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NASA Weighs Moon Plans
mknewman writes "Space.com is reporting that NASA is set to roll out next month a U.S. national strategy for lunar exploration, one that outlines both robotic exploration needs and the rationale for sending humans back to the Moon. This has been sorely missing in Bush's Vision for Space Exploration."
That's easy. It'll weight 1/6 of what it does on Earth.
I've been wondering for years why we would ever want to step foot again on the moon given the risks and massive costs (other than the obviously political reason of: the chinese are doing it). This article is actually semicoherent, and it's great to see them putting a heavy focus on robotic exploration.
What I'd still rather see though, is human exploration being conducted on an "as needed" basis. For example, let's put robots on the moon that can determine if the moon can be utilized for its supposed natural resources (as NASA contends it has), and if these robots can't mine fuel or other supplies that could be used for a Mars mission, we can send people up there.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
The real action is going to be on Phobos and Mars, in that order. Don't look for the next Iceland, look for the next New York City, the slam-dunk locations in space. The Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system, Earth-crossing "dead" comets and Mar's small moons are good candidates. Phobos allows both resource extraction including actual water (not maybes in polar shadows), Phobos also offers realtime contact with Mars and the convenience of working in familiar freefall. The moon has a lot of unaddressed operational issues that a Phobos/Mars orbitter and mine scheme doesn't possess. Admittedly there is a lot of handwaving in this, but we discussed the tradeoffs here:
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Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Personally, I think we should skip Mars for the time being and concentrate on getting useful things done on the moon. Once we have some real manufacturing capability, building larger projects, for both earth orbit and beyond, would become much easier. In the long run, we want to encourage private enterprise in space. By blazing a trail, NASA can jump start the process.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Yeah nearly half a trillion dollars a year on Iraq and Afghanistan vs. what 16-17 billion for all of the NASA projects? This isn't just Project Orion it's also all the aeronautical research as well as various space science related work. How friggin' nuts is that? Roughly thirty times as much money spent to kill innocent people as to expand the horizons of the entire human race. Oh well there's always Russia and China for all that good stuff.
Why is it that whenever anyones says "... Bush's vision ..." I think of crayons, preschool and cirlces of paper?
There's a good reason for manned exploration: people -- otherwise known as 'taxpayers' -- don't care about and aren't inspired by robotic exploration. When the Mars Rover does something, it's lucky to get a 5 second mention on CNN. Putting a robot on another planet isn't nearly as tangible an accomplishment as putting a person somewhere.
When people want a measuring stick to judge the successfulness of our technology, they still say "we put a man on the moon..." (generally followed by "...and we still can't do [something]"); you don't hear people saying "we put a robot on Mars" or "we put launched a deep-space probe beyond our Solar System..." While important, virtually everything NASA has done since the moon landing, with the possible exception of the Hubble Space Telescope (because of the neat pictures it sent back), has failed to capture the public's interest. And as a result, they have seen their funding grow slimmer and slimmer.
To be honest, doing exploration that doesn't get the average people excited is shortsighted, because it's ultimately those people, apathetic and ignorant as they may be, who control the purse strings that are the lifeblood of the space program. If they don't care about NASA, then NASA gets its budget cut by the Congresscritters next time they're looking for money to fund their Bridge to Nowhere. And that means no money for 'real' scientific research.
Putting people back on the moon ASAP is essential to restore interest in the Space Program to a country that has, by and large, forgotten it. Manned space exploration today is a joke: it's tourism. The adventure of space is something mostly reserved for a generation that's obsessing over the costs of prescription drugs, and has stopped looking outwards for new frontiers. The younger generation hasn't been given any reason by NASA to be interested. I haven't even seen as many kids these days saying that they want to be astronauts as used to. (And why would they -- ride up into space on a vehicle that would be cat food cans already, if it had been an automobile; have basically nowhere to go when you get up there; and there's always the risk of the whole thing falling apart on the way down.)
NASA is a far cry from the national inspiration that it was to previous generations, and unless it can demonstrate some ability to capture the imaginations of today's citizens, it's going to be budget-cut into nonexistence.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There's no oil on the moon as far as I know...
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.