NASA revisits the past to launch itself into the future

Some question the similarities to the 1969 moon landing.
BALTIMORE SUN
It looks like Apollo. And, if Congress foots the bill, NASA's proposed "Crew Exploration Vehicle" would fly astronauts to the moon and back in 2018 pretty much the way Apollo did in 1969.
The similarities have some Americans wondering why the space agency would spend more than $100 billion to repeat something we mastered when Richard Nixon was president.
"It seems like buying a used car," said Charles County, Md., resident Dudley N. Thompson, in a recent letter to The Baltimore Sun. The plan "largely ignores Mars and focuses on an achievement we attained 35 years ago."
NASA's view
But NASA officials insist the Apollo blueprints still make sense. And they stress there's plenty they need to learn before sending people back to the moon, and more still before crews can safely make the 18-month voyage to Mars and back.
"We can't do that today," said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. "We cannot live for 18 months in low Earth orbit without sustenance from Earth. And we have not learned how to live in a gravity field on another planet for 18 months without sustenance from Earth."
"We're going to learn how to do those things on the [International] Space Station and on the surface of the moon. And when we can do them with a very high confidence, it will be safe to send a crew to Mars," he said. "Otherwise, it's a recipe for killing people."
Scientists and engineers say the long-duration stays they're planning on the moon, and much longer voyages to Mars, will require, among other things, that they learn how to extract water, oxygen and even rocket fuel from the lunar soil. And they must learn to protect astronauts from the deadly radiation they'll face when they venture beyond low Earth orbit.
But for all that's novel about them, the plans Griffin unveiled last month for landing astronauts on the moon by 2018, after an absence of 46 years, do look strikingly retro.
Like the Apollo capsules, America's new Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV, will be a conical, "blunt-body" spacecraft, launched atop a slim, multistage rocket.
The aging space shuttles are scheduled to be retired by 2010. But NASA will re-enlist the shuttles' trusty main engines and simple solid-fuel rocket boosters. They'll be stacked together to lift the CEVs and related hardware to orbit.