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Category: space travel

The NASA official who oversaw the first SpaceX astronaut launch last month will now lead all the agency’s human spaceflight efforts, including its goal to land astronauts on the moon by 2024.

NASA chief Jim Bridenstine on Friday announced that Kathy Lueders was selected as the agency’s associate administrator of its Human Exploration & Operations mission directorate. He said in a tweet that Lueders to be “the right person to lead HEO as we prepare to send astronauts to the Moon.”

Lueders is the first woman to lead NASA’s human spaceflight efforts, the agency noted.

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Genetic engineering and other advanced technologies may need to come into play if people want to live in Mars.

Last month’s NASA and SpaceX successful launch of astronauts from US soil for the first time in almost a decade, has reignited discussion about space travel to Mars and beyond. SpaceX is fronted by the billionaire Elon Musk.

Sky News reports:

Having completed its first human launch, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive Elon Musk says the company is now focusing on developing its next-generation spacecraft Starship …

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SpaceX is developing a massive stainless-steel Starship that will one day take one hundred passengers to Mars. The company aims to launch the fist Starship with cargo by 2022 and targets 2024 for the first crewed voyage to Mars. The first mission to Mars will consist of taking over 100 tons of cargo humans will need to survive on the rough Martian environment. Vital things like Oxygen and food will be transported to Mars first, so, when the first astronauts arrive, they will have more survival resources. Then, the second mission will transport the first humans to the Red Planet.

Yes— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2020

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But he, himself, is clearly not gone. Earlier this week, Rogozin authored an op-ed in Forbes about Crew Dragon and Russia’s plans in space. Roscosmos has since published an English version, and in it Rogozin is far less complimentary of SpaceX and NASA.

“Elon Musk did not bring us down—he brought down his compatriots.”

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NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tells me that despite the pandemic, the agency will do its utmost to meet the 2024 Artemis lunar return deadline.

“We continue to assess the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on our missions, but we strongly believe that we can still meet the goal of landing the first woman and the next man on the Moon in 2024,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told me via a headquarters’ spokesperson.

Yet NASA has also experienced shakeups in its human spaceflight directorate that could hinder meeting Artemis’ goals. Case in point, Doug Laverro, Associate Administrator of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, departed less than a month ago.

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Good idea. I wonder how much of his attention will shift from Mars to the Moon.

Elon has tweeted out that early Starships will stay on the moon as part of moon base alpha.

The SpaceX plan is what Nextbigfuture described in last months article “A Sky Full of Starships”.

The SpaceX Starship will have six Raptor engines but will still be larger and cheaper than the external fuel tanks of the Space Shuttle. Elon Musk has a goal of building Starships for $5 million.

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