The United States will have to make a choice between the creation of a lunar base and the development of asteroids. According to US President Barack Obama, each of these programs will be very costly, so you have to choose one thing. Until recently, the answer to this question seemed obvious. Scientists around the world have taken up the study of asteroids quite seriously. However, a few days ago a group of congressmen submitted to Congress a draft law "On the restoration of American leadership in space", which involves sending a man to the moon by 2022 and the subsequent creation of a habitable base on the moon.
The authors of this bill argue that the meaning of the idea is not to repeat the tasks that faced the Apollo program 40 years ago. The new lunar mission sets before the country achievable and fairly clear goals, which, according to the developers of the law, will return the American astronautics to the status of the world leader in space exploration. Also, attention is paid to the fact that a person's stay on another celestial body will entail the creation of new technologies and breakthroughs in many scientific disciplines. And the experience gained during the implementation of this program can be applied in the framework of future expeditions for the exploration of deep space, for example, flights to Mars.
If we talk about the Moon, then there is still a lot of work for scientists. Since the mid-90s of the last century, satellites have been successfully engaged in this kind of research. According to Vladimir Surdin, Associate Professor of the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University, in the past few years, spacecraft from different countries have been working around a natural satellite of the Earth. It is also planned to land automatic stations on its surface. Roskosmos is also preparing for such work, while human participation in such programs is not required. Rather, it even appears to be harmful, since it can significantly increase the cost of the program without introducing anything fundamentally new into it. According to Sudrin, there is no need for an inhabited lunar base today, humanity does not yet know what exactly can be developed there and what is useful for the Earth to find.
At the same time, the number of critics of the "asteroid" project is growing in America. Earlier in the United States seriously considered the idea of / u200b / u200bcapturing a small asteroid and putting it into a circumlunar orbit. Part of the amount to finance this project in the amount of about $ 100 million has already been included in the US budget for 2014. According to experts, the implementation of the entire program would require investments at the level of $ 2, 7 billion. This amount is quite adequate for the work that scientists have to do. There were no examples of it yet. First, you need to find the desired asteroid. At the same time, there are quite a lot of candidates who are not so far from the Earth - about 20,000 pieces. Scientists call the ideal option a small carbonaceous space body weighing about 500-550 tons and a diameter of 7 to 10 meters. Such a small asteroid, in case something suddenly goes wrong, and it falls on the surface of the Earth or the Moon, should not cause serious harm.
They are going to catch and tow the required asteroid to the Moon using an automatic vehicle. After that, it will be possible to send space expeditions to it and conduct various kinds of training and experiments, including as part of the flight to Mars planned for 2030. It is assumed that if this venture was successful, astronauts could set foot on the uncharted surface of the asteroid as early as 2021. Previously, NASA had already planned a mission to any of the large asteroids by 2025. But, as it turned out, it is much cheaper and faster not to send a mission to an asteroid in the depths of space, but to acquire your own "home" asteroids, pulling it closer to the Earth or the Moon, fixing it in orbit. At the same time, the previous version was not canceled, so it is not entirely clear whether this is one project or 2 different ones.
Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences of Cosmonautics Andrei Ionin believes that the very idea of the US asteroid mission was born artificially. It appeared in 2010, when the country's new president, Barack Obama, canceled the lunar program of George W. Bush. According to Ionin, it was necessary to choose a target purely for political reasons. You couldn't just cancel and close everything, you had to choose a new direction. This is how the idea of asteroids came about. At the same time, there is not much sense in it, since everyone understands that this goal is not justified and by itself is gradually receding into the background.
Differences in opinions about what is better for the United States in space in the next decade is the result of a kind of ideological impasse, into which modern astronautics has climbed quite a long time ago. After the implementation of the Apollo missions, tasks of the same scale were never again set. Therefore, nowadays some kind of large space project is needed that would provide a number of conditions. Such a project should be interesting for people and businesses working in the space sector and should be understandable for politicians and the public, says Andrey Ionin.
In his opinion, the flight to the asteroid does not correspond to either of the two points set out above. But the Moon answers, albeit partially. Moreover, in his opinion, the only possible project that would meet all these conditions is only a mission to Mars. And so the preparatory stage for such a mission could be the return of a man to the Moon, but only in order to then fly to Mars.
As arguments in favor of new lunar programs, American congressmen cite plans and programs of other states to land people on the moon. China and Russia have such programs. But in this particular case, we are only talking about giving the topic a sharpness, and not about rivalry in space, says Andrey Ionin. The head of NASA, Charles Bolden, almost certainly got acquainted with the initiative of the congressmen. In early April 2013, he reaffirmed US plans for asteroid exploration, stressing that the US was not planning expeditions to the Moon. Although it is rather difficult to imagine a situation in which a state official would make a statement that ran counter to the space policy of the incumbent President Barack Obama.
And if the United States still does not fly to the Moon in the coming years, then in Russia the Moon is chosen as the nearest space target. At present, the Luna-Glob and Luna-Resource projects are being actively implemented in Russia. The first of them is an orbital probe, which is part of the Russian space program, which is being implemented by NPO. Lavochkin. This program is aimed at research and practical use of the natural satellite of the Earth and the lunar space using automatic spacecraft. Luna-Resource is a more complex program, which involves the use of full-fledged landing modules and lunar rovers.
At present, the control systems of the Russian spacecraft Luna-Glob and Luna-Resurs, which are to be launched after 2015, are undergoing significant alterations. Instead of the on-board computers inherited from Phobos-Grunt, it is planned to install new on-board computers on the devices, which are used on the satellites manufactured by the ISS named after Reshetnev, RIA Novosti reports, citing its own sources in Roscosmos.
It is assumed that the first Russian lunar apparatus "Luna-Glob-1" will be launched in 2015. Mainly, it is intended for testing the landing platform. In 2016, it is planned to launch the Luna-Glob-2 orbital probe, and in 2017 to send the Luna-Resource spacecraft with a landing module to the moon. This version has greater weight and significantly greater capabilities for scientific research than the Luna-Glob vehicles.
