Why NASA's Road To Mars Plan Proves That It Should Return To the Moon First

MarkWhittington writes: NASASpaceFlight.com published the results of current NASA thinking concerning what needs to be launched and when to support a crewed mission to Phobos and two crewed missions to the Martian surface between 2033 and 2043. The result is a mind-numbingly complex operation involving dozens of launches to cis-lunar space and Mars using the heavy lift Space Launch System. The architecture includes a collection of habitation modules, Mars landers, propulsion units (both chemical rockets and solar electric propulsion) and other parts of a Mars ship.

Comments

Re:Moon as a gas station

[Mystic Pixel]

So let's say the Moon is acting as a "gas station". Gas stations are great and all, but the fuel they dispense has to come from somewhere. On Earth this occurs via tanker truck. If you're arguing that "most of the mass involved in a trip to Mars consists of fuel", and therefore it would be cheaper to refuel ships at the Moon, great. You are trying to say that this makes economic sense.

How do you account for the cost of getting "tanker trucks" to the Moon? If you want to refuel rockets on the Moon you have to get the fuel there somehow, or create it on-site.

Currently the options for that are:
a) mine lunar helium-3. Cool, but let's get some rockets that can use it first.
b) spend unnecessary money to ship fuel there just so we can put that fuel into another rocket, which needs it because... it spent all the fuel going to the Moon instead of Mars.
c) ???

Anyone who hasn't actually read up on Mars Direct really just needs to stop commenting and do that first, so they can actually understand what the hell they are talking about. The Moon as a waypoint is completely and utterly unnecessary. It has no useful resources for this purpose other than helium-3, which we can't even make proper use of (because we're too scared of anything relating to nuclear energy to launch a damn RTG, let alone finish development on any actual nuclear engine). Doing anything on the Moon requires an absurd amount of machinery, life-support, and docking mechanisms, which are completely overkill for what you're trying to do (i.e, go to Mars, which is a balmy paradise compared to the environmental hell of the Moon.)