Extending Human Presence into the Solar System. An Independent Study for The Planetary Society on. Strategy for the Proposed U.S. Space Exploration Policy …

Introduction

The recent Presidential Directive to focus NASA’s future on exploration via “the Moon and on to Mars” has invigorated the space community and many of the general public. Meeting these goals while remaining within realistic funding expectations is foreseen as the major difficulty in meeting this challenge. The Planetary Society has commissioned this Report to encourage support for this new venture and to suggest a workable strategy for human exploration of the solar system, with the specific goal of placing humans on the Martian surface at he earliest possible moment, while allowing costs to be managed at reasonable levels. It will be suggested below that the exploration can be conducted in three stages. Stage 1 is the early development of a new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), as the President has directed, accompanied by the development of a launch vehicle to transport the CEV to and from low Earth orbit (LEO). Success with the CEV will lead to missions beyond LEO. We are recommending that strong consideration be given to a specific design using the Shuttle solid rocket motor (SRM), together with a new liquid propellant upper stage, for this role. We believe that this evolutionary development will be the quickest and least expensive path to realizing a U.S. capability to send humans to LEO, and beyond, without the use of the Shuttle Orbiter. This capability should be available well before 2010, the date by which the Orbiter is to be retired. By this time, the International Space Station (ISS) should have reached at least the “U.S. Core Complete” stage, and NASA should have reached an agreement with our international partners about how best to complete our obligations to them.

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