An anonymous reader shares a report on NASA’s ongoing work on a manned trip to the moon. From the report: Without a new administrator even nominated yet, NASA’s acting head Robert Lightfoot on Wednesday requested a study of whether next year’s first flight of the Space Launch System rocket, billed as the most powerful NASA has built, could have a crew of astronauts. “I know the challenges associated with such a proposition,” Lightfoot said in a letter to his agency, citing costs, extra work, and “a different launch date” for the planned 2018 Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1). The mission would be launched by the massive SLS, which is still in development, then boosted by a European service module to put three astronauts inside the new Orion space capsule on a three-week trip around the moon. NASA first sent three astronauts around the moon in 1968 in the Apollo 8 mission. The last astronaut to stand on the moon, the late Gene Cernan returned to Earth in 1972. The new talk of a repeat moon-circling mission, aboard an untested spacecraft, has space policy experts variously thrilled, dismissive, and puzzled. “I frankly don’t quite know what to say about it,” space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University said. Writing on NASAWatch, Keith Cowing called the study request a “Hail Mary” pass to save the life of the SLS ahead of Trump installing a budget cutter to head the space agency. The Government Accountability Office estimates the costs of SLS and its two planned launches (a second, crewed mission is planned for 2023) at $23 billion.
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