The Orlando Sentinel reports that NASA is considering a new idea for the next human spaceflight destination — a “gateway spacecraft” at the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point.  Under current presidential policy, the agency is focused on sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 as the next step in human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit (LEO).

The newspaper’s description of the proposal, which it says was briefed to the White House earlier this month by NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, suggests that it would be a smaller version of concepts proposed decades ago.  The idea is essentially to have a space station at an Earth-Moon Lagrange point whose purpose is to serve as a transportation hub to other solar system destinations.

The Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point is on the other side of the Moon, that is, further from the Earth than the Moon itself.

There are five points in any two-body system where the gravitational forces are in equilibrium; three are unstable (L1, L2 and L3) and two are stable (L4 and L5).   Also called libration points, they were defined by the French-Italian mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange.   Putting an object at one of these points reduces the need for fuel to keep it in position.   The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA have descriptions of Lagrange points on their websites that are very useful in explaining these difficult to visualize locations.

NASA and ESA have made good use of the Sun-Earth L1 and L2 Lagrange points already.   Sun-Earth L1 is the place for spacecraft that study the Sun and provide early warning of bursts of solar particles heading to Earth that could disrupt communications or endanger International Space Station crews.  The Sun-Earth L2 point is good for astrophysics and is the home of NASA’s WMAP spacecraft and ESA’s Herschel and Planck.  It also will be the location of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

NASA’s ARTEMIS spacecraft are the first to be placed in the Earth-Moon L1 and L2 Lagrange points.   These two spacecraft, P1 and P2, were part of another NASA satellite constellation, THEMIS, that were repurposed to investigate those two Earth-Moon Lagrange points.

According to the Sentinel, NASA is now thinking of using the Earth-Moon L2 point for an outpost that would “support a small astronaut crew and function as a staging area for future missions to the Moon and Mars.”    The newspaper says the cost of such a mission is not mentioned in the NASA plannning documents it reviewed.  Those documents reportedly say it could be built with “only ‘modest increases'” to the NASA budget.

The idea of using Earth-Moon Lagrange points for space stations/transportation hubs is hardly new.   Gerard O’Neill popularized the idea of a very large space station — a “colony” — at the Earth-Moon L5 point in the 1970s and 1980s.   He was one of the members of the 1985-1986 National Commission on Space (NCOS), chaired by former NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, that adopted the notion of Earth-Moon Lagrange-point space stations (not necessarily at L5) as part of a much bolder “Bridge Between Worlds” — a transportation system between cis-lunar space and Mars that would make such trips routine rather than individual “flag planting” missions.

More recently, the 2009 Augustine Committee report on the future of the human spaceflight program included Lagrange points as possible destinations in its “flexible path” category that also includes asteroids.   On April 15, 2010, President Obama announced that he had decided that the next destination for human spaceflight beyond LEO should be an asteroid, but a consensus has not developed to support that policy.  Last month in an Internet chat, he referred to it as a “potential” mission, which could suggest that he may be having second thoughts.

Orlando Figueroa will brief the National Research Council’s Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science (CAPS) next week on the results of his Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG) effort. 

MPPG was established earlier this year in the wake of budget cutbacks that caused NASA to withdraw from planned Mars cooperation with the European Space Agency.  Its task is to “develop foundations for a program-level architecture for robotic exploration of Mars that is consistent with the President’s challenge of sending humans to Mars orbit in the decade of the 2030’s, yet remain responsive to the primary scientific goals” of the most recent NRC Decadal Survey for planetary science.

Figueroa is scheduled to brief the committee on Tuesday at 10:15 am PT (1:15 pm ET) at the NRC’s Beckman Center in Irvine, CA.   The NRC plans to webcast the meeting.

Russia’s official news agency Itar-Tass is reporting today that the launch of the next International Space Station (ISS) crew will be delayed because of a defective instrument on the crew’s Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft.

The announcement comes just hours after the successful landing of Soyuz TMA-04M with its three-person crew.

Itar-Tass quotes Vladimir Popovkin, director of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, as saying that an otherwise unnamed instrument must be removed from Soyuz TMA-06M, replaced, and tested.  That will delay the planned October 15 launch until later in the month — no earlier than October 20, he indicated.

The spacecraft is to take Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Evgeny Tarelkin and NASA astronaut Kevin Ford to the ISS.

Update:  Soyuz TMA-04M landed at 10:53 pm EDT on September 16, 2012.

Original Story:

Three International Space Station (ISS) crew members aboard the Soyuz TMA-04M spacecraft are on their way home.

Undocking took place at 7:09 pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).  Landing in Kazakhstan is expected at 10:52 pm EDT.  Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin, and NASA astronaut Joe Acaba, are aboard.

Witnesses appearing before a Senate subcommittee last week stressed repeatedly that stability and leadership are keys to the future of the U.S. space program.   More money would be nice, they said, but stability is critical.

Steve Squyres, chair of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC), pointed to the mismatch between what NASA is being asked to accomplish by Congress and the Obama Administration versus the resources the agency is provided to meet those goals.  In particular, he is concerned about the “pay as you go” approach to funding the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion spacecraft.  That “can result in slow progress if funding levels are not adequate” and the low flight rate could threaten program momentum and the need to keep “flight teams sharp and mission ready.”   He also highlighted the lack of funds for the other parts of a system needed to take astronauts beyond low Earth orbit — hardware to keep crews healthy on long duration missions far from Earth and a lunar lander for “a lunar surface mission which also is to be a stepping stone to Mars.”

A lunar landing mission is not part of the Obama Administration’s plan, but Squyres apparently agrees with the late Neil Armstrong and others who insist that a return to the Moon is a necessary step in future human space exploration.  President Obama believes the next step should be a human mission to an asteroid in 2025.  His program includes no missions to land on either the Moon or Mars through the 2030s; orbiting them, yes, but not landing.

Squyres concluded that the current budget is “insufficient” to carry out the administration’s plan and identified four options to proceed:

• keep trying to do everything “with an inadequate budget, running the risk of lengthy delays and a job poorly done”;
• making “painful choices” about what to eliminate in order to preserve funding for higher priorities;
• increasing the budget “although I realize that might be difficult in a constrained budgetary environment”; or
• forging strong international partnerships.

Jim Maser, President of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, agreed that a lunar lander will be needed “eventually,” expressing skepticism about the asteroid mission and saying that “fallback plans” are needed.    His main point, however, was the need for “an enduring vision” and a “consistent, clearly articulated budget” to execute it.  Lamenting the Obama Adminstration’s change in direction “with what appears to be limited coordination and consent from Congress” which led to Congress “being compelled to be prescriptive” in law regarding what NASA should build, he called for “an enduring stable vision … that’s set by the President in alignment with Congress and budgets in a consistent manner that enables execution over timeframes that extend beyond a single administration or congressional election cycle.”

Charles Kennel, chair of the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Space Studies Board, also called for “consistency of vision and goals as essential to achieving leadership in space.” His testimony focused on the importance of the United States maintaining leadership, especially in space science.  The NRC just completed a series of decadal surveys on the various aspects of space and earth science, including biological and physical science research aboard the International Space Station (ISS).  Kennel said the ISS “guarantees our leadership” for a decade in human spaceflight, but asked what comes next.  Congress directed NASA to contract with the NRC in FY2012 (which ends on September 30) to conduct a study and make recommendations on the future of the human spaceflight program.   Kennel said the members of that study committee are about to be announced and will be a “distinguished” group.

Kennel and Squyres both lamented the cancellation of NASA’s cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) on robotic Mars exploration because of cutbacks in the FY2013 budget request.   ESA is now partnering with Russia on the 2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions instead of NASA, but financial difficulties still must be resolved.   Despite the United States leaving ESA in the lurch, the potential of international cooperation to enable achieving bold goals in space was heralded at the hearing.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), who is retiring at the end of this term, asked whether NASA’s mission should be more narrowly focused by moving aeronautics elsewhere, for example.   Squyres, Kennel and Maser all argued against it, pointing out that the aeronautics budget is so small it would not make much of a difference in pursuing NASA’s space activities and that aeronautics research is critically important to the nation.   Squyres, who is a planetary scientist, said that as chair of NAC he has come to learn a lot about NASA’s aeronautics program. “Disrupting the program — trying to rip it out of the place where it’s found such a good home and place it somewhere else could be detrimental to what I think is one of the best things that NASA does,” he said.

Squyres is best known as the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity that landed on Mars in 2004.  He also chaired the recent NRC decadal survey on planetary science.   Robotic Mars exploration was one focus of the hearing, which led off with witnesses representing the Mars Curiosity mission that landed on Mars last month.  Fuk Li, Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Exploration Directorate and CalTech’s John Grotzinger, Curiosity’s lead scientist, updated the subcommittee on the Curiosity mission.

Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL), chair of the subcommittee, asked about the utility of SLS for science missions.  Similar in capability to the Saturn V that sent Apollo astronauts to the Moon, the SLS will be optimized for human spaceflight missions, but Nelson asked about other missions SLS could enable.   Kennel offered that a mission to deflect an asteroid that might impact the Earth is one possibility, along with robotic sample return missions from Mars.  Squyres said that human missions to asteroids and Mars could be important from a planetary science standpoint.  He pointed out that the science that has been achieved with the Opportunity rover over eight years could have been accomplished in a week or week-and-a-half with a human crew.

The September 12 hearing was before the Science and Space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee.