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Old March 13th 08, 12:18 AM posted to sci.space.policy,sci.space.station,sci.space.shuttle,sci.space.history
BradGuth
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Default Military vs Civilian Orbital Laboratories, Vehicles, and Crews

On Mar 12, 9:41 am, Pat Flannery wrote:
wrote:
What would this path have given us? For the same money spent on
Shuttle, by 1980s we would have had a human presence on the Moon equal
to that of Little American in Antarctica, and in the 1980s,


Unlike Antarctica, the Moon is difficult to get to, and even with Saturn
V's with nuclear upper stages, very expensive to supply a base on.
There's nothing there worth the effort of going there from a economic
point of view, and even from a scientific point of view its pretty
uninteresting. You may find water ice in the sunless valleys at the
poles, but you aren't going to find life of any sort.
Astronauts at a lunar base would soon find themselves bored out of their
minds from walking around in a barren, lifeless environment for two
weeks followed by hunkering down for a two week night, over and over again.
They could drive around in rovers, but even then they'd have to not
journey too far as they would still need to have the ability to walk
back to some sort of shelter with life support if the rover broke down.
Compared to the other moons of the solar system, our Moon is a very
boring place indeed.
It lacks volcanoes like Io, a atmosphere like Titan, a subsurface liquid
water ocean like Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede, nitrogen ice geysers
like Triton, or water ice geysers like Enceladus.
It's just a big dead ball of rock.
Like the summit of Mount Everest - once you get there, there's really
not much to do, so you plant a flag and head home again.

Pat


Pat, you are a certified liar of the worse possible kind. The moon's
L1 is by far the least complex and least energy demanding requirement
per tonne of anything deployed outside of LEO. From the Moon's L1,
getting yourself down onto the moon is nearly a free ride, that is
unless you're worried about the saturation of Gamma and Hard-X-rays,
or that of the soft-impact form of a one-way landing because you still
haven't a viable fly-by-rocket lander.

Again, we must say that Pat Flannery is a systematic born-again liar,
if not a whole lot worse.
..- Brad Guth