NASA Decides to Go to the Moon After Obama's Re-Election
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will announce plans to build a base on the moon after President Barack Obama is re-elected for another term.
Illustration of an astronaut in the Orion spacecraft controlling a robotic rover on the permanently dark side of the moon. Photo: NASA.
NASA has announced that it wants to establish a "floating" base above the permanently dark side of the moon. John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University in the US, said that the Obama administration approved the program, but before the presidential election on November 6, NASA officials stopped discussing it because they thought that if Mitt Romney won, he would cancel the program, Space reported.
"They delayed announcing their ambitions to build a base on the dark side of the moon until after the presidential election, because Romney had pledged that he would reassess and change NASA's goals and direction," Logsdon said.
President Obama has directed NASA to aim to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 and to Mars after 2030. To explore such distant celestial bodies, NASA is building a large rocket (called SLS) and a new spacecraft (called Orion). According to the plan, the Orion spacecraft will begin operating in 2021.
But last year, sources within NASA revealed that the agency wanted to build a base on the far side of the moon. Astronauts on the base could support exploration on the moon. The base could also serve as a springboard for NASA to send humans to more distant destinations, like Mars.
According to VnExpress - DT
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