NASA Plans Lunar Mobile Phone Network

If NASA and the British National Space Centre succeed in their 'MoonLite mission' you won't be able to say, "In space no one can hear your ringtone." They plan on building a satellite system/phone network that would provide full four-bar signal coverage for colonists living in the base NASA wants to build at the south pole of the moon after 2020.

Comments

Re:Unless Obama wins

[llZENll]

Project Constellation overall is a great idea, but building a moonbase is probably a bad idea.

He also argues that a Moon base is a poor use of resources, since "science can be done for far less money by robotic missions--which also don't put human lives at risk."[5] The Los Angeles Times seconded that in an editorial, saying "Manned moon flight may appeal to baby boomers, but it makes little scientific sense for most space missions these days. Robots can now perform, or be developed to perform, most of the tasks people would do at a moon station." [6]

Columnist Gregg Easterbrook has criticized the plans as a poor use of resources. He writes that

Although, of course, the base could yield a great discovery, its scientific value is likely to be small while its price is extremely high. Worse, moon-base nonsense may for decades divert NASA resources from the agency's legitimate missions, draining funding from real needs in order to construct human history's silliest white elephant. [7]

According to Easterbrook, the billions of dollars that a lunar colony might cost should instead be devoted to exploring the solar system with space probes; space observatories; and protecting the Earth from Near-Earth asteroids.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_outpost_(NASA)

Re:Unless Obama wins

[imipak]

yeah, right, 'cos the current regime have been just showering money on NASA, right? Why, it's almost as if Dubya announced a pie in the sky plan at some far-off-date just far enough ahead that it'll have to be Democrat decision that, sorry, actually you've already spent the NASA Mars budget a few thousand times over in Iraq. (Note that that Planetary Society "success!" press release is about their (ok, our - I'm a member) getting existing funding for space science restored, after it was slashed to try to make up the increasing void between the directive "go back to the moon" and the reality that it costs money to make and fly spaceships and train astronauts. Lots and lots and lots of it, actually.)

Many of us don't think the gee-whizz eye-candy coolness factor of watching someone bounce round the moon on TV is actually worth the enormous opportunity cost of what could have been done with that money if it wasn't wasted on manned missions. The Shuttle's landing tomorrow morning after a ten day mission that cost $1.3 billion. Consider that the incredibly successful Mars Exploration Rovers cost less than half that over the entire four years and counting mission, and have made fantastic breakthrough scientific discoveries as well as producing some amazing eye-candy.

(And incidentally those are all "amateur" images produced from the raw data stream, thanks to JPL/Cornell/Steve Squyres' wonderful policy to release it as it arrives.)