We choose to go to the Moon?

"Jon Berndt" wrote ...
Space.com has an article posted this morning called "Top 10 Reasons to Go
Back to the Moon":

http://www.space.com/news/moon_top10_031208-1.html

I'm not saying I agree with any or all of them -- they do include the
expected arguments. Some of the reasons seem agreeable at first glance.

My personal opinions.

Reason 1 - A good reason to spend one's own money, not so good to
spend someoneelse's money (unless most of them are also convinced).

Reason 2 - Contrasts oddly with the 'Second space race!' pundits.
A few terrestrial policy changes might do rather better.

Reason 3 - Doesn't shout 'Moon' to me. /After/ LEO space tourism
has been successful on other than a 'hitchhiking' basis ...

Reason 4 - Highly reasonable - if it can be done at a more reasonable
cost. Say two or three Hubble Space Telescope's worth.

Reason 5 - Not convinced that that this would be much better than
can be achieved without direct visits.

Reason 6 - Free flying astronomical satellites have the (presumed)
advantage of very large & lightweight structures being possible.
I don't know how the +'s and -'s would work out.

Reason 7 - Seems dubious even compared to LEO SPS.

Reason 8 - Pretty darn long term.

Reason 9 - Spend a lot of money on anything technically difficult
and you are likely to get some spin-offs. Is the Moon more
deserving than, say an Extra-Super-Collider or developing fusion
plants?

Reason 10 - "We do these things not because they are easy, but
because we want to show that we (still) can."

Actually that last reason isn't so unreasonable. One "Reason to
go [manned] to the Moon." would be to aid in establishing and
later to test equipment aimed at supporting long term habitation
on the Moon.

I would do as much as possible, particularly at early stages,
with robotic / waldo systems but if you could get a lunar base
that is even just (say) 85% self supporting that opens up more
possibilities than if everything has to be supplied from Earth.

Stuff that would be started _now_ would be small-ish
technology demonstrators and such - rather than the big buck
manned mission preparation.

"Brian Gaff" wrote in
:

because????

Well, maybe cos Bushykins needs a diversion from his war mongering and
his transparent agenda for making sure oil supplies are kept cheap.

:-)

Cynic? moi?


Cynic - Yes/No/Who cares?

Troll - definitely.

In article , Paul Blay wrote:

Reason 1 - A good reason to spend one's own money, not so good to
spend someoneelse's money (unless most of them are also convinced).

It is the biggest reason driving most proponents, I suspect. We just
want to go g

(Footnote - it's odd seeing Rees described as "a leading astrophysicist"
- he almost always gets noted as the Astronomer Royal over here]

Reason 2 - Contrasts oddly with the 'Second space race!' pundits.
A few terrestrial policy changes might do rather better.

It's not automatically a recipie for a good program, but it's plausible
that it could be instrumental to actually having someone fund one.

Reason 4 - Highly reasonable - if it can be done at a more reasonable
cost. Say two or three Hubble Space Telescope's worth.

What's the aggregate price of Hubble now? Must be well into the
multi-billion range...

Reason 5 - Not convinced that that this would be much better than
can be achieved without direct visits.

Neither am I; do we have a geologist in the house?

Reason 6 - Free flying astronomical satellites have the (presumed)
advantage of very large & lightweight structures being possible.
I don't know how the +'s and -'s would work out.

Yeah, but you need to construct them. OTOH, lunar-far-side gives you
wonderful shielding prospects, no?

Reason 9 - Spend a lot of money on anything technically difficult
and you are likely to get some spin-offs. Is the Moon more
deserving than, say an Extra-Super-Collider or developing fusion
plants?

Space programmes do have the benefit of being more diffuse, mind you -
there's more fields with odd things being developed than from, say, your
SSC.

Reason 10 - "We do these things not because they are easy, but
because we want to show that we (still) can."

Actually that last reason isn't so unreasonable. One "Reason to
go [manned] to the Moon." would be to aid in establishing and
later to test equipment aimed at supporting long term habitation
on the Moon.

This doesn't seem quite right, though; it's a cop out. "Do it now, so
that we'll be able to do it properly if we ever find a good reason to do
it".

There's certainly an argument in this field for more attention to the
moon - better mapping, an attempt to figure out ore concentrations, that
sort of thing - but I think it's a fairly flawed argument for manned
return.

--
-Andrew Gray

This rationalization process for justifying manned exploration into deep
space has been around a long time, at least since the early 1950s when von
Braun, Willy Ley and others were popularizing manned spaceflight in their
books and magazine articles. All of the 10 items on the list from Space.com
were used to justify Apollo in the 1960s. Of course, the primary
justifications for Apollo were military (Cold War politics linked to Sputnik
I (4Oct1957) and Gagarin's flight (12April 1961) and political (John
Kennedy's screwup at the Bay of Pigs 17April1961). All of the other
justifications on that list were later rationalizations used to keep the
Apollo program going after 1965 when the Vietnam War began to eat into
NASA's budget and after the Apollo 204 (aka Apollo 1) fire of 27January 1986
that killed three astronauts..

In a 1991 article in Issues in Science and Technology entitled "Why send
humans to Mars?, the late Carl Sagan noted that this type of effort to
justify manned Moon/Mars projects by generating a shopping list of
rationalizations is an exercise in futility. Sagan, usually associated with
robotic science missions to the planets, was not opposed to these manned
missions provided a sufficiently cogent and persuasive argument could be
made for them. He wrote:

"When I run through such a list and try to add up the pros and cons, bearing
in mind the other urgent demands on the federal budget, to me it all comes
down to this question: Can the sum of a large number of individually
inadequate justifications and some powerful but intangible justifications
add up to an adequate justification?"

Sagan doubted that any single justification was worth the $572B (todays
bucks) that NASA's 90-Day Study ( issued 20Nov1989) estimated for G.H.W.
Bush's Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). But he acknowledged the
difficulty in attaching dollar values to individual justifications, hoping
by summation to arrive at an adequate justification for the SEI.

Sagan's hope was that international cooperation and cost sharing would make
a manned Mars effort a reality in the early decades of the 21st century.
Maybe ISS is the first step in this type of cooperation, but that program is
in such a mess that it's too early to tell.

Later
Ray Schmitt








"Jon Berndt" wrote in message
...
"Hobbs aka McDaniel" wrote in message

For anybody who has dreamed of people one day colonizing space,
I don't see how pushing for a return to the moon can be a bad
thing.

-McDaniel

Space.com has an article posted this morning called "Top 10 Reasons to Go
Back to the Moon":

http://www.space.com/news/moon_top10_031208-1.html

I'm not saying I agree with any or all of them -- they do include the
expected arguments. Some of the reasons seem agreeable at first glance.
In
any case, I suspect if you ask 10 people what ought to be next up for us
in
space, you'll get ten different answers.

Jon

"Hallerb" wrote in message
...

Would someone who is an AOL member post the text portioin of the article?





Select One Fine Writing Padfolios Desk Accessories

America Considers New Mission

Thanks!

(Hobbs aka McDaniel) wrote:

For anybody who has dreamed of people one day colonizing space,
I don't see how pushing for a return to the moon can be a bad
thing.

Because returning to the moon has nothing to do with the colonization
of space.

D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
at the following URLs:

Text-Only Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html

Enhanced HTML Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to , as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003 16:42:24 -0800, "rschmitt23"
wrote:

Dubya knows that Congress isn't going to put hundreds of billions of bucks
into a manned Mars program

No one has suggested Bush will propose that. The rumors are "cislunar
space" which could be manned lunar exploration, or an L5 space
station, or any of a number of other things.

So I'm
not expecting him to stick his foot into that Moon/Mars crap bucket on
17Dec2003 like his daddy did in July 1989.

Well, NASA still needs a follow-on program for ISS, which I think is
how all these proposals got started. Either that or start cutting back
NASA's budget. While many here would cheer that approach, I don't see
politicians doing that.

Brian

"Brian Thorn" wrote in message

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003 16:42:24 -0800, "rschmitt23"

wrote:

Dubya knows that Congress isn't going to put hundreds of billions of
bucks
into a manned Mars program

No one has suggested Bush will propose that. The rumors are "cislunar
space" which could be manned lunar exploration, or an L5 space
station, or any of a number of other things.

Yes, I think a small increase might be seen, but what I am hearing is that
instead of multiple unrelated or unfocused programs there would be a long
term vision proposed that would help focus efforts towards that vision.
With careful planning and management, the idea is that extraneous projects
would not be undertaken, and the "useful/useless ratio" would go up.

So I'm
not expecting him to stick his foot into that Moon/Mars crap bucket on
17Dec2003 like his daddy did in July 1989.

Well, NASA still needs a follow-on program for ISS, which I think is
how all these proposals got started. Either that or start cutting back
NASA's budget. While many here would cheer that approach, I don't see
politicians doing that.

One man's crap is another man's goal. What would rschmitt have us do? What
would I have us do? There's little concensus; no single voice. Just a
cacophony of ridicule. Do we throw up our hands and walk away? I applaud
the efforts at working towards a concensus, demonstrating leadership, and
putting serious thought into what we ought to be doing. Those who don't
like what they are hearing should contact their congressional
representative.

Jon

Derek Lyons wrote:
Because returning to the moon has nothing to do with the colonization
of space.

If the moon does turn out to have water at the poles, then this probably
isn't so- the vast majority of the mass of a vehicle for a lunar or Mars
mission consists of fuel- any non terrestial source of rocket fuel opens
up the solar system to a huge degree.

D.

"rschmitt23" wrote in message news:SL4Bb.16636$yf.9976@fed1read01...

oubted that any single justification was worth the $572B (todays
bucks) that NASA's 90-Day Study ( issued 20Nov1989) estimated for G.H.W.
Bush's Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). But he acknowledged the
difficulty in attaching dollar values to individual justifications, hoping
by summation to arrive at an adequate justification for the SEI.

Sagan's hope was that international cooperation and cost sharing would make
a manned Mars effort a reality in the early decades of the 21st century.
Maybe ISS is the first step in this type of cooperation, but that program is
in such a mess that it's too early to tell.

Later
Ray Schmitt

Let's say we built a colony on the moon that was largely self-sustained
and had the people power and equipment to build and launch a variety of
spacecraft. It should be that there'd be some significant long term
cash returns available from making earth satellites and space
probes on the moon or elsewhere in space (even Mars). Of course the
initial investment required to start up such an operation would be
large but it has aspects of both business investment and sentimental
'it's our destiny to have communities out there'.

I think if a leader is clever enough he can come up with enough
justification to get 500 billion and more spent on this kind of
thing.

-McDaniel