Thread by @BadAstronomer

The White House wants NASA to put humans back on the Moon by 2024.

This is a very very very terrible idea.

syfy.com/syfywire/the-w…

Did I say “terrible”? I meant irresponsible and dangerous. It’s a political stunt pure and simple to stroke Trump’s ego, and would likely put astronauts’ lives at risk unnecessarily.

There’s so much wrong with this idea that my keyboard jammed up while I was writing the article yesterday. I actually restrained myself in it, too. But I’m furious (as usual) with Trump and Pence, and very unhappy NASA Admin Jim Bridenstine is going along with this.

It’s hard to know where to start with this idea. The lack of funding? The lack of hardware? The lack of an actual, y’know, *plan*?

Or the fact that there’s no logical reason to move the timeline up?

Why move it from 2028, which is hard but achievable, to 2024? Could it be because, no matter what, Trump will be out of office by 2028, and if NASA does it by 2024 he’ll be able to gloat?

I do think so, yes.

I describe why this is such a bad idea in the article. But what makes me incandescently angry about this is that now NASA has to jump through all these dumb hoops to try to make this codswallop happen.

Forget for the moment the risk to astronauts, and look at budgets. No funding has been promised. Where will NASA get the money? What will have to be sacrificed to crank this machine up to 11? This will cost many, many billions of dollars. Will science get cut?

And if the White House does pony up the cash, what will such an accelerated schedule mean for safety? For risk? We’ve seen what happens when political pressure is put on spaceflight. I remember Challenger. I remember Columbia.

I want us to go back to the Moon. Oh, *so* very much. I want us to go there, to explore, to stay, to discover. But I want us to Do. It. Right.

This is not right.

The White House should sit down and talk to NASA engineers and ask them what is the best way to do this, how long it will actually take, and what it will cost. Then they should write a check.

And there’s a vast irony here…

When I ask you which President you associate most with Apollo, who do you think of?

Kennedy. Of *course*.

There’s plaque on the Moon, placed there by the Apollo 11 astronauts. It says “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

Who signed it?

Richard Nixon.

Do you see? If Trump actually funded a responsible, clearcut, sustainable program to return humans to the Moon, it would be his name people a century from now will remember, even if he weren’t in office when it happened.

Instead, this plan is nonsense, it’s dangerous, and I would bet it will go the way of so many other White House mandates for NASA that wasted billions of dollars, huge chunks of NASA’s time, and flushed all those human-years of expertise down the drain.

NASA is one of the single best things this country has ever done. We don’t spend money on NASA, *we invest it*. The returns we get are huge. Given the impetus and the funding and the correct oversight, what NASA could do would stagger the imagination.

Perhaps Congress will put a stop to this by not funding it. I don’t know how that would play out politically.

And if this does happen, if NASA can and does put a human on the Moon in a mere five years, I hope it’s done safely, sustainably, and with an eye toward the future instead of as a goal that can be done, won, and forgotten.

</rant>

Once again, the article I wrote is up at:

syfy.com/syfywire/the-w…