{"id":16840,"date":"2015-09-02T22:57:10","date_gmt":"2015-09-03T05:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/09\/nasa-and-the-politics-of-going-back-to-the-moon"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:24:23","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:24:23","slug":"nasa-and-the-politics-of-going-back-to-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/09\/nasa-and-the-politics-of-going-back-to-the-moon","title":{"rendered":"NASA And The Politics Of Going Back To The Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nasa-and-the-politics-of-going-back-to-the-moon.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A year ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it\u2019s amazing at how small a role the American space program has played during this tempestuous summer of early primary campaigning.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s certain that NASA will live long and prosper no matter who\u2019s ultimately elected as our 45th president; the American space agency has done so for 50-plus years. But even in this burgeoning age of commercial space development, political catchphrases such as \u201cBack to the Moon and on to Mars;\u201d \u201cCapture an asteroid and on to Mars;\u201d or even bypass the Moon and \u201cGo directly to Mars\u201d somehow still ring hollow.<\/p>\n<p>On the morning of the recent booster test launch of NASA\u2019s Space Launch System (SLS), I watched NASA Administrator Charles Bolden enthusiastically describe the new launch system. He noted NASA\u2019s goal of using the new system to capture a large boulder from a near Earth asteroid and bring it back to a stable lunar orbit. This planned Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) as it\u2019s now called would happen by the middle of the next decade. Then by the 2030s, NASA would re-purpose SLS for a manned mission to Mars. But such massive undertakings still need political will and the funding that goes with it.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/brucedorminey\/2015\/08\/28\/nasa-and-the-politics-of-a-manned-lunar-return\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A year ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it\u2019s amazing at how small a role the American space program has played during this tempestuous summer of early primary campaigning. It\u2019s certain that NASA will live long and prosper no matter who\u2019s ultimately elected as our 45th president; the American space agency has done so [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":380,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/380"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16840"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69638,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16840\/revisions\/69638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}