Trump Wants to Send Astronauts Back to the Moon. Will That Really Happen?

The easiest part about going to the moon is, well, going to the moon. Once you’ve got your funding in place, your crew trained and your rocket and spacecraft on the launch pad, it’s just a matter of gassing it all up and going. We’ve done it before — nine times in fact; we can surely do it again. The trick is all that other stuff that has to come first — especially the money, the rocket and the spacecraft. Details like that are worth keeping in mind in the wake of President Donald Trump’s just-signed Space Policy Directive, setting NASA on a path to return Americans to the moon and to use it as a training and staging ground for later missions to Mars. In a White House ceremony — with a toy astronaut figurine on hand — the President said, “Imagine the possibility waiting in those big beautiful stars if we dare to dream big. That’s what our country is doing again, we’re dreaming big.” OK, it’s not President Kennedy’s celebrated “We choose to go to the moon” speech. But it’s not nothing either. For lunar enthusiasts, the most encouraging part of the announcement is that it comes at the end of a reasonably orderly process. In June, Trump reestablished the National Space Council, a space advisory group that existed from 1958 to 1973 under presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and again from 1989 to 1993 under the first President Bush. In early October, the Council me...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Apollo program Mars moon NASA onetime space Space Policy Directive trump Source Type: news