Most would say space geeks are a bit loony, but NASA has taken the moon craze to the next level. NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate has "consulted more than 1,000 people from businesses, academia and 13 international space agencies to come up with a master list of 181 potential lunar objectives." From a radio telescope on the far side of the moon, a regolith laboratory to remotely-controlled rovers, the complete list is here. From this master list, NASA will select a few high priority goals for the initial return to the moon.
Over 1,000 minds and a survey and only 181 ideas?
1 comments:
Is there anything you (or anyone reading) would include that wasn't on the list there? Pretty much anything reasonable that someone could come up with will fall into one of those couple dozen categories, and into one of those already-stated objectives.
One of the really awesome things NASA (Ames) did for this list was ask for youth input... this is what the big Next Generation Exploration Conference (http://ngec.arc.nasa.gov/) was all about last August. There was a lot of international youth participation there, too. Huge representation from Space Generation, ISU, SEDS, NASA Academy, and other groups.
And that wasn't even the first time I'd seen an opportunity to contribute... At Glenn for the summer, there was a call out for any interested person there to review, contribute to, and comment on the list they had going at the time.
They did really work hard to make sure they were getting as much diverse input from people as possible, and I think they probably covered every reasonable task.
Does anyone notice a big omission?
Post a Comment