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Schedule including this lecture.

Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium

Date: Monday, May 13, 2002

Title: The Moon and the Future of NASA

Speaker: Paul Spudis

Abstract

Although much of the current PR focuses on missions to Mars as the next big program, I suggest instead that the goal of a manned lunar outpost more readily fits economic, political, and technical realities. Such a program would both create the infrastructure that would allow us to go on to the planets and accomplish significant and recognizable near-term milestones. The history of the United States shows that only two kinds of large-scale engineering projects enjoy long-term funding stability: those related to national defense (e.g., the Panama canal, Apollo) and those related to America's economic infrastructure (e.g., TVA, the interstate highway system). Neither the search for other planetary systems nor extraterrestrial life qualify on such grounds. Thus, they will never be funded at levels permitting significant levels of human activity. And if there is no major, human spaceflight program, the agency will whither away. By going to the Moon next, we accomplish two important goals. We enhance national security by securing for America access to valuable lunar resources (our first off-world El Dorado) and we augment the national economic infrastructure by obtaining routine access to all of the valuable "energy levels" of Earth-orbital space operations. Thus, a program to return to the Moon ties NASA to important national priorities, in contrast to its current lack of a mission. A human return to the Moon should be the next major space flight program that NASA undertakes.

Speaker

PAUL D. SPUDIS is a Staff Scientist and Deputy Director at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. He is a geologist who received his education at Arizona State University (B.S., 1976; Ph. D., 1982) and at Brown University (Sc.M., 1977). Since 1982, he has been a Principal Investigator in the Planetary Geology Program of the NASA Office of Space Science, Solar System Exploration Division, specializing in research on the processes of impact and volcanism on the planets. He has served on NASA's Lunar and Planetary Sample Team (LAPST), which advises allocations of lunar samples for scientific research, the Lunar Exploration Science Working Group (LEXSWG), which devised scientific strategies of lunar exploration, and the Planetary Geology Working Group, which monitors overall directions in the planetary research community. He has also been a member of the Committee for Planetary and Lunar Exploration (COMPLEX), an advisory committee of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Synthesis Group, a White House panel that, in 1990-1991, analyzed a return to the Moon to establish a base and the first human mission to Mars. He was Deputy Leader of the Science Team for the Department of Defense Clementine mission to the Moon in 1994. He is the author or co-author of over 100 scientific papers and two books, including most recently, The Once and Future Moon, a book for the general public in the Smithsonian Library of the Solar System series. 


Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Brent Warner


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