Is the US considering once again a moon program?
Hmmm.
Well, I can just imagine the furor it would set off if it did happen.
Can we afford such a thing? Can we afford not to, either for what it might to do for the human spirit, or in the face of a new Chinese space program?
Would such an attempt be a mere search for popularity and distraction by the Bush Administration? (I can name a dozen people who would say yes.) Would that make it necessarily a bad thing?
At any rate, I agree with Reynolds on the following:
What’s most important is that whatever we do be sustainable, not just another flags-and-footprints mission to say we’ve done it. Long-term, that means getting private enterprise involved, and making sure that people can make money. Taxpayers get tired of spending money. Businesspeople never get tired of making it.
Shades of D.D. Harriman.
Of course, then we can get into debates about “corporate greed ruining space” …
There are a lot of little things that need to happen before all of that:
-Getting the Shuttle program going again, or it’s replacement in the pipeline.
-Completing the Space station, and getting that going. A good place to start for a midway point for a moon base/station. Plus this would be a good place to see if there is any commercial benefit to space without committing to another series of Moon missions.
-A Mars mission at this point might be a better idea, since it’s been 35 years since Apollo we don’t really need to redo it. Plus it would be interesting to see if the Chinese can pull off what the USSR couldn’t do.
-But the most likely scenario is that even more of NASA is going to be sold off and the Chinese are going to be the “Trailblazers” in exploration for the near future. If there is no profit in it why do it.
Where is that 1 x 3 x 9 Black Obelisk when you need it?
I agree we need to get the shuttle (etc.) and ISS set, but only to wrap that phase up. Both provide a backstop for other activities, and the ISS might have some commercial applications available for it.
It’s not clear to me that the shuttle’s concept — a reusable flight system that therefore lowers costs and increases convenience — has ever been met. Each shuttle mission seems far from routine, the craft themselves too idiosyncratic and prone to catastrophic failure from eleventy zillion causes. Until we have something better, we need to continue using them, but we should be looking for something better.
The question becomes what tangible benefits can be forseen from a Lunar (or Martian, or both) outpost. To some degree, a lot of the benefits are soft — the spirit of adventure, the expansion of human knowledge — but that can only sustain you so long as you keep pushing it. Maintaining a Lunar outpost is a great goal, as long as it doesn’t become the final goal — at which point it becomes routine and there had better be something profitable you can do with it.
I don’t know that a Moon mission is so much of a slam dunk. We did it a few times, but it would be interesting (and a stretch of the technology) to do it again, with three decades (more, if you figure NASA tech is probably already 10 years old by the time it gets put into place) of advancement. Can we do it cheaper and smarter? Can we avoid mission creep? Does it make sense to go to the Moon first, to prove the tech, then to Mars?
That gets back into tangible returns, not just from R&D, but whether there’s something there worthwhile to do, or get. That might not happen until we get the cost down.
I don’t know. It really messes with the romantic and the pragmatic in me, in all directions.
The problem with the shuttle is that we have all our (heavy lift) eggs in one basket.
I really think we need unmanned heavy lift capability. That way if one system (the shuttle) has a problem, we’re not stuck (there are ISS components “stacking up” at Kennedy because there is no way to launch them at the moment).
As for the moon–we’ve been there, but can you really say we know it with just a half-dozen missions?
Plus, what we learn during a long-term mission there would be applicable to a Mars mission.
And…if there really is a large amount of water at the south pole of the moon, that can be used for things such as fuel and life support. That would make (a) the moon mission cheaper, and, (b) help lower the cost of a Mars mission as well (cheaper to lift the stuff off the moon than the Earth).
Now, even easier (in terms of lift cost) than either of these missions would be a mission to the asteroids in the Lagrange points, or a mission to a “near Earth object” (other asteroids) or a comet. Imagine how much life support and other materials we could get from a icy comet or asteroid or a asteroid made up of organic materials…