Exploration: February 2012 Archives

NASA Infographic: The Future of Human Spaceflight, NASA

"NASA has released a new infographic which seeks to collect future space vehicles, destinations, and possible paths of exploration together into one "Big picture".

NASA's Dueling Concept Maps, Road Maps, and Infographics

"As you can see below, there is no shortage of roadmaps and graphical representations of where NASA should be going in the coming years. To be certain, concept maps, roadmaps, and infographics are different things. Done properly, they serve a similar, overlapping function: to contain a series of things you need or intend to do, and present these things in a way that allows others to understand what it is you want to do - and why. A good roadmap or concept map should be easy to make into a good infogrpahic. But if your roadmap is not well thought out, or your concept map has incomplete logic, then your infographic is going to be confusing."

Cislunar is the next destination for America in space, Cislunar Space Next (Paul Spudis)

"Develop a space transportation system using existing assets to the extent possible, build new reusable vehicles to transit cislunar space, develop lunar resources with the aim of propellant production, emplace staging nodes in LEO (use existing ISS), geosynchronous orbit (GEO), Earth-Moon L-1, low lunar orbit (LLO) and on the lunar surface."

Brochure

NASA Internal Memo: Public release of 'We Explore Space' Concept Maps

"We are pleased to notify you that the human space exploration project you graciously offered your time and expertise to support has been completed and is being released to the public at this very moment! You may launch into the "We Explore Space" concept maps from the NASA website."

Keith's note: At first blush there is a blatant omission in this presentation: commercial space - crew and cargo. Given the large amount of money NASA is spending, and the hopes that the agency pins on the private sector for acccess to space, you'd think this would be a prominent theme. Guess not. And the "Previous" and "Next" links do not work on my Mac running OS 10.6.8 in Safari, Firefox, or Chrome browsers.

Keith's update: Well I fiddled with it some more and I found a page that deals with commercial space. But finding it was rather counterintuitive requiring multiple steps where the word "commercial" is not used. Again, given the battles that NASA and the Administration have had with Congress over this issue you'd think they'd want to explain how commerce fits into it. Or maybe they are trying to de-emphasize it so Congress won't complain. Oh yes, you can't print these charts out (easily) on a single sheet of paper. PDF versions would be nice.

That said, I am a fan of mind maps, so this is an interesting approach. The question that really begs an answer is who is the intended audience for this website? The media? Policy wonks? The public? How much this activity cost? How much was the grant? Why is there no press release?