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Dreams of the Moon
Iron Sun writes "The Mars Institute has an interesting overview of past studies into sending people to the Moon, ranging from pre-Apollo plans by Werner von Braun to NASA studies just a few years old. Timely, given the continuing speculation as to whether the US is going to go back."
Can't go back to the moon. Nobody can make a "business case" for it. The skeptics and cynics will whine "what do we need THAT for?" and since nobody can demonstrate a 20% cash ROI in the latest version of Excel, complete with pie charts and a "whoosh" sound in PowerPoint, it won't happen.
In other words, nobody has written an elevator pitch.
Hope and progress are quaint notions which have no place amongst the cubicles. Now get back to work. Rent is due.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
"So, hands up. Who would accept this mission if it was offered?"
I would in a heartbeat. Seriously.
One of the unspoken truths about NASA (and probably about manned spaceflight in general) is that they'll run out of hardware long before they run out of volunteers.
The ISS serves no current purpose other than to wrap a little bit of U.S.-Russian diplomacy in a patina of pseudo-research. In other words, it is a make-work project.
It ought not to be.
The only reason -- a compelling reason --for people to be in space is to Go Somehere Else. That's why it's called "Space Travel, not "Space Science Lab". The purpose of a space statoin in low-Earth orbit is this: Serve as a way station on the way to Somewhere Else: fuel depot, construction yard, launch and rendevous point.
We've spent billions of dollars, pounds, yen, euros, rubles, etc., building a station that helps us accomplish nothing. It's time to change things.
It is now more than 40 years after the first human flew to low-Earth orbit and returned. Having a space station go in the same low-Earth orbit pretending to do research is akin to having no aircraft flying in 1943, save for one flying in circles over Kitty Hawk.
(Kennedy's impetus re: Apollo may well have been to thwart the Soviets, but the accomplishment transcended that, and will again, when we return. It's also worth recalling that sound strategic and military reasons existed to prevent Soviet dominance in space.)
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Curious that none of these previous plans to reach the Moon mention utilizing a space elevator for most of the journey to orbit.
I suppose that this demonstrates one of the more fundamental problems with most proposals to go to the Moon: they clearly aren't sustainable, at least with today's prices for rocket propulsion. One of the earliest draws for moneymaking on the Moon will clearly be tourism, which cannot flourish at current launch costs.
On the other hand, a space elevator would make it not only very possible to go back to the Moon cheaply, but also just about anywhere else in the Solar System!
As many other comments have pointed out, there is little immediate financial impetus to go back to the Moon. If NASA were to permanently ground the Shuttle fleet, and suspend their manned spaceflight program, would the money they would save be enough to accelerate the development of space elevators to the point of useability?
...and this is a very bad thing. Yes. For YOU. For me also. And for our children, those of us who have, or intend to have them.
Unless one of the worlds space programs starts to show some genuine progress and stop fsck-ing around, the governments of the world are going to pull the plug. Why should they not? Expensive, largeley fruitless and frought with schoolboy errors in calculation and execution. The fate of space programs around the world currently hangs in the balance, in the aftermath of the latest in a long series of these unforgivable multi-billion dollar errors.
I have been a geek, a nerd, a propellerhead, call me what you will, for most of my life. My views on many things have developed in accordance with this. As a child, and as an adult I have read the novels of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and many others, as I am sure that most of you will have. As the vast majority of us also have, I have been exposed to successive variants of Star Trek, and Babylon 5. These fictitious sagas, and many others have shaped my mind through the years, and they have instilled a belief that to go out and visit the stars, and to interact, whether peacefully or otherwise, with those who may live on distant planets is nothing less than the manifest destiny of humankind. These stories could be described as cheesy, corny, cliched melodramas, and it would not be untrue, but they are also an expression of their writers beliefs in the nobility of such endeavour.
It fills me with genuine, heartbreaking pain to think that our efforts to make these dreams a reality are subject to the political agendas of men who have no concept of magnificence in their soul. It makes me weep to see the ruins of NASAs once glorious space program. Oh, to have lived in those days, when the men who went to the Moon genuinely had 'The Right Stuff'. It's time that the politicians of the world forget their differences, and finally deliver on the promises of yesteryear. I may be misquoting, but I believe that the phrase was, "We come in peace, for all mankind."
Imagine what we could acchieve if all mankind were to work together! I believe that furthering our progress into space is the only way that we can progress as a species. If we don't progress, then what else is there to do, but retrogress. Oh, I forgot, most of the population of this planet have already chosen the latter option!
I am fully aware that not only is this little rant of mine somewhat off-topic, but is unlikely to provoke agreement. On the other hand, I for one, am sick of being though of as a crank for endorsing the value of space exploration.
Thank you all for listening while I have unloaded a lot of pent-up feelings.
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There are other baskets out there, and I want to see our eggs get spread out, dammit. This becomes doubly important as we start getting the potential ability to wreck this place enough that we'll need to spend millenia crawling back to the stars. We're not simply staring at eons of easy future that we can take our time with; this is probably more likely a dangerously narrow window of opportunity, and we need to take a chance while we still have a chance to take. We can worry about the (highly overrated, usually) cost later.
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke