NASA To Push Human Spaceflight

b00le wrote to mention a New Scientist article in which NASA chief Mike Griffin says that human spaceflight should be NASA's top priority. From the article: "Griffin countered that the same loss of expertise threatened NASA's human spaceflight programme, which had served to define the US as a world 'superpower'. He said NASA lost a substantial fraction of skilled engineers during a six-year gap between the end of the Apollo programme in 1975 and the first space shuttle flight in 1981. Letting the human spaceflight programme 'atrophy' after Apollo damaged the agency for three decades, he said."

Comments

Heavy editing

[b00le]

Actually what I submitted was something entirely different: I highlighted Griiffin's comment that "NASA's human spaceflight programme ... had served to define the US as a world 'superpower."' (As if that were what NASA is for!) I wished to emphasise that this focus on human spaceflight was at the expense of real science, and quoted Louis Friedman, director of the Planetary Society, who said: "I would almost describe it as 'anti-science NASA' now". My point was that NASA is sacrificing substance for style - or politics for science.

Maybe Zonk works for NASA, or the US Government - certainly he spun the story in a way that would make Scott McLellan proud. It's one thing for /. editors to edit submissions, but if they're going to wholly distort my meaning I'd rather they took my name off the story, thanks all the same.

Re:Griffin was the right choice.

[Rei]

The problem is that probes are mostly *not* bulk material. They're mostly intricate components. Perhaps if you were talking about exporting girders or sheet metal to help build a base on Mars you might have a point, but even then it's doubtful.

Lets eliminate aluminum from the picture right now. First off, it eats up gobs of energy - so much that a typical aluminum production facility on Earth often has a large nuclear or hydroelectric plant nearby whose energy it gobbles up as fast as it can get it. Energy on the moon will be *expensive* as heck, because the price of getting infrastructure to the moon has to be amortized, and maintenance prices will be obscene due to labor and parts costs. But just to make it more obvious that this won't happen, aluminum refining involves cryolite. There's almost no fluorine on the moon, and the cryolite *does* get consumed (not as fast as the bauxite, but still at a reasonable clip). Yes, you could recover it, but that makes it even more expensive. Not going to happen.

Iron refining? Get rid of any notions of recovering oxides; it's only cheap on Earth because we can reduce it with coal, and have a nice convenient atmosphere on hand. There's no coal on hand, no atmosphere, nor most of the fluxing agents. Not going to happen. Now, on the moon, there are very small amounts of elemental iron which could be recovered with magnets. This could be melted and wouldn't need to be reduced. However, this is iron, not steel. There's almost no carbon to work into it. So, it manages to be both heavy *and* weak. You might as well send aluminum from Earth rather than export that, although it might be useful for lunar base construction if you have excess power (see the points for aluminum).

Other metals on the moon are just as bad (for example, I can't even imagine titanium refining on the surface). The only thing that I can think of that would potentially make metal production on the moon realistic is direct metal oxide electrolysis (for which there has been some recent progress on), but even still, you need the oodles of power (and the price problems with that have already been mentioned). Unfortunately, the surface of the moon is extremely non-diverse. If you want a limited selection of ceramics, it can't be beat, but apart from that, it's not exactly a good production facility.