What’s Next for NASA?
Interesting article from the Washington Post this morning – so the White House has called off a plan to go to the moon, and the space shuttles are mere months away from being decommissioned. For the first time in decades, NASA has no specific location it’s headed to next.
Where NASA heads next seems to be dependent on where rocket technology is. Obama’s plan to divert money from George W. Bush’s moon mission to better rocketry could pay off in as little as a few years, finally bringing us the breakthrough it’d take to get to Mars.
Here’s a list of destinations, as listed by the Washington Post, in order of easiest to hardest:
- A flight to the moon, without a landing
- Points in space where the gravitational pull between the earth and the moon is equal – such points would be ideal for telescopes or other space science platforms
- A near-earth asteroid
- Landings on mars & a martian moon
My vote for a next stop? Asteroid. We’ve gotta learn how to blow those things up in case a planet-killer asteroid stops by planet earth to say hey.
Source & Photo Source: Washington Post
