The feasibility of returning humans to the Moon by 2004, the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, is examined assuming the use of existing launch vehicles (the Space Shuttle and Titan 4B), a near term, advanced technology space transportation system, and extraterrestrial propellant--specifically 'lunar-derived' liquid oxygen or LUNOX.

Advanced Technology for Human Support in Space was written in response to a request from NASA's Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications (OLMSA) to evaluate its Advanced Human Support Technology Program. This report reviews the four major areas of the program: advanced life support (ALS), environmental monitoring and control (EMC), extravehicular activities (EVA), and space human factors (SHF). The focus of this program is on long-term technology development applicable to future human long-duration space missions, such as for a hypothetical new mission to the Moon or Mars.

This document communicates NASA’s strategy and progress to learn about the Red Planet, to inform us more about our Earth’s past and future, and may help answer whether life exists beyond our home planet. Together with NASA’s partners in academia and commercial enterprises, NASA’s vision is to pioneer Mars and answer some of humanity’s fundamental questions: • Was Mars home to microbial life? Is it today? • Could it be a safe home for humans one day? • What can it teach us about life elsewhere in the cosmos or how life began on Earth? • What can it teach us about Earth’s past, present, and future?

NASA's detailed programmatic goals, system architectures, and mission designs for future human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit remain unspecified. Given this uncertainty, it is not clear exactly which technologies are necessary for enabling future exploration. The process of establishing technology development strategy relies on methods to evaluate the benefits and cost of potential investments. While the cost of technology development is often the primary uncertainty, in this application it is particularly difficult to quantify the benefit of technology development without a clear understanding of the system architecture to which it is being applied. With destinations and exploration strategy left to be determined, the potential benefits of any given technology can not be stated with certainty. While challenging, it is necessary to identify a prioritization of these development projects for early investment before the system architecture is defined. This thesis develops a framework for evaluating technologies in the context of long term system architecture planning for the future human space exploration transportation system. An abstracted solution-neutral formulation of the transportation architecture to any arbitrary destination is defined as a combination of multiple architectural sub-problems. To evaluate technologies within the tradespace, two measures are adapted from design of experiments literature. Main effects analysis is used as a measure of a technology's influence on the best architectures. Similarly, the strength of coupling effects between two technologies is captured by interaction effects. The measures of technology influence and coupling enable architects to prioritize technologies based on their performance, and to organize investment decisions by those that must be treated together and those that can be taken in parallel. The system architecture tradespace for Mars, the Moon, and two representative Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) missions are explored and presented. Results from the proposed influence and coupling measures are used to evaluate technologies considered in the tradespace and to understand the benefits and tradeoffs presented by investing in different technologies in relation to each destination. Following the results from each tradespace, some suggestions of favorable pre-cursor missions to the Moon or NEAs are proposed as preparation for a future Mars exploration mission.

In January 2004, President George W. Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE), which instructed NASA to "Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations," among other objectives. As acknowledged in the VSE, significant technology development will be necessary to accomplish the goals it articulates. NASA's Exploration Technology Development Program (ETDP) is designed to support, develop, and ultimately provide the necessary technologies to meet the goals of the VSE. This book, a review of the ETDP, is broadly supportive of the intent and goals of the VSE, and finds the ETDP is making progress towards the stated goals of technology development. However, the ETDP is operating within significant constraints which limit its ability to successfully accomplish those goals-the still dynamic nature of the Constellation Program requirements, the constraints imposed by a limited budget, the aggressive time scale of early technology deliverables, and the desire to fully employ the NASA workforce.