Draft Lunar Exploration Roadmap

Google Moon looking eastward over the virtual landing site of Apollo 11, including laser altimeter relief from Japan's Kaguya and shading as seen days ago at local sunset by the Narrow Angle Camera on-board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The presense of the Eagle Ascent Stage, and perhaps the upright flag too, betray this is only a computer generated Google "street view," but it is the place of a small beginning. The Lunar Exploration Analysus Group has released a summary of the reasons it cannot be the beginning of the end of the human story of the Moon.

The Lunar Exploration Analysis Group is pleased to announce that a draft of the first version of the Lunar Exploration Roadmap is available for community comment. As some of you know, this has been a very involved process that has attempted to be "inclusive". The LEAG and the team that put this together feel that this is a good start and view the roadmap as a living document, which will be revised and updated as new data/situations arise in order to keep it relevant. In other words, the roadmap should NOT be viewed as "complete".

The roadmap has been constructed because of a request from the NASA Advisory Council and has been sentto them for approval. Only when/if the NAC approves this roadmap and the Administrator blesses it will the term "draft" be removed.

The Roadmap information is presented in two forms - a PDF (descriptive) version and an Excel spreadsheet in order to see the linkages (i.e., the actual roadmapping of Objectives and Investigations) between the three main themes: Science, Feed Forward, and Sustainability. As you can see, this roadmap goes beyond Science, which we feel is needed in order to make lunar exploration sustainable and affordable.

The files containing the roadmap can be found at:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/leag/ler_draft.shtml
Comments can be sent to:
leag@lpi.usra.edu
Best regards
Clive R. Neal(LEAG Chair)