10 minute overview of the Augustine Commission final report which commenced the press conference today in Washington DC. The main thrust of the report is to introduce missions which will visit/land on objects such as Asteroids, NEOs, Moons of other planets, visit Lagrange points and/or circumnavigate a planet such as Mars.
These new missions will be lower cost and achievable within a shorter timeframe than the current objective to land on the Moon and Mars, which requires the development of complex landers and larger heavy launch vehicles. The committee has not excluded the landing of humans on Mars ultimately, but believes that smaller steps are required in order to ensure continued public interest and funding of human spaceflight in the future.
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my very first impression about the Augustine Commission report in this article
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HSF Committee Report: "treatment" much worse than "disease"
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http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts2/056hsfreport.html
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The Augustine commission were asked to produce a report that would present options for the president to choose that would be realistically achievable within the confines of the current budget and not make any single recommendation.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that so many of the proposed options exceed the current budget suggests that it was always the intention to increase the budget by $3Bn per year. The current Constellation program will never achieve its 2020 Moon landing and 2030 Mars landing (mainly due to a halfing of the original projected budget over the past few years) without significantly more funding than the £3Bn.