HOUSTON, Texas - The
International Space Station is an invaluable teaching tool for hardware and
assembly ideas required to install a permanent base on the Moon and for
dispatching humans onward to Mars.
The
orbiting outpost--still being built--shouldn't be thought of as completely
finished anytime soon, said William Gerstenmaier, NASA's Space Operations
Mission Directorate Associate Administrator.
"It's
really more than completing the space station. We're learning assembly
techniques that can be used for exploration. As we go to Mars we're not going
to be able to do that Mars journey with a single spacecraft launch. We're going
to have to do some type of assembly in space," Gerstenmaier said.
Gerstenmaier
spoke today here at the 2nd Space Exploration Conference - Implementing the
Vision, organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics.
What works, doesn't work
"We
get a chance to learn what works and doesn't work" on the International Space
Station (ISS), Gerstenmaier added, valuable lessons learned for a Moon base and
the long journey by crews to Mars. "The space station is not just about
completing it but how it fits into the larger goal of exploration."
Re-supply
of the ISS has spotlighted how best to re-supply crews on the Moon and for
later human voyages to the red planet, Gerstenmaier said. Moreover, the ISS has
shown "what works and doesn't work...what's too complicated...takes too much
time...what involves more risk than necessary," he said.
ISS
experience has yielded insight into the redesign and change of systems so that
voyages to Mars can be made more routine, Gerstenmaier noted.
Lessons learned
NASA
announced yesterday that the space agency is putting at the top of a beyond
Earth agenda the establishment of a Moon base.
"We
have made the determination that we're going to be 'base-centric'; get as much
mass down to the surface of the Moon and leave it there ... to build up
infrastructure," said NASA's Scott Horowitz, Exploration Systems Mission
Directorate Associate Administrator.
That
ability to land substantial hardware on the Moon for use by crews on the Moon
is a pattern akin to what is planned for later Mars expeditions, Horowitz said.
With
the space station, the sphere of human influence has been extended to a couple
of hundred miles above the Earth. That human influence will be taken to a
couple hundred thousand miles from the Earth to the Moon, Horowitz said.
"And
those lessons learned will be extended as we take ourselves a couple of hundred
million miles away from Earth," Horowitz added, to the planet Mars.
Thick and thin
Getting
boot prints on Mars won't be easy, suggested Lisa Porter, NASA's Aeronautics
Research Mission Directorate Associate Administrator. A major challenge is Mars
entry, descent and landing of large human-carrying spaceships.
"In
a nutshell, this is an extremely challenging problem," Porter advised. The
atmosphere of Mars is thick enough to become worrisome in terms of spacecraft heating
issues during entry. But it is also thin...so thin that how to handle
deceleration of large landing ships is a concern.
"So
it's a very tricky atmosphere to deal with. Quite frankly, given where we are
today, and the payloads we're talking about for humans, we can't get there from
here right now given the knowledge that we have," Porter said. "We have a lot
to learn...we have a lot to do in order to be able to put those kinds of payloads
on Mars safely."
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