On Feb 5, 7:16*pm, BradGuth wrote:
On Feb 4, 6:55*am, Michael Gallagher wrote:



If President Obama wants truly new and unique ideas for what he calls
a 21st century space program, he has one problem:

There aren't any.

Everyone talks about orbital refueling as the new idea, but its not
new at all. *It was at the heart of EOR considered for Apollo, but
even then, it was an "old" idea. *Aurthur C. Clarke described it in
his book "The Exploration of Space," published in 1951, so the British
Intperlanetary Society must have kicked the idea around before that.
Did anyone come up with them before they did? *And one of Clarke's
applications for it was refueling space ships bound for the Moon; the
book has a chapter on Moon bases. *So 20th Century. *Sorry, can't do
that!

In fact, I can't think of anything we could do in space that isn't a
20th century idea first implented then: *Space shuttle, space
stations, planetary probes, observing the Earth -- all old news. *No
new ideas. *So nothing to do.

I guess there's nothing for it except to repeal the National
Aeronautics and Space Act AND ban all space research and development
by all public or private US entities unless they do a new 21st century
idea which there are none of so of course, they do nothing. *And
hopefully, when the Chinese go to Mars, they'll put a token American
on their flight.

There's always Venus and even our moon(Selene) that's new as far as
accessible and more than paying their own way.

What's not to like about either of those?

*~ BG

Venus is too toasty for my taste. And I don't want
to try floating around in its atmosphere. The moon
is a bleak place but does it truly offer some
resource that earth doesn't have? Space itself
offers as good or better vantage points for
space telescopes. Even Mars is pretty bleak
though it may have more resources. To live
in a settlement would mean living in a tunnel
or heavily shield air locked building. The
work would be doing repairs and upkeep on
remote vehicles or robots and doing remote
operations from the settlement to the robotics
extensions to the human presence.

Perhaps the thinking needs to be vastly bigger.
Materials, biological, and physics research in preparation
for the big jump to the next habitable star system?
Habitable meaning a detected planet in the habitable
zone, etc.

Trig