Why we’re going back to the Moon—with or without NASA

[LiberalArkie]

by Eric Berger

It was time for the spent rocket to die. So the 2,000kg Centaur upper stage, about the size of a yellow school bus, detached from its spacecraft and began falling toward the Moon six years ago. Soon lunar gravity took hold, tugging the Centaur ever faster toward the Moon’s inky black South Pole. An hour after separation, the rocket slammed into terra incognita at 9,000kph (or roughly 5,600mph).

Named for a mythical creature with the upper body of a human and lower body of a horse, the empty Centaur burrowed several meters into a crater that had not seen the Sun’s light for billions of years. The impact kicked a plume of Moon dust as high as 20 km into space. The detached spacecraft followed just minutes later, sampling the plume. “We knew within hours that we had measured something really interesting,” recalled Anthony Colaprete, the mission’s principal investigator.

Interesting indeed. After more than a decade of speculation and intriguing findings, the Centaur had blasted up grains of pure ice. It provided dazzling confirmation that a world once thought entirely barren and desiccated harbors the most valuable commodity for human exploration—water. Yet even as Colaprete and other scientists announced their findings in the fall of 2009, NASA’s lunar program was dying.

The Constellation plan to return humans to the Moon had by then become bloated and fallen desperately behind schedule. Less than four months after the Centaur slammed into the Moon in October 2009, the White House formally canceled Constellation. Ironically, almost from the very moment scientists found a compelling reason to go back, NASA had forsaken the Moon.

Snip

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/why-were-going-back-to-the-moon-with-or-without-nasa/

[longship]

1. Well, Constellation was cancelled to save NASA science.

There was not enough budget to fund both, so something had to give. Putting it all into perspective, it was better to save planetary science and ditch the return to the moon.

Double the NASA budget and we could do both.