With NASA budgets for manned space flight not looking too rosy these
days, since the Columbia disaster, and any future direction on whether
to continue the ailing Shuttle program for decades more or to invest
in a whole new ball game for future orbital transfers - all looking
somewhat patchy, I have a few simple (but fanciful) thoughts that I
would like to share with you all!

Considering that the ISS in its final guise post-completion will be
substantially below what I would have liked to see with a 21st century
orbital facility, I reckon we should (or NASA should) make a future
aim towards the Moon.

I was always under the impression that the ISS would be an advanced
facility for testing such things as artificail gravity with rotating
modules, new and innovative interplanetary propulsion technologies, it
would act as an orbital foot hold for building manned Mars rockets,
provide a half way house for future journeys to the Moon, etc. Clearly
these things are not going to happen and with the ISS mass vs its
orbital altitude of just 400-km, there is no further room to expand
the Station within dynamical constraints. Even as it stands, the ISS
orbit is prone to rapid decay and without periodic re-boosts from the
Soyuz and Shuttle, there is risk of re-entry!

Back to the Moon idea. Suppose we could dis-assemble the ISS piece by
piece and fire each bit of hardware on low cost, fuel efficient,
transfers to a fixed location on the near side of the Moon ready for
future re-assembly into a Moon base? The Earth-Moon transfer can be
low cost, as much of the hard work of lifting massive solar panels,
radiators, truss segments, service modules, etc into LEO has already
been done and they are expensive and vital components. A delta-V
increment impulse from an ISS orbital velocity of 7.7 km/s to an
Earth-Moon transfer escape of circa 11 km/s should be easy. Assuming
we can manage this first phase, it should then be a new motivation for
the international participants in the ISS program to aim for a lunar
base. Funding support from countries like Japan, India and even China
(up and coming space nations) may be more forthcoming with this idea
once they know we have a fixed location in mind.

I reckon this idea will gain psychological acceptance also. Everyone
looks up at the night sky and dreams of going to the Moon, its the
nearest object of any size to resemble a *world* as opposed to near
Earth *space*. So if you're American (I'm not) then lobby the US
government to send up all Shuttle missions from this day forth with
this idea in mind! If we're lucky, then by 2010 we could have the
first Saturn 5s and Proton's launching men to the Moon once again,
this time to build a Moon base for all eternity. Then we will have
made REAL progress in space!

Abdul Ahad
http://uk.geocities.com/aa_spaceagent/