Researchers at NASA seem to be all set for their upcoming and well-talked mission to the Moon. In the wake of this upcoming mission NASA is trying to strengthen it’s commercial associations and considerably taking measures for the same. We got to have some idea from sir Neil Woodward who is the acting director of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate - “That would make our life a lot easier.”
NASA seems to be leaving not a single stone unturned for getting what they want. Their projected mission will be starting somewhere around 2019 or 2020. Another assignment NASA will be eyeing on would be a manned mission to the Red planet – Mars. Woodward opined that -”If somebody says ‘I have this really great way to be able to extract water ice from lunar regolith (lunar rocks) that I’ve developed on my own dime’ we would be interested.”
In regards to the “Space development conference”,Dallas, Mr. Woodward addressed the Reuters by saying that -”If we could be in a commercial relationship with somebody who has the capability that’s fine because in many cases they can do it for less money than we can.” While addressing them, he very well kept the “Venture capital in space exploration” as the main theme in consideration.
It is amazing to know that NASA foretells a manned outpost on the Lunar surface just like the International Space Station (ISS). Woodward tried to make clear that - “Maybe at that point there will be commercial exploitation and we won’t be sending missions there but some of the commercial companies here will start sending people there. One thing that keeps being batted around is a fuel dump in orbit, in low Earth orbit. If someone was to build one of those and said do you want NASA to be a customer we would say yes because if you do the math it turns out that it would be an advantage to us.”
“We’re trying to help some commercial entities demonstrate that they can do low Earth orbit resupply to say the space station and once they can do that we can contract with them and then we don’t have to do it ourselves anymore. It would be much better if there was an American company who had that capability and presumably being a private entity they may be able to do it for less expense,” he added.
For the space shuttle fleet that would retire by 2010 he opined - “The space station needs a tremendous amount of food and water and scientific experiments to go up and down — we have to pay the Russians to do that after the shuttle retires.”
Via: Reuters
