Humans head for moon's orbit - and beyond

"I JUST have to say pretty bluntly here: we've been there before." So said President Obama in 2010 as he ruled out a return to the moon. But there are signs on the NASA grapevine and from the world of commercial space flight that humans are once more headed that way.

A NASA crewed mission to lunar orbit could focus on exploring the moon's dark side and testing technologies to speed up exploration of Mars and other planets. Unfettered by the demands of state funding, a private mission may attempt something even more novel.

Since Obama's speech, there have been hints that NASA might be changing its tune. Rumour has it that the agency plans to build a hovering moon base about 60,000 kilometres above the moon's far side at a Lagrange point, where the pull of Earth's gravity cancels out the moon's. From this point ? called L2 ? astronauts would steer rovers round the surface in close to real time, much cheaper than actually landing on the moon.

NASA hasn't commented on the rumour, but the European Space Agency says it is collaborating with NASA on two lunar missions, one crewed and scheduled for 2019 (see "Europe has right stuff to take NASA back to moon").

Unexplored world

What's more, Jack Burns of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues, two of whom work for NASA, have written a paper, to appear in Advances in Space Research, that suggests what a mission to the far side might achieve (arxiv.org/abs/1211.3462).

An unexplored wilderness, the far side hosts one of the solar system's oldest and largest impact basins, the 8 kilometre deep South Pole-Aitkin basin, flagged as a research priority by the US National Research Council in 2011. It could help fill in a timeline for early solar system evolution and discover if impactors brought organics to the infant Earth. "The far side is effectively a whole new unexplored world in our own backyard," says Burns.

It may also be the only place near to Earth where it is possible to observe when and how the first stars and galaxies formed from the neutral hydrogen atoms that filled space in these cosmic "dark ages". The light from those ancient hydrogen atoms is still reaching Earth now, but gets drowned out by the ionosphere and signals from human technology.

Brains in orbit

Why control robots from L2, not Earth? It's a dry run for Mars, Burns says. The ability to hover above the Red Planet and operate robots on its surface would be a huge advantage. Currently, there is a 20-minute time lag each way when Earth talks to the Mars rover Curiosity, so each night the team sends up all the instructions for the next day. That makes things slow ? if something goes wrong you won't even know about it until the next day, let alone be able to fix it. Burns believes that space exploration in future will involve wheels, not (moon) boots, on the ground, and human brains in orbit.

Mars isn't the limit, adds Dan Lester of the University of Texas at Austin: "We could send human beings into orbit around Titan. They could do virtual scuba diving in the methane lakes." Burns's team is presenting the idea to NASA this week.

But wouldn't it be disappointing to merely orbit the moon or Mars, without planting any flags? Enter private companies. In recent weeks, space-minded media have been abuzz with a rumour that a new private outfit, allegedly staffed by former NASA astronauts and engineers, would soon announce its intention to put humans on the moon.

Even if it doesn't pan out, commercial outfits may be the ones to raise the funds for a crewed mission. Options include mining, tourism or even carrying out the stunt for the sake of publicity. A commercial mission may yet boldly go where governments fear to tread.

Reference: arxiv.org/abs/1211.3462

Read more: "Europe has right stuff to take NASA back to moon"

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