Why should we return to the moon

Running head : Back to the Moon

Back to the Moon

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Back to the Moon

Introduction

President Bush 's Plans

More than thirty years after America 's first landed on the moon , the current President of the United States , George W . Bush , recently announced his plan of sending American astronauts back to the moon (BBC News

Picture 1 . President George W . Bush announcing his new vision for space exploration at NASA . Photo retrieved March 6 , 2007 , from www .radionetherlands .nl /us040115 .html p

The President 's target is to accomplish this goal by the year 2015 (Lane , 2004 . The project can be said to be merely preliminary to Bush 's more flamboyant plan , which is to prepare the exploration to Mars Moreover , the program also intends to make up for the setbacks experienced by the United States space program , such as the Columbia shuttle disaster (BBC News . The Columbia disaster prompted Bush and a group of administration officials to develop a new plan that would use the existing space shuttles to complete assembly of the International Space Station (ISS ) by 2010 (Lane , 2004

Bush revealed his new vision for the United States human space program in a speech delivered at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) headquarters . He called for the retirement of the space shuttle to give way for building new space vehicles that would , in the future , allow travel to Mars (Lane , 2004 . The space shuttle is expected to fly in about 13 or 14 more missions before its expected retirement in 2010 (Hunt , 2007 BBC News . Bush 's vision also calls for the use of robots and human manpower in the exploration of the moon . The ultimate aim of the vision is to prepare the moon as a living base and to develop means for explorations to Mars (BBC News

The Space Shuttle

The space shuttle is a brainchild of improvements and inventions in rocketry . The craft contains three main engines that provide huge amounts of force compared to previous spacecrafts . It also boasts of a reusable engine and engines that weighs quite lightly considering their power (The History of Moon Exploration . Considering its characteristics , it is no wonder that Boeing boasts of it as the most sophisticated human-rated launch vehicle in the history of space flight (Boeing

The space shuttle had its first flight in 1981 , and since then it was able to aid more than a hundred missions involving hundreds of astronauts (Boeing . Boeing claims that the spacecraft still has 75 percent of its design life to spare (Boeing

The space shuttle plays a major role in sustaining the International Space Station , being the ISS ' heavy-lift cargo vehicle . The space shuttle is responsible for having lifted the now existing structure in orbit , which comprises two-thirds of the ISS (Boeing

Bush wants to retire the space shuttle by 2010 at the earliest , hoping that by then the International Space Station is already complete (Hunt 2007 BBC News . Bush also hopes that by...