In article ,
Fred J. McCall wrote:
:Turning the general populace into space enthusiasts *will not happen*, and
lans which assume that it will are pointless fantasies. The only way to
:get to (say) Mars is to lower the cost to the point that overwhelming
ublic enthusiasm is not required.

Which essentially says that it will never happen, Henry, since you
have to start going there before there is an incentive to lower the
cost of going there.

Not at all. The single technical change that would contribute most to
lowering the cost of a Mars expedition -- much cheaper launch to LEO -- is
desirable for a number of more immediate reasons.

The technical problems of a Mars expedition mostly would yield quite well
to a "kill it with mass and margins" strategy, heavily overbuilding the
equipment to avoid the fussy, time-consuming engineering needed to tightly
optimize it. The dominant item in the pricetag of a Mars expedition is
R&D, and buying more cheap launches would be rather less expensive than
buying more engineers.

Indeed, you can make a half-plausible argument that this is already true:
that even at today's launch prices, it makes sense to accept mass growth
to save engineering man-years.

Finally, the single change of any kind (not just technical) that would
reduce the cost of a Mars expedition most is *better management*. The
problems of doing such a mission today are utterly dominated by the
difficulty of doing anything *efficiently* within the NASA/JSC/MSFC
bureaucratic empire. There is plenty of incentive for fixing that, in
one way or another.

(Karpoff's study of the various 19th-century arctic expeditions is
notable: the single strongest predictor of success was private funding,
mostly because it meant unified, consistent leadership throughout.)
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |