NASA's spaceflight plans for the next 10-15 years.

[Spicer]

Ok, so the STS finishes up it's last flight in May of 2010. The Ares 1/Orion isn't due to be flight ready until sometime around 2014 or so. Falcon 9/Dragon X is also due to be ready at some point.(If the Falcon 1 can ever get off the ground) How do these vehicles fit into NASA's plans for the next 10 or so years, before we get back to the moon.

It seems like after the shuttle finishes, Dragon X would take over. It'll be fine for transport and cargo to the ISS. The Ares will be tested for crew transport, some resupply at the ISS, and eventually to get us back to the moon.

Am I on the right track here? Does anyone else have any feelings about what NASA's "vision" is between now and 2020?:beach:

 

[Chupacabra]

I think that is pretty much it. Of course SpaceX still needs to get to the Falcon 9 and prove it before they start launching manned capsules. But SpaceX works independently of NASA. It seems as if NASA is relying on COTS to pick up their slack, which it is supposedly better than Russian Soyuz , rather than to promote the use of Commercial Launchers.

As to Ares...I think I saw an estimated schedule on it somewhere. If you have gone through the Direct 2.0 proposal you will see an estimated calender of the Ares Program.

Other than that there are groups within NASA working on Lunar Rovers and the like on the Dessert RATS program. Others are focusing on Mars.

This vision doesn't really seem yet to be as clear as the vision of the 60s. Which is interesting because when the program was conceived it had many aspirations towards a mars mission. But they weren't presented as clearly as they should have been. For instance, the reason for the use of a now scratched fuel scheme on the Lunar Lander would have been to gain experience with it. Because that fuel was later going to be generated on Mars.

 

[ar81]

If things go though current path, US astronauts will required russian Soyuz to go to ISS, China will go to the moon and they will colonize it, US trade and government deficit will continue growing until there is no money to even rebuild a bridge, such leak of money will add inflationary pressure to the world, and after the world gets used to it and US depleted all the money, world deflation will come...

 

[Moonwalker]

Does anyone else have any feelings about what NASA's "vision" is between now and 2020?:beach:

At the moment NASA's vision is rather realistic: ending the Shuttle era in 2010. After that there won't be any manned flights for a few years while they'll work on Ares.

But now speculation takes place. I can already see what NASA's vision will look like from 2015 to 2020: "Florida, ISS and the Pacific Ocean".

NASA will carry crew to and from the oldie-ISS by using their Ares I and Orion within the second half of the next decade. At that time I won't be interested in current space flight anymore because it won't be really different to what we already saw after Apollo for more than 40 years (as about 99% of the people on the planet today already don't care about manned space flight stuff). Also, there won't be any fund for Ares V and the Lunar Lander to enable manned Moon missions until the first half of the 2020's. And so we won't see missions to Mars in the 2050's too. The whole thing will shift into the late 21th Century. And so talking about "beyond" is a real nonsense at the moment. Their current vision was initiated by Bush and wasn't anything but not a realistic and good idea. It will turn into a painful story in NASA's history within the end of the next decade and the beginning of the 2020's...

China will go to the moon and they will colonize it

Until 2020? :rofl:

Seriously: we're approaching 2010 already. What happened within the last 10 years? They didn't even fly manned within the last 3 years. And they just had two flights until 3 years ago. If at all, they just would have orbited the Moon until 2020 but not even landed on it. They'll realize what the US congress already realized in the early 1970's: manned Moon landings make no sense and it's just a big loss of money