"Jorge R. Frank" writes:

David Spain wrote:
Jorge R. Frank wrote:
Are you off your meds, David? First you question the science utility of a
human return to the moon, where humans can actually explore the surface to
a level of detail that no robot could possibly match,

That is true. And that appeals to Dr. Schmidt and... ?

Many. Dr. Paul Spudis, for one:

http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/

There are others. Just because you are ignorant of their existence does not
mean they do not exist.


Agreed. And I can line up several experts that claim a return to the moon is a
waste of time and money. The fact that you choose to ignore them does not mean
they do not exist.

http://planetary.org/programs/projec...y/roadmap.html
http://planetary.org/special/vision/results.html
http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...html?series=35
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0801/18avweek/

then you post this nonsense about sending humans past Venus just so you
could

Actually to orbit Venus for a few months, dropping probes, placing
satellites in orbit around it, maybe doing atmospheric sample returns,
etc. A Venus orbital exploration mission would be a great warm-up for a
Mars mission. As you said small steps. We could do all that with a
traveling space habitat. Try to do that with Constellation.

There is still no need to send people. Everything you list could be done
more cheaply without them.

There is no need to send people to the moon either. Tele-robotics will work
just fine on the Moon, unlike the planets, because the round trip
communication delay is on the order of 2 seconds. People can work around that
very effectively. A 20 min to 2 hour delay makes that impossible for
planetary exploration via tele-robotics. You have to rely on some amount of AI
in your probe programming. And that is not easy. And tele-robotic exploration
will be far far cheaper than a moonbase. In fact after the political will to
stay on the moon is gone, tele- robotics may be the only remaining viable
option that will allow NASA to "afford" a long-term lunar exploration program.

impractical for humans to explore its surface directly. It is not the case
for the surfaces of the moon and Mars, where not only can humans explore
more effectively than robots, but more *cost*-effectively as well.

I disagree about the cost effectiveness for the moon given what could be done
with tele-robtic explorers.

But more to your point, sure if surface exploration is the end all and be all
of exploration. But I disagree with that as well. Much can also be learned
from orbit. Think about the ability to alter the experiment or create new ones
based on the results obtained during observations. That is very hard to do
with unmanned probes. I mean if we can't get to the surface should we not even
*ever* attempt future manned missions to Jupiter or the outer planets someday?


Venus has an atmosphere that has "global warming" run amok. There might be
some useful science to be done there with Earth application.[/quote]

However, no science that requires people.

How do you know that definitively? Maybe if we had an orbiting laboratory the
science would present itself?

The moon offers us... ?

Lots. Dr. Spudis explains it more eloquently than I could; I suggest you
look over some of the past articles in his blog.

OK. The page you pointed me to didn't really put much of a case forward for
lunar exploration. It was more of a lament about the decline of the US
aerospace industry (a lament I share), but I'll poke around a bit.


But putting all that aside, my actual point is a space habitat could
travel.

I don't see why we need to jump down the gravity well of the moon just to
establish how to do long endurance space living. The ISS is a start. But
then it looks to me like from a policy perspective I don't know what the
plan is after shuttle. A few Orion visits? Then what?

At least six years, probably ten or more, of ISS operations after shuttle
retirement.

We'll see. Esp. if moon fever takes over NASA as I have a feeling it will.
These things tend to snowball.


A space habitat could be built in LEO, travel out to the moon or elsewhere
and then return to LEO, where it would remain accessible even after a US
moon program is abandoned. We could park it near the ISS. In fact the ISS
would serve as a good construction site for the traveling habitat.

Nope. As someone with over 15 years experience working ISS, I can tell you
it's a ****ty site for construction. All the features of SSF that would have
enabled large-scale in-space construction were gone by the time it morphed
into ISS.

OK, I'll defer to your expertise and accept that. And more's the pity. We
should have downscaled SSF into something we (US) could have used more
productively. And in-space construction is one of those functions we should
not have sacrificed.

All the more reason to get cracking on building useful space infrastructure in
LEO now, rather than another one-off to the moon that the politicians will
abandon when the polls tell them to. In the meantime we will have squandered
another 25 years and more billions of dollars before getting back to building
the kind of infrastructure that we really need.

BTW Jorge, thanks for engaging me in this instead of succumbing to the
temptation of writing me off as a crank. I'm the first to admit that space in
not my profession nor my area of expertise. But I learn a bit every day and I
highly value the input from those like yourself who are involved. Thank you.

Dave