Permanent moon base planned
NASA wants to start building way station for Mars voyages near south pole by 2024

- David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Tuesday, December 5, 2006

NASA announced plans Monday to begin building a permanent base on the moon by 2024, four years after the space agency starts sending crews of four astronauts there for weeklong exploratory missions.

The base would probably be located near the lunar south pole and be staffed by rotating teams of international astronauts for up to six months at a time, according to NASA officials.

The teams will be equipped for extended travel across the cratered lunar surface and will start preparing the base as a way station for an eventual human mission to Mars, the officials said.

No price tag has yet been set for the lunar venture, but the space agency's lunar exploration chief conceded that participation by other space-faring nations as well as U.S. industries will be critical for success of the costly, risky and technically demanding effort.

Deputy NASA Administrator Shana Dale, who led a news briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the agency will send a series of manned spacecraft starting in 2014 to orbit both polar regions of the moon and scout out possible landing sites in search of evidence of natural resources and potential hazards to exploring lunar vehicles.

The first astronaut teams, she said, would land in 2020 -- as President Bush has proclaimed -- and start building the permanent base from which the international teams could explore the lunar surface for miles around aboard mobile solar-powered craft in preparation for the Mars mission Bush has also envisioned. No target date has been set for any human mission to Mars, where the robot spacecraft Opportunity and Spirit are still exploring the surface nearly four years after they landed there on what was scheduled as a three-month mission.

A successful manned mission to the moon in 2020 would come 51 years after the astronauts of Apollo 11 made the world's first lunar landing and 48 years after Apollo 17 ended that ambitious space venture.

Dale said NASA experts have already consulted more than 1,000 scientists, engineers and other space specialists in 14 nations to set the long-term strategy for lunar exploration and to design the architecture of the orbiters, the landing craft and the bases that will ultimately be required.

The manned lunar venture could cost $500 billon or more, experts have estimated. It will be up to future presidents and Congress to provide the money.

Even now, all the schedules are tentative and detailed plans are still being developed, Dale said. A NASA-sponsored international space exploration conference focusing on the moon, Mars and beyond is under way in Houston, she said.

The original Apollo astronauts landed near the moon's equator and ventured as far as 21 miles across the surface, but the new plans call for a base at one of the poles because the polar regions are sunlit 70 to 80 percent of the year and that means easy access to solar power, said Doug Cooke, NASA's exploration systems chief. Eventually, with sturdy vehicles, the lunar explorers could roam for scores of miles across the surface.

The Shackleton crater near the south pole would be the most likely location for the moon base, Cooke said, because a 300-acre flat site -- almost the size of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. -- lies nearby. That would give astronauts a natural place to land and would put the base close to deep, dark craters where water may exist that could yield hydrogen, oxygen and perhaps other volatile chemicals for creating rocket fuel for return voyages to Earth.

"There could even be cometary ices that have lain there for billions of years," Cooke said.

Major scientific goals would be achieved by returning to the moon, said Dale and Scott Horowitz, a retired astronaut who is another NASA deputy administrator for space exploration.

Dale, for example, envisioned placing arrays of space telescopes on the moon's far side where no atmosphere or sunlight would obscure their unlimited vision.

Horowitz said mobility of the exploring crews would be crucial: "Everything from a guy walking around in a spacesuit to a team riding away in a fully pressurized space vehicle -- maybe equipped with a backhoe to dig up lunar dirt," as he put it.

At NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, where scientists first analyzed the moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts more than three decades ago, engineers have long been noted for expertise in developing pressurized suits for space travel and will work with colleagues at the Johnson center to create new gear and respirator masks that could resist the razor-sharp particles of moon dust.

The first new robot reconnaissance mission to the moon will actually start next year, with the launch of a spacecraft called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which will circle the poles on the lookout for natural resources that might prove useful to later astronauts.

The orbiter will also carry a smaller craft called the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, that was designed by Ames engineers and scientists to take a first look for signs of water in the moon's rocks. In 2009, the spacecraft's Centaur rocket stage will deliberately crash into the Shackleton crater near the south pole, while instruments on the observing stage seek for evidence of water in the plume of moon dust kicked up by the impact.