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NASA Is Going To Announce New Plans To Go Back To The Moon

NASA Is Going To Announce New Plans To Go Back To The Moon

​Sure, people are starving, but let’s send a load of people back to a barren rock so they can tell us what earth will be like in 30 years

Tom Wood

Tom Wood

The Earth that we live on is dying. We have filled the oceans with plastic, the ice caps are melting and releasing all kinds of horrible diseases, the global temperature is rising, and the Doomsday Clock ticks ever closer to full scale global destruction.

But fear not! NASA is planning to bring mankind back to the moon!

OK, so space exploration is cool and important (probably), and perhaps it's not too bad an idea to explore the possibility of other space rocks we can go and inhabit once we've finally finished knackering this one, but surely there are better ways to spend billions of dollars than going to the moon?

As it happens, apparently not. NASA is about to announce what kind of money they are going to need if we are going to get back to the moon (spoiler alert: loads).

PA

This is all because back in December Donald Trump signed off on Space Policy Directive 1 which - apart from sounding like a crap sci-fi movie - changed the focus from getting to Mars to getting back to the moon.

Barack Obama wanted to get to Mars, which is usually all the convincing The Donald needs to do the exact opposite.

Anyway NASA will release the first details about their mission in February because that's when they have to announce their budget for the financial year of 2019.

NASA will release details about the mission in February 2018.
PA

NASA' Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot said: "We've been working on the plan. We've been working with the administration. I think when the budget comes out folks will see what we've been asked to go do and how we think we're going to do it."

Under President Obama, the plan was thought to be to try to get a space station orbiting Mars by the early 2030s, followed by manned missions to Mars later that decade.

Nobody has been to the moon since 1972, so we will get a chance to see if anything has drastically changed up there in the last 46 years. I'm no spaceologist (which I assume is the correct term), but an educated guess would be that it has not.

In total, only 12 people have been to the moon, so we'll have to work pretty quickly if we're going to get everyone up before whatever global mass event brings about the end of life on Planet Earth.

It's Friday tomorrow though, so that's good.

Featured Image Credit: PA

Topics: UK News, Nasa, Moon