At the Institute of Aerospace Sciences in Los Angeles in 1962, the pair unveiled their “One-Way Manned Space Mission” proposal.
The plan called for a one-man spacecraft to follow a direct ascent path to the Moon. Ten feet wide and seven feet tall, the empty spacecraft weighed less than half the much smaller Mercury capsule. Inside, the astronaut would have enough water for 12 days, oxygen for 18 with a 12-day emergency reserve, a battery-powered suit and backpack, and all the tools and medical supplies he might need.
He would land on the Moon after a two-and-a-half day trip and have just under ten days to set up his habitat. As part of his payload, the astronaut would arrive with four cargo modules with pre-installed life support systems and a nuclear reactor to generate electrical power. Two mated modules would become his primary living quarters, while the others placed in caves or buried in rubble — a feature Cord and Seale assumed would dominate the lunar landscape — would provide a shelter from solar storms.
With his temporary home set up, he would wait a little over two years for another mission to come and collect him.
from squidgenyin the comments:
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This is how I feel a one-way mission to Mars ought to be conducted. Send an astronaut first, with at least enough supplies to last until the next launch window for a second mission to Mars, which would deliver more supplies and perhaps additional astronauts. The program would consist of a long and expensive series of missions, some manned, most unmanned, with an eventual goal of providing enough equipment and supplies for the first astronaut(s) to return home, while the most recently arrived take their place to continue the study of Mars (and of living on Mars) - a sort of interplanetary shift-rotation.
“We need the courage of starting a new era,” Europe’s director of human spaceflight, Simonetta Di Pippo, told the BBC News. For sending a mission to the Moon from the ISS, De Pippo said, “The idea is to ascend to the space station the various elements of the mission, and then try to assemble the spacecraft at the ISS, and go from the orbit of the space station to the Moon.”
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With this type of mission, the future of spaceflight actually be as Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield describes in the video below. “This is the great stepping off point of to the rest of the universe,” says Hadfield, who will be commanding an upcoming expedition on the ISS. “This is an important moment in the history of human exploration and human capability,… and the space station is a visible sign of the future to come.”
I agree. I have never seen a country squander its pre-eminence in any field with this sort of abandon. History will hold responsible those who sold out out all of the programs that made the U.S. space program great.
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"Moon" was really, really great - especially for the tiny budget and the return to using miniatures in the shoot.
Having grown up on "Space:1999", I may have been indoctrinated with the idea of a permanent space base. It's a shame that the US space programme failed in that regard, but I have no great problem with China being the new leader in space. I do hope that the Canadian Space Agency won't let it's ties to the US programme blind it to the possibilities of joining Chinese efforts. We can't go into space ourselves, and should be cultivating relationships that allow us some future ability to contribute.
Going (back?) to the moon
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