University Sponsored Trip to the Moon?

Psiolent writes: "An aerospace and mechanical engineering professor at the University of Oklahoma has been promoting the idea of a university sponsored trip to the moon. What's really interesting is that those in charge are actually considering it. Even though it is still in the idea stage, it is a provoking idea. Read the article from the University of Oklahoma student paper, the Oklahoma Daily." I think clearly any major university could do a moon trip if the money and willpower were available, and the publicity would be great - unless the traveler(s) didn't come back.

Comments

This is talking about unmanned rovers.

[Christopher Thomas]

The article mentions unmanned rovers, not a manned mission. This might indeed be do-able on a university's budget.

Research groups routinely send things to low earth orbit atop commercial boosters. A one-way moon probe carrying a couple of light autonomous rovers could be lifted for a sane price, especially if you use something like an ion drive to get from LEO to lunar orbit (no idea what engines they're actually planning to use for the transfer orbit).

Re:This is talking about unmanned rovers.

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

"The article mentions unmanned rovers, not a manned mission."

Damn... I was hoping they'd send one of those annoying engineering professors that is only there because of tenure, so he could serve out his remaining time there...

"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."

Re:Why not start the apollo program back up?

[OmegaDan]

Just immagine how bad we'll feel when the french beat us at something!

Re:Maybe they'll get some science done

[Guppy06]

1.) They weren't JUST jet pilots. Most of them had masters degrees (usually in engineering), and some had doctorates.

2.) They weren't ALL jet pilots. There was at least one geologist sent up that I can think of.

Useless make-work bogs the economy

[Spamalamadingdong]

The only reason the Apollo program produced economic benefits is because it was cranking out solutions to problems nobody had solved before. The benefits fell out when those solutions turned out to be applicable to other things. If you commissioned somebody to build Saturn V's today, you'd have piles of money going into the solution of problems that were solved as much as 35 years ago. Who's going to have a use for that? It would just be useless make-work, as economically damaging as western water projects and inner-city job training for jobs that no longer exist or have a union keeping new people out of the craft.

If you wanted to jump-start the economy, you'd put up money for solving new problems. Better yet, you'd put up money for certain scientific and environmental achievements, with the requirement that the technology developed for them would be available royalty-free to everyone in the USA. Instead of just going to the moon, have a prize for delivering water to the ISS. You might have some people building robots to make a mass-driver near the lunar pole and send crater-ice down to LEO, and some other people building a laser to launch frisbees of ice into orbit from the Mojave desert. You'd have solutions that could then be applied to all kinds of other things, and you'd get a boom.
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