President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a law that said manned missions to deep space, including to Mars, would be the US space agency’s main goal in the decades to come.
According to the text – adopted by a rare unanimous vote in the Senate and House of Representatives – NASA will work toward the goal of ‘a crewed mission to Mars in the 2030s.’
The law also highlights the importance of the deep space capsule Orion, which is under development and aims to carry humans further into space than any spaceship ever has.
Orion will be launched atop the ‘Space Launch System’ (SLS), which the space agency has described as the most powerful rocket ever built.
Land ahoy: The manned mission to mars would follow in the path of other missions, including the one which produced this NASA image of President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a law that said manned missions to deep space, including to Mars, would be the US space agency’s main goal in the decades to come.
NASA ‘shall continue the development of the fully integrated Space Launch System, including an upper stage needed to go beyond low-Earth orbit, in order to safely enable human space exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond over the course of the next century,’ said the text.
This law reaffirms ‘our national commitment to the core mission of NASA,’ Trump said, signing the text in the presence of numerous elected officials including former Republican rivals, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
He saluted the ‘heroic role’ of US astronauts over the last several decades, and called for continued partnerships between NASA and the private sector in the realm of space exploration.
Former president Barack Obama also hailed these industry-government partnerships, and said in October, just months before leaving office, that the United States had ‘set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America’s story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth.’
Experts say that sending people to live on the Red Planet, which lies on average some 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away from Earth, will take immense amounts of technological advances and cash.
NASA continues to investigate a request from Donald Trump’s administration to asses the feasibility of sending a crew around the moon with the first flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraftEarlier this month, NASA’s top staff was given instructions to assess the feasibility of sending humans to space with the first flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. The mission was originally designed to be uncrewed, and was set to launch in 2018.In a press conference, officials leading the study revealed the evaluations are now well underway, and they’ve already created a ‘hard, crisp list’ of everything that will need to change ‘from a hardware standpoint’ in order to add crew.But, so far, the team says they’re sticking to their baseline plan for EM-1, and will let the ‘let the data drive’ any decisions moving forward.It will see Nasa’s Orion, stacked on a Space Launch System rocket capable of lifting 70 metric tons will launch from a newly refurbished Kennedy Space Center in November 2018.The uncrewed Orion will travel into Distant Retrograde Orbit, breaking the distance record reached by the most remote Apollo spacecraft, and then 30,000 miles farther out (275,000 total miles).The mission will last 22 days and was originally designed to test system readiness for future crewed operations.
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