NASA’s Orion completes historic flight, but why can’t man return to the Moon?

21st Century Wire says…
When NASA unveiled its space shuttle program in the mid-1970′s, it was hailed as a major breakthrough in space travel, using a ‘reusable’ spacecraft to fly multiple mission and with a savings in the hundreds of millions per mission. And then the US government scrapped the space shuttle and replaces it with… Orion?
Nearly 50 year on from NASA’s first mission to the Moon, and not once – ever – has the space agency even mentioned a plan to return to our Earth’s closest celestial body. Why is that? Instead, govt space agencies and their private contractors are piling in with budgets and all but impossible plans to send manned missions to Mars instead. Rather conveniently (see Orion story below), space officials are constantly laying on caveats and announcing delays to actually launching the Mars mission, and one might think was because neither NASA nor its privatized counterpart actually have a viable theory as to how to get there, much less a working physical plan for completing that mission.
One of the main barriers that astronauts will face in mounting a deep space journey to the red planet is surviving passage through the Earth’s notorious Van Allen radiation belts.

The belts extends some 60,000 kilometers above the planet’s surface and is mostly formed from solar wind and other particles by cosmic rays. The belt is what actually helps protect the Earth from cosmic radiation and solar shock waves, and is held in place by the Earth’s magnetic fields.
It’s believed that human exposure to the belts’ intense radiation would be fatal, and would require a substantial, thick lead, or alternate radiation shield around any spacecraft making that journey with human’s on board. To date, NASA has never fully explained how its Apollo astronauts were able to make repeated journeys through the belt in its relatively primitive 1960′s space capsules. The agency maintains that its astronauts had ‘low exposure in the Van Allen belts due to the short period of time spent flying through it. The question here is compounded by the fact that the Apollo command modules were made of aluminum with a thin steel ‘honeycomb’ core.

This post was published at 21st Century Wire on DECEMBER 8, 2014.