"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...


George William Herbert wrote:


One hypothetical approach here would be to start a major
set of initiatives now, and set specific long term goals,
and then assuming Bush (43) gets re-elected, for there to
be a major bloodbath among the non-perfomers about oh say
6 months into his second term. Something like that...




The thing that's missing from all this is a rational reason to return to
the Moon- it's lifeless, and we already know a fair amount about its
geology; we can't afford a permanent manned lunar base because of the
supply problem that such an endeavor would pose, and spending billions
of dollars to get some more rocks is a vast waste of money. At least
with Mars, we would get an inherently more interesting place to visit.

I'm not sure that supply is all that much of a problem, certainly for a
small outpost with crews rotated on, say, a 6 montly basis. A
Proton/Ariane5/etc... size launcher can soft land around 6,000kg of cargo on
the surface at a reasonable cost for supply purposes.