayday /Thinkstock]
