Kosmos: Moon rush, settling for Soyuz, and SpaceX has a complaint

Okay, fine. This is “This Week in Space!” Except … This Week in Space!, complete with exclamation point, was always something of a weak title. So I’m stealing “Kosmos,” which was the title of a book that Darksyde and I did in the early days of DK and taking it for a spin.

Space.Com: NASA decides it wants to go back to the Moon in a hurry. Tariq Malik

NASA really wants to land astronauts on the moon in 2028. But to do that, the agency is looking to commercial space companies to build the landers, space tugs and refueling stations required to make a moon exploration effort that lasts.

"This time, when we go to the moon we're going to stay," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told a roomful of space industry representatives here Thursday (Feb. 14).  "So, we're not going back to the moon to leave flags and footprints and then not go back for another 50 years. We're going to go sustainably. To stay. With landers and robots and rovers — and humans."

The gathering at NASA's headquarters comes a week after the agency unveiled what it calls a Broad Agency Announcement calling on commercial space companies to submit ideas for lunar landers, tug-like transfer vehicles and refueling systems to gas up those vehicles for reuse. Interested companies have until March 25 to submit their ideas, with NASA aiming to make selections in May and issue contracts of up to $9 million for follow-up studies in July (just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing).

Honestly, no matter what I think about Bridenstine, I have sympathy for anyone trying to accomplish anything that takes more than a week at NASA. With the agency subject to complete rewrites of its direction every four to eight years, and 538 legislators all looking on the agency as a source of revenue, not research, it seems impossible for it to stay focused, especially on the manned space flight side, long enough to get anything done. And anything that does get done is often vastly over cost especially because it is the ill-fitting compromise of pieces leftover from competing visions.

While privatizing NASA would be a disaster, I’d be completely behind legislation that provided the agency with a semi-autonomous buffer zone, allowing it more independence so long as it continued to set goals and accomplish them.

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2Ee68Qo