Saturday marked the fortieth anniversary of the end of the most suspenseful week in the… Saturday marked the fortieth anniversary of the end of the most suspenseful week in the history of spaceflight. On April 14, 1970 — ironically also the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic — the Apollo 13 spacecraft suffered a massive explosion in the service module on its way to the moon. This forced the astronauts on board to abort the moon landing and attempt to return to Earth in the lunar module. Through the astonishing ingenuity and endurance of the crew, as well as Mission Control in Houston, Apollo 13 went down in history as a most peculiar event: a triumphant failure.

Now, NASA faces another sort of suspense. President Obama has planned to ax the Constellation Program, which was supposed to return a man to the moon. The program the President now proposes is considerably riskier, namely, it is a mission to land on a nearby asteroid as a stepping-stone en route to Mars.

While it is admirable that the Obama administration is asking NASA to boldly go where no man has gone before, rather than continuing to routinely go where many men have gone since 1961. But an asteroid voyage presents considerable technical challenges that should be ironed out by first going to the moon.

First and foremost is the question of distance. A nearby asteroid would be millions of miles away, rather than the short hop of only a quarter-million miles that separate the Earth from the moon. Those distances would require an extremely powerful rocket — powerful enough not only to escape Earth’s gravitational pull, but that of the moon as well.

There is also the question of time spent in space. The weeks or months spent travelling to an asteroid would require the installation of radiation shielding to protect the astronauts from extended exposure to cosmic rays. Life-support systems and exercise equipment for the crew would also have to grow accordingly. These expanded requirements would add to the weight the mission would have to carry, meaning the booster would have to be even more powerful.

The size of the target itself is another cause for concern. According to the Associated Press, most of the candidate asteroids are less than a quarter-mile across. Although this shouldn’t pose a problem in finding the asteroid or being able to hit it with a missile, orbiting and/or landing on one of these rocks poses unique challenges — like not having much gravity to work with.

This is not to say that these challenges should be avoided. The backers of the Obama plan are quite correct that an asteroid would be an important stop on the way to Mars. Learning how to mine an asteroid to make rocket fuel and other needed materials in space would be of great use for future missions to Mars. Mining an asteroid is also a commercially lucrative prospect, as some of them contain materials, such as cobalt, that are relatively rare in Earth’s crust. Landing on an asteroid would also have important implications for our long-term survival. After all, if dinosaurs had been able to land on an asteroid and divert it, odds are they would still be around and all of us would still be small, furry and nocturnal.

However, the technical challenges of a voyage to an asteroid are more daunting than that of a trip to the moon — a trip that we haven’t made since 1972. It would be easier to tackle the challenges in stages. The first time we went to the Moon, we did so in a series of steps. The Gemini missions were focused on docking procedures, seeing if humans could survive in space for the time required for a moonshot, and so forth. There were four Apollo missions that were manned and did not land on the moon: Apollo 7 tested the new command module, Apollo 8 orbited the moon, Apollo 9 and 10 tested the lunar module.

Before we aim for an asteroid, we should focus on the intermediate step of a moon landing. This mission would allow us to recapture the skills that have been lost in the nearly 40 years since we last went. A moon launch would serve as an important test for the technology we would use to go to an asteroid. After all, it would be infinitely preferable to see a potentially catastrophic failure en route to the Moon, where there would at least be some hope of returning the astronauts alive, than to have an equally bad failure occur beyond the moon, where a return might take a week and the chances of survival would be less.

So, as we celebrate the successful return of Apollo 13, let us urge the President to reconsider, and let us go back to the object that we haven’t seen up close for nearly 40 years.

Write [email protected]