Manned flight around Moon considered By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News
11 October 2010
Image caption
It was on the Apollo 8 mission that the famous "Earthrise" image was acquired The possibility of using the space station as a launching point to fly a manned mission around the Moon is to be studied by the station partners.
Letters discussing the concept have been exchanged between the Russian, European and US space agencies.
The Moon flight would be reminiscent of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission which snapped the famous "Earthrise" photograph.
The agencies want the station to become more than just a high-flying platform for doing experiments in microgravity.
They would like also to see it become a testbed for the technologies and techniques that will be needed by humans when they push out beyond low-Earth orbit to explore destinations such as asteroids and Mars.
Using the station as the spaceport, or base-camp, from where the astronauts set off on their journey is part of the new philosophy being considered.
"We need the courage of starting a new era," Europe's director of human spaceflight, Simonetta Di Pippo, told BBC News.
"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.
We need the courage of starting a new era
Simonetta Di Pippo, Europe's director of human spaceflight
"What we are thinking about right now - but again we need more technical work to address this - [is] it should be a small spacecraft that goes around the Moon."
This vehicle would then likely return straight to Earth, rather than returning to the ISS.
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Poster Comment:
How grand it would be to return to the moon. Even though we do not possess the technology (Saturn V rocket) which was used previously to launch Apollo missions, using the ISS as a launch platform would be ideal. And now with the advancement of computer technology (your smartphone has more computing power now than the Apollo astronauts did in the Lunar module) it would be much simpler to do it all again.