![]() “So you’re going to see a lot of budget move into 2020, 20 to allow for that first phase.” “What happens when we go to 2024 is all the funding that was out there (for a 2028 lunar landing) … that now all moves forward,” Gerstenmaier said. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is scheduled to testify before a Senate appropriations subcommittee Wednesday afternoon, but it’s unclear if he will offer any new details on the budget required for the moon landing initiative. “If we’re going to do this procurement stuff, I honestly need a budget come Oct. “The biggest risk is schedule,” Gerstenmaier said, adding that Congress must approve a budget with the extra funding by the start of the next fiscal year in October. “That’s what we’re doing now to see which ones we can trade if we start running into some technical problems.” “We recognize that we’re going to be challenged, and we’re going to have to be prepared to back off some of these requirements in order to achieve schedule,” Gerstenmaier said. ![]() ![]() “I will tell you it’s not easy, and it is not risk-free,” he added.īefore Vice President Pence’s March 26 speech announcing the Trump administration’s goal of landing humans on the moon by 2024, NASA’s schedule targeted a moon landing in 2028, allowing more time to build out a multi-module space complex in lunar orbit and a landing craft.Īssuming NASA can secure funding to pay for the accelerated moon program, there are numerous technical and schedule hurdles to overcome. Gerstenmaier’s presentation Tuesday offered more detail on NASA’s planning for a 2024 moon landing than the agency has previously disclosed. “We’ll know in the next couple of weeks whether we’re successful or not,” Gerstenmaier said in a presentation to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Space Studies Board. The accelerated schedule, which would bring forward a moon landing from 2028 to 2024, is likely to require billions of dollars in additional funding per year, and new authority from lawmakers and the Trump administration, according to officials familiar with planning for a budget proposal NASA expects to soon send to Congress.īill Gerstenmaier, head of NASA’s human exploration and operations mission directorate, said Tuesday that the space agency is developing a “compelling presentation” for Congress with sufficient technical details on the 2024 moon landing plan to convince lawmakers to support the accelerated schedule, and the supplemental funding needed to make it happen. Credit: NASA/Aubrey GemignaniĪ senior NASA official said Tuesday that the Space Launch System, a huge heavy-lift rocket years behind schedule, could launch astronauts on a moon landing mission in 2024 on just its third flight to meet a goal announced last month by Vice President Mike Pence, while commercial companies will be entrusted with more responsibility to develop a lunar lander and a modest mini-space station, or Gateway, in lunar orbit. “Flying the actual mission was (usually) much easier than the dozens of times they would have practiced this particular maneuver in the simulator.Bill Gerstenmaier, head of NASA’s human spaceflight programs, speaks April 8 during a meeting at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. “As is typical of simulator training, the crews would have practiced the launch and docking maneuver many times-and usually while having to deal with some simulated failure,” he says. Many of those simulations, Barry notes, involved maneuvering the command module to complete the rendezvous in case of a problem with the lunar module ascent stage getting into the right orbit. “I’m not aware that this specific scenario was simulated, but the in-depth systems knowledge learned in those hours in the simulators-and the techniques developed for astronauts and ground crews to work through problems-would have served them well if further work was needed to fix the broken ‘engine arm’ circuit breaker,” he says. ![]() READ MORE: Apollo 11 Moon Landing Timelineīarry says that during the Apollo program, Mission Control and the astronauts ran thousands of simulations, and the simulation team was “quite devious” about coming up with problems for them to work through. ![]()
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