plan to pay for it? By credit card installments? and adding to their
$15 trillion (=15,000,000,000,000) debt?
Neil Armstrong urges return to the Moon
Posted: 25 August 2011 0904 hrs
SYDNEY: Astronaut Neil Armstrong has urged a return to the Moon to
train for missions to Mars as the United States contemplates the
future of its space programme following the end of the shuttle era.
The first man to walk on the Moon is due to address the US Congress on
new directions for NASA in coming weeks.
He has previously criticised US President Barack Obama for being
"poorly advised" on space matters and said it was "well known to all
that the American space programme is in some chaos at the present
time, some disarray".
"There are multiple opinions on which goals should be the most
important and the most pressing," he told a function in Sydney late on
Wednesday.
The US shuttle programme came to an end last month with the Atlantis
cruising home for a final time, 42 years after Armstrong became the
first person to set foot on the Moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission.
Critics have assailed NASA for lacking focus, with no next-generation
human spaceflight mission to replace the shuttle programme.
Now 81, Armstrong said the agency had become a "shuttlecock" for the
"war of words" between the executive, legislative and congressional
arms of US government.
"It's my belief given time and careful thought and reasoning we will
eventually reach the right goal, I just hope we do it fairly quickly,"
he said.
The normally private and reserved space veteran said Mars should be
the next frontier for exploration but urged more missions to the Moon
as the vital next step.
"I do favour going to Mars but I believe it is both too difficult and
too expensive with the technology we have available at the current
time," he said.
"I favour returning to the Moon. We made six landings there and
explored areas as small as a city lot and perhaps as large as a small
town. That leaves us some 14 million square miles that we have not
explored."
Armstrong said working on the Moon would allow scientists to practise
"a lot of the things that you need to do when you are going further
out in the solar system" while maintaining relatively close contact
with Mission Control.
Communication is the major problem for trips to Mars, he said, with
the relay of a message between Earth and the red planet delayed by
about 20 minutes, compared with 1.5 seconds between here and the Moon.
Travel time is also a major concern, with a journey time of two months
when Mars was closest to Earth, but also at its most rapidly spinning
trajectory, requiring massive amounts of fuel to land.
- AFP/ck
