NASA plots a return to the moon within a decade — but this time astronauts will stay there

Neil A. Armstrong/NASA/AP Photo FILE - In this July 20, 1969 file photo, astronaut Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. poses for a photograph beside a U.S. flag planted on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. On Friday, April 13, 2018, The Associated Press has found that stories circulating on the internet that Aldrin passed a lie detector test about alien life, are untrue Bob Richards remembers watching the gray, ghostly figures bounce across his family’s black-and-white TV screen nearly a half-century ago: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first humans walking on the moon.
enthralled by the success of Apollo 11, which touched down 49 years ago on July 20, and by the future portrayed in pop culture by “Star Trek” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Richards was certain that routine flights to the moon and space stations were inevitable within a few decades.

It never happened: The United States canceled its big-budget moon program just a few years after an epic Space Race victory over Russia, and astronauts haven’t left orbits near Earth since.

But Richards, the CEO of Cape Canaveral-based Moon Express and a self-described “orphan of Apollo,” now is confident that Americans are within a decade or so of returning to the lunar surface — this time to stay.

“It’s a different paradigm, to have economics introduced to exploration and science,” said Richards, whose company is trying to lower the cost of robotic lunar missions. “It has to be part of a growing, continuing expansion of the human economic and social sphere to the moon, then to Mars, and eventually to the stars.”

Under new direction from the Trump administration, NASA plans to partner with companies like Moon Express to fly small, robotic landers carrying scientific instruments to the moon, as soon as next year.

It’s a modest start to public-private partnerships that aim to help companies develop increasingly capable landers quicker and at lower cost than NASA could on its own. A first medium-size lander could fly

--msn  19-7-2018