NASA outpost beyond moon could lead to Mars

The Lagrange points for the Earth-moon system. NASA is evaluating an early mission with the Orion capsule placed at Earth-moon L2. Astronauts parked there could teleoperate robots on the lunar farside. / LPI-JSC Center for Lunar Science and Exploration,David A. Kring

Sending astronauts to a deep-space outpost beyond the moon's far side could help lay the groundwork for more ambitious manned missions to Mars, some researchers say.

Such a lunar effort would take humanity farther from Earth than it's ever been before, allowing scientists and engineers to work their way up to even more distant targets such as asteroids and Mars in a stepwise fashion, advocates say.

"It's a really good way to basically dip your toes in deep space," Josh Hopkins, a space exploration architect for Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, said during a Nov. 14 presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations working group.

Beyond the lunar far side

NASA is apparently thinking seriously about launching astronauts to Earth-moon L2, a spot in space beyond the moon's far side. EML-2 is a so-called libration point where the gravitational pulls of the moon and Earth roughly balance out, allowing spacecraft to essentially park there. [Visions of Deep-Space Stations (Gallery)]

Astronauts would ride to EML-2 aboard NASA's Orion capsule, which is being built by Lockheed Martin. Orion would get off the ground atop the Space Launch System(SLS), the agency's huge new deep-space rocket.

The launcher's first unmanned test flight is slated for 2017, and NASA hopes the SLS-Orion combo will begin carrying crews by 2021.

EML-2 is an interesting target in its own right, Hopkins said. From there, astronauts could teleoperate rovers on the far side with relative ease, helping explore a part of the moon that remains little-studied to date.

Such rovers could gather samples for a possible return to Earth, he said, which could shed light on the moon's mysterious impact history.

The robots could also deploy huge antennas, helping set up a powerful instrument that would take advantage of the radio "quiet zone" found on the lunar far side to investigate some of the universe's deepest mysteries.

"You can do, particularly, low-frequency radio astronomy from the far side that you can't do from Earth," Hopkins said.

Beyond the moon

But the main reason to set up a manned outpost at EML-2, Hopkins said, is to lay the foundation for human missions to even more far-flung destinations.

In 2010, President Barack Obama directed NASA to work toward getting astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s. EML-2 would be a good stepping stone along the way, Hopkins said.

Missions to EML-2 would teach NASA and its partners how to operate without a resupply safety net, for example, and would help work out any kinks that may exist in the SLS-Orion pair.

"If things go badly enough, you can always get home pretty quickly," Hopkins said. "That's basically not possible for an asteroid mission, or a Mars mission."

A space station at EML-2 would also serve as a teleoperations training ground, he added, paving the way for efforts to drive Mars rovers from one of the Red Planet's two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos.

While the path Hopkins discussed was drawn up by Lockheed Martin, it appears NASA may be thinking along similar lines. Agency officials have said recently that they are indeed planning to send astronauts back to the moon's neighborhood.

"We just recently delivered a comprehensive report to Congress outlining our destinations which makes clear that SLS will go way beyond low-Earth orbit to explore the expansive space around the Earth-moon system, near-Earth asteroids, the moon, and ultimately, Mars," NASA deputy chief Lori Garver said at a conference in September.

"Let me say that again: We're going back to the moon, attempting a first-ever mission to send humans to an asteroid and actively developing a plan to take Americans to Mars," she added.

Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

Photos: NASA's Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle for Deep Space Flights
The Moon: Again?
Gallery: President Obama and NASA

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[jonathansj]

i mean thats untested but that my undeveloped concept

[jonathansj]

wait. now i remember. the solution is using mirrors like sailboat sails made from huge sheets of aluminium foil to bias the orbit and then turn them off a little to compensate for the perturbances

[jonathansj]

so L1 is the place where something would try to fall into the moon and try to fall into the earth equally and be pulled along by the moon's gravity.

but is it like your only locked into it by micro-gravity so solar wind, ion storm, magnetic disturbances, solar light fluctuation pressure and perturbance from prominences like mount Everest, would blow you a few inches off center and cause you to fall into the moon or reenter the earths atmosphere anyway unless you used micro reactance boosters to to continuously counteract those forces?

(i remember pondering these things and asking these questions when there was nobody to answer them and setting the topic and discussing these things with kids my age on the radio in the early 70's)

[John_Strickland]

The primary reason for creating an L1 or L2 gateway is as a logistics base and propellant storage depot to allow easy access to the lunar surface and for Mars missions, by mining lunar derived propellant and bringing it to depots at the L1/L2 base. This is the "gate" part of the station. Without the cryogenic propellant depots and the logistics facility, the base is pretty useless. It would become a "space station 2" with little to do.

There seems to be disagreement in the media about what NASA actually intends to do. Some NASA sources say that they do want the critical facilities which are not mentioned in the press releases. With a single SLS launch affordable per year, very little in fact can be done with such an incomplete and gateless "gateway".

[Snowballsolarsystem]

Why the L2 point which is unstable and requires continual energy expenditure to maintain the orbit? By comparison, the libration orbits around L4 and L5 are stable, requiring no energy expenditure except possibly for more minor corrections due to planetary perturbations.

And unfortunately, L2 is beyond the umbra of the Moon, so you don't get dark skies for viewing either.

True, maintaining libration orbits around L4 and L5 points require greater computational horsepower than merely maintaining the L2 point, but this isn't 1960s. It sounds to me like they may have dusted off an old proposal rather than considering new possibilities.

[Philly-Jimi]

What is dark skies? There is no such thing or place. Just like there is no dark side of the moon. There is the far side of the moon. Also the moon doesn't have an sky.

I'll assume you're talking about a telescope. Building a telescope on on the surface of the far side of the moon would be great. But even then a few days the lunar orbit of the Earth it would also face enough of the Sun to make it unusable. A Lagrange point would make sense for a telescope. At some point the telescope need to be serviced by humans.

The whole idea of going to the Lagrange points is a very lame attempt to justify the building of the SLS rocket and Orion. Hopefully this is the last of old NASA cost plus contracting and we'll only see NASA contracting with fixed bid contracts like what they have done with SpaceX. So for now NASA is spending billions building a rocket and a crew capsule with no where to go beside around the moon and back.

[cubscout09]

Arthur C. Clarke and Buzz Aldrin have written extensively about how to exploit the Lagrange points, using modern technology.
Welcome to 1772, budding scientists!

[rider1956]

Sounds neat, kinda like circumnavigating the globe, but what's the purpose? Just to do it????? We need to build space defense first - in case those pesky aliens come back.

[Snowballsolarsystem]

If you're referring to alien comets and asteroids, I'll second the motion.