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Moon is Stepping Stone, Not Alternative To Mars, NASA Chief Says (scientificamerican.com)
The moon has not superseded Mars as a human-spaceflight target, despite NASA's current focus on getting astronauts to Earth's nearest neighbor, agency officials stressed. From a report: The Red Planet remains the ultimate destination, and the moon will serve as a stepping stone along the way, Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator, and Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator of NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said during congressional hearings Wednesday. "The moon is the proving ground, and Mars is the goal," Bridenstine said during testimony before the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, part of the U.S. Senate's Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. "The glory of the moon is that it's only a three-day journey home," Bridenstine added. "So, we can prove all of the technologies, we can reduce all of the risks, we can try all of the different maturations that are necessary to live and work on another world. And we can do it all at the moon, where, if there is a problem, if there is an emergency, we know that we can get people home." He cited NASA's Apollo 13 mission in 1970, which famously managed to make it safely back to Earth despite experiencing a serious problem on the way to the moon.
If this guy thinks that Mars has no "surprises" up its sleeve he is going to be proved sorely mistaken. Possibly fatally so.
While your statement is true, it is unrelated to anything he's said. He's still correct; while dealing with lunar dust is not the same as dealing with martian fines, it's still a good analogue in many ways and it certainly is nearby. It's close enough to where if there are problems, we can send more supplies in a timely fashion. Or where it might even be possible to recover crew members from the lunar surface, although they'd have to have a vehicle on hot standby for that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is kinda like saying, if we are trained to boat across the great lakes, we can take on crossing the Atlantic.
However if no one crossed the Atlantic by boat before, I would much rather have someone who was able to cross large bodies of water before, with enough skills to deal with such an undertaking.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
For the foreseeable future, NASA isn't even planning to go to the moon. They're planning to be a space station in cislunar orbit. It will be mad expensive, will not help in any way with actually getting to the Moon or Mars, isn't even really all that close to the Moon at all, and is generally going to be a huge waste of money. Between the Lunar Gateway and the Space Launch System, NASA won't have any money left over to go to the Moon's surface itself.
Thank you, I came here to say just about the same thing.
This is a jobs program for NASA employees and contractors, that's all. It's simply meant to maintain the status quo. NASA has no real intentions of going anywhere with manned missions. NASA, like all large organizations, especially large bureaucratic government agencies, has become far, far too risk-averse to ever do anything bold or novel. As someone who was alive to watch the first Mercury missions, it's very sad.
US manned space exploration has become the exclusive domain of private corporations like SpaceX. Bureaucracy whose first priority is CYA combined with PC politics and crony-capitalism has destroyed NASA as a space pioneering organization.
The SLS and the cis-Lunar station proposed will be useless for going to Mars. The most efficient method is going direct from Earth orbit to Mars. Now, an orbiting Mars station would be extremely useful but again, it's a risk-bridge far too far for an enormous risk-averse US government bureaucracy.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Venus is Earth's twin.
"Lead would melt on the surface of the planet [Venus], where the temperature is around 872 F (467 C)." https://www.space.com/18526-venus-temperature.html
"At the surface, the atmosphere presses down as hard as water 3,000 feet beneath Earth's ocean." https://www.space.com/18526-venus-temperature.html
Not a twin in those regards.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
We have been lacking in the space exploration for a while now. A lot of people think we can just go to Mars now, while in reality we are in a Space Age Dark Age so we are actually kinda stupid on Space Travel, and we are back to thinking of it in Science fiction terms vs practical.
Meh, technology-wise I think we're in good shape. Even though the people on the ISS haven't been going anywhere we have long term experience with living in space. Basically it's not about where you are, it's about keeping the conditions on the inside habitable. We also have decades more experience sending satellites and probes. What's missing is money, lots and lots of money. Look at Falcon Heavy, there's still just the demo flight and no more heavy launches scheduled this year. There's two next year, but the market is like 1/10th of the F9.
What's the market for the BFR? Today, none. Musk was guessing $2-10 billion to develop, most likely $5 billion but that's just 10-50% of NASA's budget for a single year. If you had Apollo level funding with 4.5% of the federal budget it'd be $200 billion in the peak year. With that and the same "beat the Ruskies at any cost" attitude we'd be on Mars by 2025, no doubt in my mind. But since that's not happening we need something a lot cheaper. I hope Musk will fly the first re-re-used booster soon.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There's a lot of places on Earth that are a lot more hospitable than the Moon -- the middle of the Sahara, Antactica, the seafloor -- that are still pretty inaccessible to us. Yeah, we can get there, and with a continuous supply chain we can stay there a while, but we're not going to have a continuous supply chain to Mars. Whoever goes to Mars has to be able to make it there on their own. So we need to be able to at least have permanent self-sustaining settlements in the most inhospitable places on Earth, if we're ever going to have permanent self-sustaining settlements off-Earth.
And by the time we're able to do that, we've eliminated one of the biggest reasons to have people off-Earth in the first place, because if we have "colonies" on Earth that are capable of surviving Martian conditions, they'll also survive everything that could ever happen to Earth short of the death of the sun. Climate change? Nuclear holocaust? Giant meteor? Living in the aftermath of those is a cake walk compared to living on Mars.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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